Alex Massie Alex Massie

When a wink is better than a policy proposal.

What accounts for John McCain’s popularity? By which I mean, of course, his popularity amongst the press and television pundit class. After all, by some conventional measures, McCain is a politician, with few legislative achievements to his name (the most significant being his highly dubious campaign finance reforms) who shows little interest in the actual business of government, beyond sweeping bromides about “national greatness” and calls to “service”.

It helps that McCain is primarily interested in foreign affairs which carries much greater cachet in Washington than banal, number-crunching domestic policy. The pundit class considers a lack of foreign policy “experience” a serious handicap; having little interest in domestic affairs is not considered a problem. In part, for sure, this reflects the traditional view that the president has greater autonomy and power vis a vis foreign policy than matters domestic. But it’s also because foreign policy lends itself to generalised bloviating in a way that, say, economic policy does not. And journalists prefer grand rhetoric to tedious detail.

It’s also the case that McCain’s heroic biography – the cornerstone of his campaign – and his willingness to grant the press access to the candidate bolsters his easily-earned reputation as a “maverick”. But there’s something else too, something that I’d been meaning to write about for some time but that this passage from Matthew Parris’s (excellent) autobiography Chance Witness, reminded me of.

Writing about yet another Tony Blair speech, Parris notes:

“In that speech… there were ambitions but no plan. Of high-minded waffle this politician had no monopoly but what I found unusually repellent about Mr Blair’s was that it came across unaccompanied by even the slightest wink. All politics involves a measure of sham, and a little sheepishness befits those who make it their career.

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