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Writing in Reason’s April
2007 issue, Matt Welch delved into the frightening mind of
authoritarian maverick John McCain:

McCain’s dazzling résumé—war hero, campaign finance Quixote,
chauffeur of the Straight Talk Express, reassuring National
Uncle—tends to distract people from his philosophy of government,
and his chumminess with national journalists doesn’t help. There is
a more useful key to decode how he might behave as president.
McCain’s singular goal in public life is to restore citizens’ faith
in their government, to give us the same object of belief—national
greatness—that helped save his life after he gave up hope as a POW
in Vietnam.

Although Bill Kristol and David Brooks coined the phrase
“national-greatness conservatism” in a 1997 Wall Street
Journal op-ed piece, the sentiments they expressed and the
movement forefathers they chose would have been right at home in
one of the Chamber of Commerce speeches about the virtues of
patriotism that McCain gave in the 1970s. Kristol and Brooks wrote
that “wishing to be left alone isn’t a governing doctrine” and
“what’s missing from today’s American conservatism is America.”
McCain, then an ambitious pol-to-be working the rubber chicken
circuit as a famous ex-POW, would deliver inspiring sermonettes
about the value of public service and restoring America as an
international beacon. All three men would eventually come together
on such National Greatness projects as the “forward strategy of
freedom” in the Middle East, trying to drive money out of politics,
and, not least or last, getting John McCain elected president.

Like Kristol and Brooks, McCain regards Teddy Roosevelt and
Abraham Lincoln as political idols; like them, he never hesitates
in asserting that government power should be used to rekindle
American (and Republican) pride in government. Unlike most
neoconservative intellectuals, however, McCain is intimately
familiar with the bluntest edge of state-sponsored force. A McCain
presidency would put legislative flesh on David Brooks’ fuzzy
pre-9/11 notions of “grand aspiration,” deploying a virtuous
federal bureaucracy to purify unclean private transactions from the
boardroom to the bedroom. And it would prosecute the nation’s
post-9/11 wars with a militaristic zeal this country hasn’t seen in
generations.

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