The Pundit Presidency

Max Bergmann had the excellent insight that perhaps the key to understanding John McCain’s hysteria-based foreign policy is that it reflects the mindset of a television pundit. And this, after all, is really what McCain has been. He’s not interested in the nitty-gritty of domestic policy that Senators actually have influence over. And he’s hasn’t been serving in the executive branch, where the national security policies that are his passion actually get made. Instead, he spends a ton of time going on television and talking. Max mentions that “one of the first things McCain did after 9-11 was go on just about every TV program – where he incidentally called for attacking about four countries” and consistently over the years gone on TV and “sounded the alarm, ratcheted up the rhetoric and often called for military action – with almost no regards to the practical implications of such an approach.” Thus he can, for example, go on TV and call casually for a land invasion of Serbia knowing he’ll never be held accountable for any problems since the Clinton administration won’t do it, and then just forget about the whole thing in later years when the more responsible approach turns out to have been okay.

Along these lines, David Ignatius has a great column tagging McCain for his irresponsible actions over the years that have worsened the situation in Georgia. As Ignatius points out, McCain has, literally for years, been calibrating his statements on Russia and Georgia with an eye to generating (in his own words) “good zingers.” Which is fine, if a bit annoying, for a TV commentator. But McCain is actually a public official, and public officials normally try to be cautious in their statements about delicate situations lest rash words and rash promises lead, say, to a war. And as McCain’s gotten closer and closer to the White House and as the situation has grown more and more precarious, he’s shown no sign whatsoever of a desire to calibrate his attitude more carefully to the kind of responsibilities that come with substantial public office.