September 23, 2008
McCain's Temperament Fails Again
By George Will

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or
small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."
-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

WASHINGTON -- Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one
presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a
league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and
apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox,
chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be
decapitated. This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to
editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and
principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was
"unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's
happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness
on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept.
19, Page A22). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox
"has betrayed the public's trust."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His
most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously
headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to
conservatives, including then-Congressman Cox, who as chairman of the
Republican Policy Committee persistently tried and generally failed to
enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the
economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" --
is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always
operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are
"corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be
exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichean worldview
drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold
law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively
finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and
spending. (For details, see The Washington Post of Sept. 17, Page A4;
and The New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts
intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid
conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by
Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised
torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the
federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save
private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic
decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more
than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while
McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for
coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive
government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life
by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government
control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most
leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so
precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about
conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism,
said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non
sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government
control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have
qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little
unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the
Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former Gov.
Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige"
and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start,
and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial
selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal
reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he
would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having
neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for
the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling
moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the
presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great
cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
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