Round 12
Republican primary contestants: John Engler, Charles “Charlie” Crist, Willard “Mitt” Romney, James “Jim” DeMint, John Cornyn, Jon Kyl, Thomas “Tom” Corbett
Democratic primary contestants: Harvey Gantt, Paul Wellstone, Mark Warner
If Jeb Bush had entered office a controversial president, thanks to the nature of his election, John McCain was downright unexpected. It was sheer luck (together with state-level strong-arming of the system) that had brought him this far, and McCain was at once inclined to believe in his own luck and deeply grateful for it, because this was the job he had sought, in private thoughts or on the campaign trail, for the last quarter of his life. Now that he had it McCain, the oldest elected President by two years over Reagan’s re-election age, took to it with a young man’s enthusiasm. And between a Republican Party thrilled he had managed to squeak through against the party’s growing structural and demographic disadvantages in national elections on one hand and a fan-club national press on the other, his enthusiasm was at first returned.
McCain thought of himself first and foremost as Commander-in-Chief but it was domestic issues that first intruded on him. The economy still lagged and many of the voters who had so narrowly put McCain in office were more concerned with jobs and wages and futures for their kids than they were with overseas wars or the diplomatic chessboard. Here McCain moved ahead quickly with a series of tax breaks and corporate incentives following the Republican formula to get business moving again. But beyond that he espoused a broader, almost Kempian vision of what he liked to call (borrowing a phrase from the late Baroness Thatcher) an “ownership society.” Flush with the opportunities the presidency offered, McCain set out to reshape Americans’ relationship with economic opportunities and public services in market terms. He offered up rafts of legislation for school vouchers, pre-tax funds for Americans to invest in the financial markets, government insurance for reverse-mortgages, large designs for privatizing NHIPA’s public-option coverage through vouchers and personal accounts, and more of the same for a percentage of individuals’ Social Security payroll taxes. The ideas were broader, more creative, and more aggressive when they owed to McCain’s vice president and powerful domestic-affairs deputy John Engler, a social conservative and privatizer of advanced ideology and creative legislative formulas. Engler in particular preached a return to budget orthodoxy through paring back social-services agencies both in their spending and their structure. When right-wing Congressmen sometimes found the scope and zeal of their proposals challenged by qualms from McCain, they knew they had a strong and influential ally in Engler.
McCain’s own priorities in the Oval Office began and remained out past American shores. Foreign and especially national-security policy was his wheelhouse, and the son and grandson of admirals took his command of the world’s most powerful military-intelligence complex in earnest. In particular McCain desired and designed an exact reversal of several Gantt administration policies. US forces took on a far more aggressive role in pursuing and attacking Mahdist forces in Libya and Yemen, and in the latter the commitment of American personnel almost doubled. McCain and his advisors were far more suspicious of Syrian intervention in western Iraq and rolled back both active and tacit support. American policy in the Levant turned back to full-throated support for Israeli policy and, for McCain, a personal friendship with Israeli’s slowly-dying but still mighty prime minister Ariel Sharon. And, seeking a break in the long arc of increased oil prices, Washington realigned itself with the Saudis and, with McCain’s personal insistence, against the fragile but moderating Iranian government. New fronts opened in the anti-Mahdist conflict as well, as McCain sought a much closer relationship with Pakistan in order to open up supply lines and flight lanes to attack terrorist groups in Afghanistan, a process that drew in more aircraft carriers, Air Force resources, and paramilitary projects of the CIA in the first two years of his presidency. With sparkling conviction McCain laid out who he believed stood on the side of the angels in the Middle East’s conflicts and who did not, and doubled down on American commitment to the former.
McCain’s belief that the United States was the world’s indispensable nation, and that American action was the defining influence on crises overseas, was sorely tested. As Islamist violence spread out into the fringes of the Middle East Russia escalated existing border conflicts in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Angered by what he saw as Russian repression of free peoples, McCain soured on diplomacy with Moscow; as he expressed more public and diplomatic support for the embattled small republics on the Russian fringe, including American aid, a hardened chill descended. As oil prices helped the Russian economy climb out of the disastrous conditions of the early 2000s, Russian ire with American economic and diplomatic policy led to competition that observers feared was the start of a new Cold War. When Mahdist forces counterattacked Syria in a shocking master-stroke that assassinated most of the Assad family, the Syrian succession struggle touched off civil war between rival ethnic and religious groups. As the Khilafa al-Mahdi joined in the fight McCain pressed for American aid for rival Syrian forces and the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria: hard on overstretched US forces in the region, dangerous thanks to Syria’s indigenous air defenses, and another blow to relations with Russia.
The most dangerous and perhaps most costly crisis of these four years was the collapse of North Korea in early 2011. An attempted purge of rival factions from the military by Kim Il-Sung’s latest grandson-heir produced a counter-coup. With the ruling family displaced the isolated, economically broken state teetered into civil war. The long-feared conflict with the South was only a few muffled exchanges while rival factions decided whether they should declare against the capitalists to gain support or gain a southern ally. Then, just over a week into the bloody uncertainty, South Korean and US radar picked up two medium-range rockets launched from a site near the Kim family’s military compound outside Pyongyang. One was tracked and destroyed in the air by ballistic-defense missiles, the other tumbled down into the great South Korean port of Incheon, where it erupted in nuclear fire half the size of the Hiroshima bomb. The world was shocked into fear and silence, and held its breath as fence-sitters in the civil war turned on the hard-liners, fearing nuclear retaliation. The resources of many nations were rushed to aid the dead and irradiated in Incheon. McCain’s response was harsh: it took hours to talk him out of a targeted nuclear strike in response, and instead he launched a plan to destroy the hard-liners’ command with carpet bombing and two divisions of American marines. Instead of plaudits, the aggressive – and bloody – US assault faced condemnation, first from South Korea who were trying desperately to establish an alliance with the rebel forces and peace terms towards unification. More dangerous was China’s response, mobilizing its military and accusing McCain of needlessly escalation that played into the hard-liners’ hands. With Marines dying on the bloody road towards Pyongyang, South Korean investors pouring out of damaged American markets in protest, and a dangerous military escalation with China, McCain’s steely-eyed enthusiasm for settling the crisis with force looked less heroic and more rash by the day. Foreign trust in US policy, already on edge with McCain’s taste for interventionism, reached new lows as Seoul, Beijing, and even Tokyo sidelined Washington in much of the reconstruction and recovery effort.
Cold War-style great power crises and another (briefer) bloody conflict abroad could not have come at a worse time for McCain. Already in the midterms Democrats had turned out voters still angry over the economy, skeptical of what “ownership” would do for them, and of seemingly endless wars abroad. Then came the Korean crisis which, after the initial shock of Incheon, divided Americans on partisan lines as to whether it was a heroic cause or a frightening escalation. But the damning blow at home came from the financial sector. The market shocks of the Korean crisis damaged growth. Without that growth covering a vast network of shady debentures and trillions in overvalued derivatives that moved through unregulated commercial banks, a margin call loomed. It came in May, and tore through the “shadow banking” sector like wildfire. In what were effectively bank runs, major American, British, German, and French financial houses toppled and some fell directly to ruin. Private lending constricted and then collapsed. Global markets, it seemed, were on the edge of another Depression. And here, of all places, the McCain administration seemed frozen. Desperate for more detail, anxious not to act too soon lest it set off more market panics, McCain delayed direct action in the crisis for over a week. The image of a White House that seemed paralyzed, when set against McCain’s instinct to charge into international crises, sat badly with the public. When he did act, it seemed McCain had no good options. When the White House all but nationalized shaky institutions and offered relief funds there were howls of outrage from populists and the orthodox right wing of the Republican caucus. As McCain leaned heavily on Vice President Engler for domestic crisis management, Engler’s efforts to restart lending with further tax breaks and his opposition to new regulations caused fire to rain from the Democratic side of the aisle. In the autumn the political bloodletting continued, as Engler – more than McCain, which did not help the president’s reputation for decisive command – became involved in a bitter Senate fight over a “Cash for Clunkers” bill introduced by Midwestern Democrats led by the dean of Democratic progressives Paul Wellstone, designed to keep the automakers of Engler’s native Michigan alive with federally-backed deals for new car purchases.
McCain tumbled down into the winter of his third year in office with confrontation and more conflict abroad, galloping unemployment at home, torn between aggressive promotion of “ownership” principles and choosing against his own party caucus to intervene with government resources. And now the physical toll came. In September, bothered by issues with vision and his face muscles, McCain’s doctors confirmed he had suffered two micro-strokes at some point in the previous three months. His own determination to conduct his administration with personal drive and relentless energy began to tell against his seventy-five-year-old body. To McCain himself it mattered very little: he had a profound personal sense of duty, and a profound emotional investment in serving as President, and if the price of that service reached as far as his life, he was ready to pay. But as an election season approached Republican leaders feared the consequences of a sickly president, and personal friends who simply worried the election would kill him.
When a decision was forced on him it came in January, with the awful timing that had plagued his tenure since before the midterms. As he carried on the daily business of conducting America’s anti-Mahdist wars abroad, and searched desperately for a market-friendly solution to the economic collapse, McCain took to the campaign trail. US forces had come home from Korea, the emergency intervention his own party hated had prevented global depression by the skin of its teeth, and the president was determined to launch his reelection bid as vigorously as he did anything. It was when he returned to Washington that it struck. A stroke in full hospitalized McCain for over a week. Though he showed remarkable resilience for a man his age it still had debilitating effects on his health and, for the time being, his ability to walk, so crucial to campaigning. Rumors swirled. To McCain’s credit his answer to panicked Republican leaders who wanted his medical resignation was defiance. But his own family doubted he had a campaign in him. In the third week of January John McCain announced he would not seek reelection, and the floodgates opened. Vice President Engler quite naturally stepped into the race both as McCain’s surrogate and as the voice of Republican support for stripping down public services to inject billions back into the market economy. Republican senators tripped over themselves on the way into the race; Mitt Romney returned to the campaign at the head of a fundraising empire created for such a purpose since he’d left office; and Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett tried to outdo Engler as the right-wing innovator from a Rust Belt state. Engler had some structural advantages but these were not what they once were. Thanks to deep changes in the way the Republican Party funded itself, each major candidate had their own deep-pocketed support structure (some wags called them “pet billionaires”) who could keep their campaign afloat so long as they had the hint of a chance. Engler found himself attacked from all angles: one particularly cynical but effective approach came from Corbett, whose policy agenda nearly matched Engler’s but who attacked the Vice President (who had spent a lifetime in Michigan state politics) as a “Washington insider.” Romney parlayed money and structural connections into every state, competitive throughout, but never with enough juice to break from the pack. Dewhurst again fell flat but for money. The surprise, if there was one, was Jon Kyl, whose Western rectitude about fiscal responsibility and opposition to immigration reform played well with voters who liked the idea of a man of principle. Romney, sensing the man he needed to beat, attacked the seventy-year-old Kyl’s age; Kyl parried asking if this disqualified President McCain and Romney never fully recovered. As the campaign wound on Engler turned victories in Wisconsin and Corbett’s neighboring Maryland into a lead. Seeking the vice presidency, Romney dropped out and endorsed Engler. Kyl continued to perform well further west, winning Texas among others, but Engler’s victory in California appeared to seal the issue. This was set in stone when Engler comfortably double-crossed Romney and sought instead for Kyl to join him on the ticket, which balanced regions and paired decades of combined experience and commitment to Republican orthodoxy.
The real weight and force of the campaign season, however, lay on the other side of the aisle. After some months of shock and mourning at the surprise of 2008, as the wars abroad carried on and the economy did not, a single question dominated Democratic politics: would former President Gantt, like Ronald Reagan before him, try to return to office? Gantt remained deeply involved in public life, and even published a memoir on his life as a civil-rights pioneer teasingly titled Not Done Yet, but as time passed there was no clear indication he wanted to complete the presidency so many Democrats thought unfinished. Time wore on through the Korean Crisis and the Credit Crash without an answer. At least one substantial Democrat – the handsome, neoliberal former governor-turned-senator from Virginia Mark Warner – formally entered the contest. Then, in a speech before a partisan crowd in Maryland at the end of 2011, Gantt with a wide smile suggested he “might like [his] old job back” and launched into a declaration of candidacy to an earthquake of applause. This would not be a campaign like those to which Democrats had become accustomed since 1968 however. Gantt’s entry sidelined a variety of competitors, though not Warner who some suggested was now reduced to auditioning for Vice President, and with the country in crisis the party establishment rallied around the former president. But few competitors was not none: into the race came the dean of Senate progressives, longtime Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone. Wellstone’s own age and health (after years of battling multiple sclerosis, mostly with success) told against him, but his creative energy, fierce speechmaking, and political platform seemed to weigh in his favor. In his own words he ran to drive the party in a direction as much as to put himself in the White House; Wellstone scored several surprising victories against Gantt, particularly in the hard-hit Midwest. His popularity with young voters and union members indicated both the dire economic condition of the country and how much voters wanted the Democratic candidate to address it with far more scope and imagination than the McCain administration. To his credit Gantt listened and tacked smoothly in Wellstone’s direction, cutting down the challenger’s vote and drawing ever more delegates. As a gesture of unity and reconciliation, however, Gantt made Wellstone an instrumental part of the process of selecting a vice-presidential candidate. In the end the two men and their advisors settled on a Democrat who had made a career out of fighting Republicans where they were strongest and finding ways to succeed: the second-term governor of Texas Cecile Richards. Richards, daughter of Ann, had left a safe (Austin) seat in Congress to defeat Neil Bush in 2006 when he faced corruption charges, and won reelection helping to lead the 2010 wave. Far more liberal than the median of her state and a two-fisted feminist, Richards was like her mother a sharp-tongued and effective campaigner.
As the fall came, Republicans’ greatest asset was the one they seemed now to value least, President McCain. Determined to see out his office with vigor and dignity, more willing to light out in his own political directions regardless of the party line, McCain seemed to regain some of his old energy. More expansive efforts to support middle-class Americans falling into poverty helped shore up public opinion of his administration. But very little of it spread to his political heirs. Engler and Kyl ran a determined, geographically defensive, proudly Republican campaign, with conviction that their efforts to free markets from government and carry on McCain’s anti-Mahdist wars abroad would set the country to rights again. They were outmatched. Gantt played on voters’ buyer’s remorse, on how military intervention abroad and free-marketeering at home seemed to have made nothing better, on his own optimism and determination to serve ordinary Americans by finishing what he started. Richards, a master of stemwinders, was as proudly and aggressively partisan as anyone, pointing out how badly women and minorities seemed to have fared in economic and cultural life during McCain’s term, decrying the greed and stupidity of the financial sector, and calling for a bottom-up national sense of common purpose. It was the ringing calls to something better that told and, in an ever more partisan political landscape, Harvey Gantt returned to the presidency with as much of a landslide as he was ever likely to get.
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