Books

Citizen McCain
By Elizabeth Drew, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2008, 181 pp.

Citizen McCain was first published six years ago, but its subject, who is now a candidate for the presidency, is so important, and the book itself so revealing, that the publishers have reissued it with a new introduction by the author, Elizabeth Drew.

This short book covers a little more than one year, the year during which McCain struggled, tirelessly and successfully, to promote a bill that would restrict "soft money," the unregulated political contributions by unions, corporations or private individuals.

On March 27, 2002, the president signed the McCain-Feingold bill into law, removing, says Drew, "the most egregious, corrupting element of the campaign-finance system."

It was a moment "of enormous, historic significance," she says, made possible by "one man" and his "determination, guts, steadiness, political acumen, and feel for the American people's better nature."

In her new introduction, however, Drew doubts whether this man — John McCain the maverick, the straight talker, the champion of human decency even in war — still exists.

He does not talk much these days, she says, about campaign finance reform; he has withdrawn his support for "a humane and practical immigration proposal"; he has voted against a bill that would have made it illegal for the CIA to use waterboarding and other questionable interrogation techniques.

In short, says Drew, McCain has become "just another panderer — to Bush and to the Republican party's conservative base."

But people rarely change in such profound ways. The value of Drew's book, in fact, is that her original perceptions of McCain, whom she followed closely from early January 2001 to March 2002, are so fine that they allow one to see how the new McCain is not at all new.

Getting the McCain-Feingold bill passed was an almost impossible undertaking — Drew documents all of the setbacks and successes that marked the bill's slow progress to the president's desk — but the struggle seems to have given McCain a strange pleasure.

"This thing," he said, talking about how to deal with his opposition, "will be trickier and more devious than anything I've ever done. It's a house of mirrors."

Here and elsewhere, Drew reveals, perhaps unwittingly, that what motivates McCain is not the struggle to uphold moral and ethical principles but the challenge to win the struggle — any struggle.

No one should doubt McCain's "feel for the American people's better nature."

To what use, however, would he put that special faculty if, as president, he should begin hanging mirrors in the White House too?

Carmine G. Di Biase is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.