It’s easy to forget just how controversial a figure John McCain was amongst the Republican Party, so firm has he been in stressing his jingoist credentials and especially with the selection of the base-appeasing Sarah Palin. But McCain was derided heavily for decades prior to his current position and although the partisans have largely come around (either a testament to their shamelessness or McCain’s power as a uniter, although perhaps it was Obama…) his position as a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) seemed fairly secure for many years.

Although suitably bellicose to compensate John McCain remains the man who believes in global warming, does not believe in torture and loves the immigrant. This blatant opposition to the three grand shibboleths of the American right (the former new but increasingly vehement, the latter old and insidiously dynamic and the center vital to all apologists for Bush and perhaps the most important for the past two years) render him a rather strange choice for the representative of their party, but he has spoken little of them during the campaign.

Although he made some early campaign videos relating to climate change he has since demurred to the raucous cries of “Drill baby, drill!”, He has distanced himself but not disowned Bush: playing up the “Maverick” line but sticking away from the denunciations of a severity that only an eloquent torture victim confronting a torturer could deliver. But of the three his integrity to at least one has remained strong. Observe the following:

A stronger defence of the place of the endlessly (and ironically) maligned figure of the immigrant you are unlikely to hear leave an American politicians lips.

So the sleaze, the lies, the distortion, the fact that he backed a deranged war when it mattered, still does and is backing another, may well start another World War, has next to no knowledge of an economy that is currently collapsing and will need someone to stop it continuing, picked an utterly inexperienced, inappropriate and inadequate figure for his Vice President and is prone to breath-taking errors even in the subject which is supposedly his speciality, that all still matters?

Yes, but let us not simply demonise this man. There are instances where he threw his weight behind bloody folly and others where he has acted against the full onslaught of his party. He is a jingoist, but not some bland partisan who falls into line behind convenience (more than can be said for his distinctly new-found supporters).

This doesn’t surprise me:

ST. PETERSBURG — Five weeks ago, the St. Petersburg Times convened a group of Tampa Bay voters who were undecided about the presidential election. Their strong distrust of Barack Obama suggested it was a group ripe for John McCain to win over.

Not anymore. The group has swung dramatically, if unenthusiastically, toward Democrat Obama. Most of them this week cited the same reason: Sarah Palin.

Palin is, by most measures, an extremist; and thus polarising. Those who agree lover her - while those who disagree will be yet more desperate to stop them. This comment seems typical of the phenomenon:

Nobody had finalized a choice, but seven of the panelists said that McCain’s running mate selection had made them more likely to vote for Obama, and in several cases much more likely.

“And that ticks me off because I do not want Obama,” said Democrat Annette Kocsis, 68, a former Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter from Clearwater, scoffing at “the pit bull in lipstick,” as Palin has called herself.

She doesn’t want to vote for Obama. But she will because she recognises Palin the extremist presents such a threat to what she believes in. And, the more extreme a figure is, the greater the number of people likely to disagree with them. So it is with Palin:

“The one thing that frightens me more than anything else are the ideologues. We’ve seen too many,” said 80-year-old Air Force veteran Donn Spegal, a lifelong Republican from St. Petersburg, who sees McCain’s new running mate as the kind of “wedge issue” social conservative that has made him disenchanted with his party.

That’s Republicans Palin puts off now, too. The hardliner scares the moderate, and so the moderate votes against them. McCain may have rallied conservative votes in chosing Palin - but how many of America’s saner occupants did he frighten with her? Numbers, numbers…

Did McCain vet Palin at all? First, her very presence undermines his cheif attack on Obama; then, the swirling rumours of whose child occupied what womb when, and now this:

New revelations about the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin — including her membership of a party that wants Alaskans to vote on becoming a separate country — are raising questions about how thoroughly John McCain’s campaign vetted her background before adding her to the ticket.

Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence party (AIP) before becoming an elected Republican official, according to party members, and recorded a video message for the AIP convention this year. The AIP’s chief goal is securing Alaska a vote on seceding from the US, a goal that party leaders believe the state was denied before it became part of the US almost 50 years ago.

Yet it is the AIP’s motto, “Alaska First, Alaska Always”, that may cause the most trouble for McCain. The Republican’s campaign slogan this year is “Country First”.

It looks more of a rumour than confirmed fact - but a potentially damaging one, at that. Palin offered few enough long-term advantages to McCain in the first place. She very much appealed to the conservative base McCain had some trouble securing; how will they take this?

So, that’s a series of negative headlines all sourced in an apparent failure to actually check Palin’s record in detail. Hardly impressive. She snatched decent headlines from the DNC, and then those turned sour. But, given how soon she was chosen after Obama’s speech, and at such short notice, perhaps that was the only job McCain wanted her to do…

EDIT: James got there first.

Today’s Democratic press release attacks the woman on leadership, oil and the salvage-fleeing-Clinton-supporters issue of abortion:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.

Clever stuff.  But something tells me they hope you will read it slightly differently:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heart attack away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.

It seems that Sunny Hundal disagrees with my article on the likely nastiness of the presidential campaign ahead. I cannot help but be amused by the aforelinked article. In response to my claims that this should be a far more calm and pleasant race than the downright grisly 2004 contest Sunny states “No. This is going to be by far the nastiest presidential race you have ever seen and will ever see.” I think that the error made here is in presuming that anyone in America or elsewhere has the capacity to make a more effectively nasty campaign than Karl Rove. I am uncertain if Sunny is aware of this but McCain himself actually received far worse treatment during primary contests against Bush of 2000 than Gore later would in the true presidential one. There was racism used in reference to their adopted daughter and it was stated baldly that McCain’s wife was a drug addict.

Then Sunny’s post strays into the realm of parody:

McCain may give the impression of being intelligent, calm and reasonable but there’s one problem - he is a Republican. Most Republicans are scum of the earth. They are fantastic strategists but nevertheless they are scum.

Yes, those dreaded Republicans, a pack of bigots to a man, aren’t they? The problem here is that Sunny has effectively performed the crime the party criticised are most commonly guilty of. It is true that the Republicans have resulted in a bunch of truly foul policies but what is excluded from this rather feeble attempt at analysis is that McCain has actually opposed a considerable amount of the most reactionary evil generated by his own party, to the extent that he has frequently been dubbed a RINO {Republican In Name Only}.

Now this doesn’t matter too much as far as I’m concerned because he still supports Bush’s foreign policy perhaps even more fiercely than Bush does. But there are a plethora of other issues over which McCain has enraged the left; such as his creation of a bill outlawing torture, his strikingly liberal policy upon immigration, his commitment to ending global warming and drafting of legislation that prevents campaign finance being even closer to the plaything of corporate and personal interests than it is today. This has been toned down for his campaign, but still resulted in some moments that have caused apoplexy on the far-right, as I have documented.

Yet Sunny states that:

McCain himself may not say much but his surrogates and the wing-nut wing of the Republican party - the Ann Coulters, Bill O’Reillys, Sean Hannitys, Michelle Malkins of this world - are going to do anything to ensure he doesn’t become president.

Sunn is correct insofar as all of the people listed are indeed wing-nuts and would indeed love nothing more than Obama be defeated. What this does not mean is that they want to see McCain win. He is, in fact, a hate figure for Republicans for the reasons aforementioned. He is largely considered a traitor and a villain, perhaps sent mad by his treatment by the Viet Cong or senility. The racist right see him as proposing a “Shamnesty” that would allow criminals to become innocent and reckon that would allow America to be flooded with the foreign and racially impure. The neo-conservative establishment are shocked at his opposition to torture, which they have spent much of Bush’s second term defending, applying endless diminutives towards and deriding all opponents. The global warming denialists see him as a dupe. The loyalists consider him the epitome of all that is disloyal, a poster boy for treachery.

I can understand that Sunny dislikes reading the content of such writers but if this had happened even briefly the disdain which all the aforementioned authors display towards McCain would have been immediately evident.

I might direct her towards Hugh Hewitt, who at one stage called McCain amongst the most inadequate senators ever to have served. This was part of a wider campaign of thorough savaging. Lately he has toned this down but is clearly still highly uncomfortable with the set-up, spending most of his time attacking Obama and trying to avoid mention of McCain where possible. Make no mistake about this: McCain has no surrogates within the Republican establishment. Even those who he attempts to appease with his pro-life positioning consider him warily and tend to view him as the “Least worst” candidate, rather than pledging active support.

This means that although these groups may well oppose Obama {although I note that Matt Drudge, previously the impeccable rightist has been joined by Rupert Murdoch in throwing weight behind Obama, with the former even lampooning McCain along with Clinton on his highly influential site} they are by no means supporters of McCain, who’s centrism is utterly unacceptable and seemingly impossible to comprehend given their monochrome, Us & Them outlook. As it was McCain was simply filed under “Them” but at present they are mainly attacking the greater other rather than embracing the one they have been spitting about for many more years than Mr. Obama.

Unfortunately Sunny is seemingly blinded by bias:

He is Republican and I would need to change my genetic code to support or embrace a Republican…The Republicans are scum and should never be supported under any circumstance.

I would never advocate supporting McCain owing to his apparent inability to break himself from the thrall of the neo-conservatives. But to suggest that his party affiliation {which is seemingly nominal at times and he has certainly proven no loyalist to} means that this campaign will be littered with the sort of noisy nonsense that Karl Rove, the nemesis of McCain, would execute is a leap of utter irrationality.

But seemingly Sunny is wrong about everything when it comes to the state of American politics! The follow praise is heaped upon the “Netroots”:

So they have taken upon themselves to fight in the way Republicans have for decades.

when it is exactly Obama’s refusal to stoop to such lows {whatever happened to “Rise above”, Sunny?} that has characterised his campaign. He is entirely opposed to the cultural war approach favoured by the right and due to this has created his own grassroots following, that seems to operate in a far more effective fashion to Move-On et al. He uses a higher strain of politics that does not depend upon personal attack and emphasises the importance of the American people in making any progress.

Contrast, for instance, Obama’s “Yes we can” to Clinton’s “Yes she can” and you will see the superficially minor but fundamentally divisive breach between a movement initiating progressive and a top-down technocrat.

Yet Sunny states that

I continue to admire Clinton.

Clinton! She who executed the purest of Rovian, Republican tactics through a network of surrogates against a member of her own party. This is simply preposterous and I would suggest that Sunny compare McCain’s conduct to Clinton’s. Clinton & Co asked if Obama had once been a drugs dealer, suggested that the views of “White Americans” {read: racists} be considered as distinct from the rest of the working classes, implied that black primary voters somehow do not count and states with many of them are of less significance than those filled with mainly whites, compared Obama to Jesse Jackson seemingly purely on the grounds that both are black and won South Carolina, suggested that Obama was far less experienced than McCain or Clinton and had only given “One speech in 2002″, argued that he was inadequate over matters of national security as he was incapable of picking up a phone at 3AM, capitalised on the Reverend Wright scandal subtly but as effectively as possible, kept the “Obama is a Muslim” meme alive by suggesting that Obama was not a Muslim but only “As far as I know” and basically used everything you would expect of the party Sunny deems “scum”.

Meanwhile McCain has so far made a few crude attacks but unleashed no Rovian onslaught and, as I referenced in the article in question written to Obama in a tone which is so gentle and courteous that I would never have expected to witness it from a presidential frontrunner after the carnage of 2004.

This may change, of course, and it is true that the opposition from the far-right media will be partisan and vicious as ever. But McCain presents a massive challenge to these extremists, not least through being a visible victim of the methods they act as ranting apologists for. In failing to recognise this Sunny has made a truly botched analysis of American politics, supporting the elements of the Democratic Party which would lead it to further ruin and failing to realise that even a Party with as poor a history as the Republicans are not a pack of blood-thirsty demons.