Stepping Up

WHEN JOHN McCAIN RAN FOR PRESIDENT against Barack Obama, I considered supporting McCain. Then, my liberal Democratic roots reasserted themselves. McCain, I think, would have been an excellent president. When Donald Trump excluded McCain from the status of war hero by virtue of McCain's having been a prisoner of war, I lost what little if any respect I had for Trump, and never regained it. When the republicans seemed unconcerned, my disrespect for them grew. I hope John McCain wasn't the last open minded, bipartisan person to ever serve in the United States Senate, but by all appearances, he may have been. Interestingly, his fellow Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who will soon leave the Senate in disgust, is remindful of McCain in his willingness as a principled conservative to listen to and respect his political opponents. McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy; seminal bipartisan legislation of this sort seems extinct in today's toxic legislative environment. Civility, the hallmark of Senator McCain's career in politics, seems missing in action. There was a time when I did not not despise conservative republicans generally, a time when I did not consider the Christian conservative community hypocritical and morally bankrupt. That was forty years ago. The memory of Ronald Reagan's willingness to to sit down and have a drink with Tip O'Neil will hammering out compromises makes me long for a return to the Reagan era, only because I compare it to the Trump era. My chances for gaining some measure of respect for the Christian conservative community, other than by their dumping Trump, acknowledging and pledging to fight climate change, and renouncing neo-liberal supply side economics, would be for large numbers of people like John McCain to enter politics and to succeed with Christian conservative support. At this point, that hardly seems likely. Civility in American politics is a myth. There has never been a time in American history when political discourse was characterized by civility. in that sense, John McCain was a ground breaker, a true maverick.