It's the End of the Road for John McCain

I've now seen John McCain in South Carolina twice this election season. The first time came last spring at a Republican debate, where the fatigued-looking seventy-one-year-old senator all but pulled a Monty Python crack-suicide-squad act onstage, standing up during a hail of political gunfire in a televised repartee about the torture issue.

One by one, McCain's GOP opponents had lunged toward the cameras pledging, by means of innuendo both thinly veiled and not veiled at all, boundless enthusiasm for the abuse and torture of America's terror-war detainees. Rudy Giuliani, baldly seeking to overcome his rep as a two-faced Yankee liberal who kills the unborn and dresses in women's clothes, grinned into the cameras and said he would tell his people to "use every method they could think of" to get information. The other suspect Northerner, the Mormon queer-coddler Mitt Romney, took in Giuliani's response like a frat pledge who had just been issued a beer-pong challenge, preposterously promising to one-up the field and "double Guantanamo."

Both answers elicited approving roars from the blood-lusting South Carolina crowd, and it seemed only a matter of time before Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter pulled a car battery out from behind the podium and pledged himself ready to torture someone, anyone, right now, if it would win him red-state votes. But just then, McCain, who spent five and a half years in a POW camp in Vietnam, decided to rain on the parade. "If we torture people," he said sadly, "what happens to our military people when they're captured?" After the debate, he went even further, offering a history lesson on one of America's choicest "enhanced" interrogation techniques, water-boarding. "Do you know where that was invented?" McCain asked. "In the Spanish Inquisition. Do we want to do things that were done in the Spanish Inquisition?"

In the diffident silence you could almost feel McCain's poll numbers dropping toward the low single digits. I, for one, was impressed. It seems amazing to say, but in the Bush era, distancing oneself from the Spanish Inquisition actually qualifies as political courage.

In the absurd black comedy of the American electoral process, our presidential candidates are mostly two-dimensional monsters, grotesque approximations of human beings born by some obscene asexual reproductive method in the demeaning celluloid muck of the campaign trail. They might be manicured, market-tested pieces of ambulatory political product like Mitt Romney, or bottomless pits of vengeful little-guy ambition like Rudy Giuliani -- but they are almost never fallible, thinking, multi-dimensional human beings. And yet that is what John McCain sometimes is. He is a relic in these proceedings, a man who will sometimes say what he actually thinks, even if it costs him politically -- like calling Jerry Falwell and other televangelists "agents of intolerance," or ripping ethanol as "a product that would not exist if Congress didn't create an artificial market for it," or copping to an "act of political cowardice" for having supported the flying of the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Statehouse. In such moments, McCain is like a guy who walks into a bar mitzvah reception and kicks off dinner by saying grace.

That supposed straight-shooter quality already cost McCain dearly in South Carolina once, when his refusal to fight back against a sucker-punching George Bush in 2000 sent his political career into a spiral, indirectly sending the rest of us careening into an ill-considered invasion of Iraq. Now, in mid-September, I watch him return to the state as a prisoner of Bush's idiot policies in Iraq. This time around, by some curious leap of Stockholm-syndrome logic, McCain has chosen Bush's cruel and asinine Mesopotamian war as the great principle he will not betray. This leaves him looking like a morbidly tragicomic figure, the doomed last rat stubbornly remaining on the deck of his one-time enemy's fast-sinking ship. As he makes his fateful return to the state where it all started to go wrong for him eight years ago, you can almost see a flash of pained recognition in his eyes, as if he is seeing his mistake too late, as the water rises up to drown him in obscurity.