John McCain likes to use words like "duty," "honor," and "putting America first," to describe the heart of his presidential campaign. It is clear that McCain sees himself as a lonely island of principle surrounded by a sea of corruption. And there have been occasions--as McCain will be quick to tell you--when he has taken difficult and principled positions on issues: originally opposing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, standing up for campaign finance reform, and taking, by Republican standards, a humane position on immigration.

But a look at John McCain's career reveals that all too often, he has failed to live up to his own billing. The problem for McCain, is that all too often in his life, when political gain and principle have collided, it is the principle that has been thrown aside. In life, even the highest ideals often give way to factors like stress, ambition, and greed. For all his high-toned rhetoric, John McCain is a classic example of this. Let's look at some examples of McCain's lapses of honor:

1) The 2000 South Carolina Primary. In January of 2000, George W. Bush and John McCain were locked in a battle for the Republican nomination. The stakes were particularly high for Bush, who had just lost to McCain in New Hampshire by 18 percentage points. Bush badly needed a win, but McCain had the early momentum. The Bush team responded with a new campaign strategy. In 1993, Cindy McCain had traveled to Bangladesh and adopted a Bangladeshi child named Bridget. Bridget had a cleft palate which needed medical treatment, and she had dark skin. The Bush partisans saw an opportunity there. During the campaign, South Carolina citizens suddenly began getting phone calls at dinner time, asking:

Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?

Other calls mused about Cindy McCain's drug use, and referred to McCain as the "fag candidate." The view of those on the ground in 2000 is that these calls were the work of Karl Rove, and of Charlie Condon, a Bush supporter and former South Carolina Attorney General. Not surprisingly, both men deny involvement in the vicious and well-orchestrated campaign, but here is what Condon had to say when asked about the smear campaign:

Our primaries have a way of doing that. There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works. There are no regrets about 2000. To this day I don’t have one. If someone did those things, shame on them. But I did see that there was a need for bringing up issues.

So, under attack in South Carolina with poll numbers dropping, what did McCain do? He suddenly became a supporter of the confederate flag. McCain dropped his previous opposition to the confederate flag flying atop the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina. Asked by a reporter about his position on the flag, McCain expressed a newfound openness to it:

Personally, I see the flag as symbol of heritage.

McCain went on to lose the South Carolina primary by 11 points. By April of 2000, Bush had become the presumptive nominee. The campaign now over, and nothing at stake, John McCain had yet another change of heart about the confederate flag. In April of 2000, he returned to South Carolina and apologized for his support of the flag:

I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles...I believe the flag should be removed from your Capitol, and I am encouraged that fair-minded people on both sides of the issue are working hard to define an honorable compromise.


This is the quintessential John McCain: No one issues a more remorseful apology than John McCain. The problem throughout his political career is that when he is confronted with the prospect of losing, his principles collapse like an old lounge chair. Shortly after the South Carolina episode, McCain commented to an interviewer that there must be "a special place in hell" for those who had perpetrated the smear against him and his family. Remarkably, however, after blasting the villains who had sabotaged his campaign, McCain had another change of heart, and hired Charlie Condon, the likely culprit in the affair. Ann Banks describes it best in her article in The Nation:

Seven years later, who is running McCain's South Carolina campaign? Charlie Condon, the former State Attorney General who in 2000 helped spread the innuendo targeting [McCain’s daughter] Bridget. If you can't beat them, hire them--even if they've launched racist attacks against your own daughter.

Hiring the guy who smeared your own daughter with racist phone calls, ranks pretty high on my scale of dishonorable acts. The frightening thing about McCain, is that he apparently believes that if the apology is contrite enough, it wipes the slate clean on the bad act that preceded it.

2) The Keating Scandal Take the case of the Keating Five. McCain, along with four other senators, intervened with regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a man who bilked investors out of billions in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal. Keating was a friend and contributor of McCain, who had given him over $112,000 in contributions, and $13,000 in free trips to the Bahamas. (McCain reimbursed Keating only after Keating became a target of investigators). The intervention of the five senators kept the regulators at bay for two years, allowing the fraud to continue, which of course worsened the financial loss for unwitting investors. Predictably, here is the McCain mea culpa:

The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do…. It was the worst mistake of my life.

He gives great after-the-fact apologies, doesn’t he?

At the Rick Warren values forum, McCain was asked to describe his greatest moral failing. He responded:

My greatest moral failing, and I have been a very imperfect person, is the failure of my first marriage.

Of course, what he really meant by this, is that he had taken up with a hotter, richer woman, after his wife had been seriously injured in a car accident, had spent 6 months in the hospital and had 23 surgeries.

Based on this, I’ll make a wager right now: After he loses the presidential election, McCain will offer a full-throated apology for his campaign’s use of words like “socialist,” “terrorist, and “celebrity” to describe Barack Obama. But I guarantee that it will be a good apology. That’s what McCain does best….