Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Here's a transcript of John McCain's talk at the New School, where he was jeered and booed.

On the narrowest possible issue — McCain's attitude towards blogging — he makes a little but telling joke. When he was young, he says, he was sure he was right and loved to argue:

All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It's a pity that there wasn't a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Ouch! Blogs being teased! He goes on to say "It's funny, now, how less self-assured I feel late in life than I did when I lived in perpetual springtime." Sen. McCain, that means you should feel even more at home in the Blogosphere.

On more important matters, he makes the same point as Gov. Warner: We Americans love to argue, and that's a good thing. But, unlike Warner, he doesn't conclude that therefore no one can know she's right. Instead, he uses it as a way of softening the audience for the statement that he supported the decision to invade Iraq. He rejects three reasons for supporting the war — empire, racism, cheap oil — but doesn't explain why he supported it, other than that he believed "rightly or wrongly, that my country's interests and values required it." Specificity would be really helpful here. It'd also be nice to know whether it was rightly or wrongly. If he believed we were going to be attacked by WMD's, how does he explain the wrongness of his belief?

But this is a commencement address, so he skips that topic in preference for saying we ought to respect the opinions of people with whom we disagree:

Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other's respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views, as long as our character and our sincerity merit respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the noisy debates that enliven our politics, a mutual devotion to the sublime idea that this nation was conceived in – that freedom is the inalienable right of mankind, and in accord with the laws of nature and nature's Creator.

Then he tries to curry some favor by using Darfur as a case that unites us all. We all believe (where "all" means something like "right-thinking Americans"), he says, that "people have a right to be free." He then explicitly rejects relativism as a "a mask for arrogance and selfishness." He says, rather effectively, I think:

All lives are a struggle against selfishness. All my life I've stood a little apart from institutions I willingly joined. It just felt natural to me. But if my life had shared no common purpose, it would not have amounted to much more than eccentricity. There is no honor or happiness in just being strong enough to be left alone. I have spent nearly fifty years in the service of this country and its ideals. I have made many mistakes, and I have many regrets. But I have never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I wasn't grateful for the privilege. That's the benefit of service to a country that is an idea and a cause, a righteous idea and cause. America and her ideals helped spare me from the weaknesses in my own character. And I cannot forget it.

He closes by recounting (again) the story of his relationship with David Ifshin, a Vietnam war protestor who changed his mind about America and became McCain's friend. It's a good story, but it's somehow slightly odd to hear a story about someone else's journey of self-discovery. It's the sort of story speakers usually tell about themselves. Anyway.

This is the type of speech that will, I believe, convince swing voters that they'd rather have McCain as president than someone more ideologically/politically motivated, even if they marginally agree more with the ideologue's positions. Yes, I'm talking about Hillary. Gore, Biden, Warner, Edwards, Oprah, not so much.

And, by the way, I hope the students unwilling to listen to this speech read it now and regret their rudeness. Thirty-five years ago, I probably would have joined them. Now I'd wear a peace symbol, but I'd listen. I'd walk out on a Donald "Abu Ghraib" Rumsfeld commencement address and it beats the hell out of me why Boston College would choose to give an honorary degree to Condi Rice, but if you can't respect McCain enough to listen to him, what does a person who disagrees with you have to do to get you to listen for twenty minutes? Agree with you?