The rehabilitation of John McCain

It looks increasingly likely that the McCain-Palin ticket will go down to a crushing defeat three weeks from today. One perennial trope of American political journalism is that once a presidential candidate has gone down in flames, an explosion of sentimentality (edited to add: in the immediate aftermath of the election; in the long term he tends to be remembered as simply a loser) tends to cloak him in virtues that seemed invisible during the campaign itself. This is likely to be especially true of McCain, who, despite the many confessions of disillusionment his unusually sleazy campaign has elicited from his former admirers throughout the media, can still call upon a deep well of residual affection in the press.

So, the question arises, what narrative will be forged to forgive McCain’s egregious sins? My guess is that one strand of it will reflect the theme of Jorge Luis Borges’ story Three Versions of Judas. McCain, it will be discovered, is so honorable that, in a display of honor greater than any ever witnessed before in American political life, he completely sacrificed his own personal honor for what he understood to be the sake of his country.

In other words, for such an honorable man to have engaged in such dishonorable conduct was, in a way, the last full measure of devotion an honorable man can manifest. If you think about it very, very carefully, by completely sacrificing what is most precious to him (his personal honor), the truly honorable man is being more honorable than the less honorable man, who remains unwilling to sacrifice his honor at the altar of patriotism.

Or something like that.