McCain Gets An Opponent For His Senate Seat

Does Glassman have what it takes to vanquish a long in the tooth Goliath?

I can't remember whose joke this was but I heard it on Columbus Day. Someone mentions John McCain to Christopher Columbus and he asks if it's the same McCain who was on the Pinta... Everyone knows who John McCain is; he's the guy that picked Sarah Palin to be a national figure and then got swamped by the first African American to run for president on a major party. McCain, who only won 173 electoral votes (to Obama's 365), managed to win 46% of the national popular vote and he insists to friends that he would have won the presidency if the stock market hadn't tanked and Bush and the Republicans hadn't been so clearly and undeniably at fault. Oddly, though, he did better nationally with that 46% than he did in his own state (45%)-- where Obama generously didn't go to campaign. Obama won in Pima County (Tucson) and McCain seems to have won in Maricopa (Phoenix), although it looks like there was significant electoral fraud there (something like what happened recently in Afghanistan), perhaps enough to have swung the state to McCain. (Obama also won Apache, Coconino, and Santa Cruz counties.)

There were some polls that showed that Arizona's popular Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, could beat McCain-- widely viewed as an absentee Senator who spends far more time on cable TV shows than in Senate committees or in his own state. Obama saved him the indignity of that by appointing her to his cabinet. Today a Tucson city councilman, Rodney Glassman, announced that he had formed an exploratory committee to examine running against McCain.

There are already two somewhat deranged teabaggers, Andy Martin and Minuteman founder Chris Simcox running against him in the GOP primary, which will probably make it more difficult for McCain to put as much energy as he wants to into making over the GOP as a less right-wing fringe movement and more like a mainstream political party again, something he and Lindsey Graham have been working on.

Back to Glassman. Does he have more than an ice cube's chance in the Arizona sun to win? I called the number at the bottom on his issue-less website and the message said the number is no longer in service. Two strikes-- no issue positions on the website other than that McCain is a doodyhead-- and a malfunctioning phone number on day one of the campaign. On the other hand, Glassman is an ally and former legislative assistant to one of the most heroic political leaders in Arizona-- if not the entire southwest-- Raul Grijalva. That's worth something-- even if only waiting to hear what Glassman thinks about... anything. His record as a city councilman is progressive enough, especially when it comes to sustainability issues (his specialty). He's also been quite good on labor and LGBT issues. There is, of course, a clear way to victory in Arizona. Under no circumstances try to be a Republican-like candidate who offers no choice and no inspiration for the many people who think McCain is yesterday's-- or last century's-- news. Glassman might start by reading, and committing to memory, Frank Rich's column in Sunday's NY Times, Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco. McCain, like Nixon before him, tries to razzle and dazzle everyone with his great knowledge of foreign and military matters. Truth is, he's an ignorant, narrow-minded fossil who gets by on bluster and doesn't know squat. Glassman should take him on-- and take him on head-on-- in the area he's presumed to be strongest in but is actually as weak as a doddering old fool ready to charge a tank on a mule. McCain can be beaten on Afghanistan-- and Rich laid out the template, calling McCain the noisiest standard bearer of neoCons who have managed to get everything wrong-- everything.

He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention-- either rightly or wrongly-- was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan-- rightly or wrongly, presumably-- just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes-- perhaps correctly-- that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003-- and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11-- even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.

Regardless of how young Glassman measures up-- and from what I've heard from friends in Arizona, there's no reason to be wildly optimistic; most see him as a careful moderate-- making McCain spend his money defending his seat rather than giving it away to other candidates by itself makes this exercise worthwhile. And Glassman could make it interesting. (He's known for his association with Grijalva, after all, not Harry Mitchell or Gabby Giffords.) Although it would take a major fuck-up by McCain for Glassman to win, it’s noteworthy that McCain never has faced a serious challenger in Arizona and the older he gets, the more likely it becomes that he won’t keep that temper under control, although we probably won’t get to hear him call Glassman a trollop and a c@nt unless Glassman takes off the kid gloves and goads the hell out of the old coot.