HOW NASTY IS JOHN McNASTY? IS HE WORTHY OF TRUST?

Looks like it's too late for the Republicans to dump McCain for a more electable candidate. They're stuck with him so they're trying to make the best of a bad deal. McCain has always been a problem for everyone around him. Even as a child he was an asshole with a quick temper and a sense of aggression that let nothing stand in the way of him and what he wanted. In high school his nicknames were "Punk" (which had a different, less cool, connotation back then than it does now) and "McNasty," which everyone who knows him says still fits like a glove.

His father and grandfather were Naval officers so he went to the Naval Academy too. He was a poor student and the only thing he excelled in was getting demerits; yes he was a member of the Century Club, meaning over 100 demerits. He did worst in anything pertaining to "works and plays well with others," which prepared him for his Senate career. Senate staffers have consistently voted him the senator with the worst temper and also the worst follower in the biannual Washingtonian Best Of and Worst Of poll (as well as biggest Show Horse).

Like Bush, he was a drunken party boy who did badly at everything he put his hand to and seemed more interested in chasing hookers than in learning how to be a good pilot. He graduated sixth from the bottom of his class and he was considered a subpar pilot in the Navy, refusing to study flight manuals-- not unlike his lack of patience today with anything to do with economics, which he finds boring, admits he knows nothing about, and claims, petulantly, he can hire people to deal with if he's ever elected to an executive position (like... uh, president). While in the Navy he crashed several planes and was eventually grounded. Despite his awful flight record he was given an opportunity to fly in combat, probably because of his father's position in the Navy. Most of his accidents didn't harm anyone-- just millions of dollars worth of equipment but one killed 132 sailors and destroyed 20 aircraft. He was shot down over Vietnam on a bombing mission and captured. Everything he says about his time in captivity is taken as the gospel and it paints him very heroically. Judging by how he has consistently lied about everything else he's been involved with there is no rational reason to necessarily believe anything he's said about his internment in Vietnam. The lies and truth are probably so mixed up that he barely knows himself what was true and what was false.

He married a model, Carol Shepp, who had already been married to one of his classmates. He adopted her two sons and in 1966 they had one daughter, Sidney-- McCain's middle name-- known to her friends and associates as Sid. (McCain's second marriage yielded a daughter and 2 sons and they adopted a Bangladeshi girl, Bridget, who may have been an orphan.)

When McCain returned to the U.S. he found his wife Carol crippled from an auto accident. Multiple one night stands led to a series of extramarital affairs. He admitted that "My marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine." Carol agrees: "I attribute [the breakup of our marriage] more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else." He took up with a rich young lady of easy morals, who had a very wealthy father, and a year later he divorced Carol (April, 1980) and married Cindy (May, 1980). None of his children attended the wedding or approved of their father's actions although years later they reconciled with McCain and Cindy. (Carol was a personal assistant to Nancy Reagan and later worked at the White House Visitors Center.)

McCain went to work for his new father-in-law, a wealthy beer distributor, who helped finance his political career and introduced him to some of the unscrupulous businessmen who helped in McCain's climb to power, particularly crooked banker and close McCain associate Charles Keating. In the not too distant future we'll be talking in greater detail about McCain's problems as part of the scandal known as the Keating Five, but the short version is that Keating and his associates gave McCain well over $100,000 in what I call legalized bribes but what is commonly called "campaign contributions." He also gave McCain some very special "investment opportunities," not available to ordinary men and women. Keating also took the McCain family on a series of expensive vacations and allowed him to use the bank's corporate jets. Were there strings attached to this immense sum of money and myriad favors? McCain met twice with Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, seeking to prevent the government's seizure of Keating's insolvent bank (which wound up costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars). McCain slithered out from under this scandal although the Senate Ethics Committee officially rebuked him. He halfheartedly apologized but wouldn't go further than claiming "poor judgment."

This afternoon I had lunch with a woman who worked for me when I was president of Reprise Records. She was friends with a well-known and well-liked music industry publicist, Sid McCain. As soon as Sid realized her father was going to run for president again, she got a transfer from L.A. to Toronto. She isn't the goodie-two shoes bleached blonde daughter who is part of the campaign. This one is famous for her work on Megadeth, Motorhead, the White Stripes and other cutting edge bands. When she was here in L.A. she was known as a cutting edge gal, very punk-fashionable (the cool kind of "punk," not like her father's disparaging high school nickname)... multiple piercings and all. She hates her father's politics but has been cool enough to keep away from the political press. A few years ago there was a bit of a brouhaha at an extremist right-wing website which quotes Moby, one of Sid's closest friends, as spilling the beans that McCain hates Bush. Free Republican misidentified Sid as "McCain's son" but, according to others who know her, the story was true. Many of us recognized, like McCain, what Bush's dangerous shortcomings were and even hated him the way McCain did. But McCain was not only dissembling about it; he calculated his own political career trajectory and decided to campaign for Bush and put him in a position to do all that he's done to this country in the last 7 years, most of which was rubber stamped by... Senator John McCain.

Today Howard Dean was interviewed by the National Journal about the latest McCain scandal. His response was similar to the way we feel about it here at DWT:

"I have no idea whether the affair story is true or not, and I don't care. What I do care about is John McCain-- and this has been well-documented-- is talking all the time about being a reformer and a maverick, and in fact, he has taken thousands of dollars from corporations, ridden on their corporate jets, and then turned around and tried to do favors for them and get projects approved. He has tons of lobbyists on his staff. This is a guy who is very close to the lobbyist community, a guy who has been documented again and again by taking contributions and then doing favors for it. This is not a guy who is a reformer. This is a guy who has been in Washington for 25 years and wants to give us four more years of the same, and I don't think we need that."