How McCain Stays Popular Despite Supporting Disastrous Wars

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted April 2, 2008.

A majority of voters reject John McCain's positions on the two most important issues of the campaign, the economy and the war. Only 27 percent of Americans say they are Republicans. Yet McCain continues to run a statistical dead-heat with both contenders for the Democratic nomination. In some polls he shows a slim but consistent lead. Who can make sense out of it?

Of course who ever said that American politics makes sense? Voters' choices depend on a host of irrational factors. Even those who try to choose rationally have to gather their information from an ever-changing kaleidoscope of facts, spin and images, thrown together seemingly at random.

But sometimes that very randomness holds clues to a pattern hidden beneath the surface of the media deluge.

In the always-darkest hour before dawn last Sunday I called up the New York Times website to find this intriguing headline in the lead: "Iraqi Offensive Revives Debate for Campaigns. " Clicking the link took me, not to the article, but to a full-page ad with the tittilating title "Scoring Drugs Is Easier for Teens Than You Think." Just a random coincidence, I figured, as I hastily clicked on "skip this ad."

That click did take me to the story headlined "Iraqi Offensive Revives Debate for Campaigns." But rather than the text of the article (which came below), I saw a photo captioned: "Senator John McCain greeting a local official on March 16 in Haditha, Iraq. He says recent Iraqi efforts are a sign of strength." There was the Republican candidate, looking younger than his 72 years, dressed in a red baseball cap and a sport shirt covered by a flak jacket. Behind him blond Americans and swarthy Iraqis beamed equally broad smiles. Apparently everyone is happy in Iraq, as long as John McCain is on the scene -- "a true American hero," according to his latest TV ad, ready for battle. The photo might well have been produced and distributed by the McCain campaign (though in fact it was taken by a Department of Defense photographer and distributed by Agence France Press).

Debate for campaigns ... teens scoring drugs ... McCain the war hero scoring political points by touting Iraqi war "strength." Already I was wondering if there really are any coincidences.

I moved on to the article, following Noam Chomsky's rule for reading the mainstream media: If there's anything important, it's usually at the end of the piece. So I jumped to the last paragraph, a quote from former State Department Middle East advisor Aaron Miller. If the current fighting "comes out well," Miller opined, "it will play to McCain's strength, his argument that the surge is working." But "if it comes out in a gray area and things start to unravel elsewhere," it will be all to the Democrats' advantage. "It's very much a question of what the ending is and whether it is clear cut."

I would have tossed this off as an obvious banality if I had not first stumbled on "Teens Scoring Drugs." But now I saw how it all fit together. McCain is offering us the war in Iraq just the way Ronald Reagan offered us the war on drugs. Both are wars that can never be won in any practical sense. But it's not about winning. It's about keeping up the fight. Because in both cases the "war" is theater. It's a show of moral clarity and certainty. And the show must go on.

The "war on drugs" has been going on for decades now. Every year it claims thousands of jailed victims and several billion of our tax dollars. No one who looks at the evidence can seriously think that all this will actually stop people from using drugs illegally.

In fact a whole academic industry studies the evidence seriously and pretty much proves that it's not really about stopping drug use at all. It's about lots of other things: keeping the drug-fighters employed, getting votes for "tough" politicians, diverting attention from more pressing problems, perhaps masking the real drug-related crimes so that they can continue unobserved. All these factors may also point to reasons that the Iraq war continues.

But the most sophisticated analyses of the war on drugs explore its deeper cultural role. As theater, it acts out a dramatic spectacle pitting good against evil. The point is not to put an end to evil, but to reassure ourselves that there is a clear and definite difference between good and evil.

How could we know that evil really exists unless we fight it unceasingly? And if we could not be sure that evil exists, how could we be sure that good exists? More importantly, how could we be be sure that we alone are the champions of good? But this show can go on only as long as evil persists, as long as "crimes" are committed. So the show must, and does, propagate the very crimes it's supposed to stop, in order to preserve our sense of moral clarity.

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Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.