Banging the Shoe...

Watching John McCain’s terse, jaw-clenching performance in the first Presidential debate, I couldn’t help noticing his eerie resemblance to former Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Anyone old enough to remember the sixties will recall Khrushchev’s stolid, low-to-the-ground physicality, his box shaped head, and the McCainesque white hair combed over a high forehead. If you count yourself in this group, you will also remember that Khrushchev made international headlines by infamously banging his shoe on a United Nations desk to silence opposing opinion.

McCain kept his shoes on during the debate, but he linked himself to the past as inextricably as old news footage of Khrushchev.

It was as if McCain, before a televised audience, cemented himself to the war in Iraq and therefore, to painful Republican mistakes that most Americans can’t wait to forget. For someone who wishes to position himself as an agent of political change, he couldn’t have been more implacable in his views. Like the old soldier that he is, McCain clings to his fantasy of a conventional victory in an unconventional war, with enemies that appear and reappear like djins, a war that can never be won on a literal battlefield but only on an ideological frontline. The ghost that is Bin Laden can’t be exorcised with a homecoming parade.

McCain’s insistence that we must leave Iraq “with honor” is an ironic impossibility, since we entered this preemptive war on a lie, devolved to torturer mentality in our conduct of it, and have since engaged in magical-thinking warfare to convince Americans that we aren’t bad guys for starting it in the first place.

Even McCain’s references to his POW credentials seemed oddly self-serving… he should let others remind us of what he endured, in the unlikely event we should forget. Again, this reference links McCain to the past, during a time when we need new ideas and fresh thinking to move into a future that is free of dependence on oil, and the ugly wars required to maintain it.

As Americans we must now ask ourselves… do we have the courage to abandon the failed policies of an eight-year Republican betrayal of our values, our economy and our constitution? Or do we want to cling in fear to one of the architects of that betrayal, a candidate who, though a self-proclaimed maverick, refused to look his Presidential opponent in the eye?

He might as well have removed his shoe and banged it on the podium.