Meet John McCain, the messy maverick

By LES PAYNE

If elected president, Sen. John McCain promises to stage a news conference every week, a singular horror that, of itself, should be enough to doom his chances.

This McCain threat shows no mercy for his staff, which trails this creaky circus doing what the man with the shovel does for the elephant. “Being human and tripping over your tongue occasionally doesn’t mean a thing,” said one top official for the GOP nominee. By contrast, McCain dismissed his opponent’s verbal appeal last week as Sen. Barack Obama blitzed the Middle East and Europe, smooth-talking 200,000 in Berlin.

Time and again, McCain staffers must return to his messes and explain what their boss meant to say. In addition to the verbal slips, even in his so-called areas of expertise, McCain rolls out his thoughts with a disquieting inexactitude.

At least twice, under coaching from Sen. Joe Lieberman, McCain confused the Sunnis of Iraq with the Shias. Darfur he misplaced in Somalia. And in speaking about “Czechoslovakia,” he reunited the Czech Republic and Slovakia, separated since 1993.

Sometimes, the slip is a matter of geography as when, on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the Arizona senator spoke of an Iraq-Pakistan border that does not exist, at least not yet.

Some blame such McCain errors on the turning of his leaves. He will be 72 next month. But, as with the current commander in chief, the blight appears to have set in early on. It practically took an affirmative action appointment to eek this wacky rebel into the U.S. Naval Academy. His legacy posting came courtesy of his admiral grandfather and on-track-to-become-admiral dad. The blood of the third generation, however, apparently ran thin as little John, a carousingly weak student, finished fifth from the very bottom of his 1958 academy class of 599 graduates.

Nothing in McCain’s career demonstrates that his bulb has brightened. His vaunted reputation as a maverick and contrarian could just as well be attributed to a short-circuiting of his command of facts and standard operating procedures.

What about his qualifications for commander in chief?

As President George W. Bush has proved, any scion of a wealthy family can be taught to fly a jet fighter by a patient, long-suffering military flight instructor. As for getting one’s plane shot out of the sky, as McCain did over North Vietnam, we need seek no analysis beyond that of Gen. Wesley Clark’s.

The right stuff?

The general’s point was not that McCain isn’t a war hero, the counterattack that put Clark on the defensive. It was rather that McCain’s heroics have not prepared him, ipso facto, to be commander in chief, as the GOP candidate claims. Incidentally, Clark ranked No. 1 in his 1966 class of 579 cadets at West Point. Other knowledgeable war veterans, and I humbly include myself, know that cocky flyboy pilots like McCain, indeed, tend not to have the right stuff to be named commanders.

Furthermore, some actual commanders, Gen. William C. Westmoreland for example — as well as some commanders in chief, such as George W. Bush — do not have the winning stuff that makes leaders successful. In the former case, Gen. Westmoreland, who got the U.S. snookered on the battlefield in Vietnam, scored in the middle of his 1936 West Point class of 276.

As for the verbal and scholastic prowess of the current commander in chief, perhaps the less said, in these tumultuous times, the better. It suffices that the closer we look at the makeup of McCain, the more we find traces of Bush. Both have been given to waywardness, one born to money, the other marrying into it.

The salient and troubling point about this duo is that McCain doggedly insists upon staying the Bush course. Also, it’s a sure bet that McCain would continue to offer David Letterman material for his “Great Moments in Presidential History,” a nightly spoof of Bush’s inarticulate ramble. Can we afford any longer to ponder our sitting president each night and laugh — just to keep from crying?

X Les Payne is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.