1. Listening to this excellent overview of McCain's career helped me understand why I was genuinely saddened, as a non-@gop citizen, by his passing. What I mourned was 99% about what McCain symbolized, and 1% about what he actually did. nytimes.com/2018/08/27/pod…
2. This theme comes out in this smart discussion as well. Aside from McCain's stance against torture during the Bush Admin (and perhaps his ACA thumbs down), it's hard to find many examples of McCain's actual, mavericky acts of legislative independence.
player.fm/series/voxs-th…
player.fm/series/voxs-th…
3. I appreciate his work on McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. But since that moment his party has systematically worked to dismantle any restrictions on campaign money...and McCain did what exactly to resist this drift? Not much from what I can see.
4. For years he worked on bipartisan immigration reform, but when he got primaried from the right he ran ads about building a fence along the southern border. In 2009-10 Dems were ready to move immigration legislation, but McCain didn't rise to the moment.
5. In 2009 the @gop committed to saying "no" to everything Obama tried to do. McCain went along with that almost entirely. Sure, he'd *say* some critical things along the way that sounded all mavericky, but what did he actually *do* to foster bipartisan civility and action?
6. These 2 things are true. John McCain was about the best that the @gop had to offer for the past 20 years. And his signature legislative accomplishments are virtually non-existent. Almost every accomplishment above is about him saying "no" to things, not crafting actual policy.
7. Those of us who are not Republicans who are feeling some political remorse for McCain's passing, are, I would argue, mourning the death of our own hopes for an opposition party we can respect. We mourn the never-realized *promise* of John McCain.
8. When we look back at the defining issues of our times--immigration, climate change, the rise of white nationalism, Russian interference in US elections, rising economic inequality--we'll see that McCain said many admirable things about them, but did almost nothing.
9. It's not like there weren't people on the other side of the aisle eager to work with him on those issues, and it's not like he didn't seem to actually agree with them...but he failed to rise to those moments and buck the McConnell obstructionist party line.
10. Perhaps the forces pushing his party to the right were just too strong for McCain to resist, and he had no choice but to go along with the party line. I'd be more willing to believe this if there was more evidence that McCain took risks to make progress on those issues.
11. When he died, John McCain had higher approval ratings from Dems than Repubs. That's because many moderate Dems want to live in a polity where the other party consists of people who resemble the public image McCain projected--principled straight-shooters you can argue with.
12. Sadly, McCain's track record shows that the legislative reality rarely lived up to the image. And if he was the best the @gop had to offer, and he wasn't even what he seemed to be, then what does that say about where that party has been and where it is headed?
13. Look, I'm a Democrat (though not an uncritical one) and I have no problem with the idea of that party having more say over our politics. But I also don't think that one-party rule is good for any diverse democracy like ours.
