John McCain: A therapist's view

A therapist evaluates John McCain

SARAKAY SMULLENS

Like most Democrats, I watched as much of last month’s Republican convention as my stomach would allow. But I wasn’t able to count how often the word “evil” was spoken. If the Democrats used that word at all the previous week, I didn’t hear it. And here lies a fundamental and profound difference between the two lead candidates in America’s presidential election (assuming, of course, that John McCain is still the lead GOP candidate).

Barack Obama seeks to understand people, why we act and react the way we do, how to pitch to the best of us all, and the world community. He stresses the necessity of thoughtfully considered actions.

He recognizes that America’s fight with Al Qaeda is above all a battle for the hearts and minds of a brainwashed, diverse and complicated enemy. Ultimately, he perceives, the road to national and world security lies in our ability to address and isolate madness.

For it is madness and not evil that permeates our times. And madness, as the Republican convention reminded me, is not restricted to Muslim countries.

Madness can be cured

As a social worker and family therapist, I’ve spent the past 25 years talking with people about their hopes and dreams and fears. I’m well aware that life is and always has been cruel. But I’m equally aware that hope, love and a sense of connection are the necessary tools to ease pain and renew human strength.

I’m also aware that madness can be cured if its causes are understood. If one hasn’t been respected, if one hasn’t been heard, if one feels all hope is dead, hatred gradually sets in. And if during formative years there is no intervention, there is no one offering the love and respect that all human beings long for from their first moments on this earth, this hatred can become intractable.

Envy and jealousy are as natural as mother’s milk. But with time and maturity, people are able to handle such feelings without a need to destroy the objects of their envy. Hatred, on the other hand, is not natural and normal. It’s born of relentless longing for connection, outlet and opportunity— of unwavering emptiness and the absence of hope. This sort of self-hatred can strike even those who are well loved and materially secure. And no one is completely immune to appeals to these instincts. When we’re afraid, this worst of us surges forward. At such moments we’re most vulnerable to manipulation.

Thus in 2004 John Kerry (who fought in Vietnam) was successfully labeled “unfit to command,” while Bush 43 (who avoided combat in that same war) was successfully marketed as a dynamic military commander.

McCain's blind spot

It’s not experience that determines leadership capacity. (Few of our leaders have boasted more government experience than Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not to mention James Buchanan.) It is, instead, a fully expanded intelligence embracing the importance of rational thought in problem solving, strength of character, and a nature that understands the power of trusted connection. McCain, notwithstanding his war heroism, lacks these qualities, nor does he appreciate them. Nor does his running mate.

Long before his selection of Sarah Palin, McCain often responded to legitimate questions with varying degrees of sarcasm and viciousness. During the Keating Five scandal in 1989, when reporters asked about his involvement, he replied, “You are a liar" and "You do understand English, don’t you?" and "It’s up to you to find that out, kids.” (He later owned up to his involvement in the scandal and apologized for it.) This vindictive side of him has resurfaced in various ways, revealing an immaturity that many of us had not previously perceived.

McCain struggled throughout young adulthood in the shadow of two revered admirals, his father and his grandfather. He was constantly rebelling. At Annapolis he was an active member of a rebellious group who called themselves “the Bad Bunch.”

Liberation in a POW prison

A psychotherapist could argue that his five years’ imprisonment in Vietnam represented the first time in his entire life that McCain found himself free from family pressure to live a prescribed life that clearly didn’t suit him. As he endured brutal suffering in his POW camp, McCain set off on a personal journey toward liberation from this psychological burden. Yet he seems to have been unconcerned about whom he hurt in the course of this journey.

During his imprisonment McCain’s first wife, Carol, a beautiful swimsuit model, was severely disabled and disfigured in an auto accident in 1969. Reluctant to burden her husband, and perhaps because she was aware of his previous womanizing and that he had become bored with married life when he enlisted, she kept this news from him. Upon McCain’s release in 1973 his shabby treatment of his ailing, no longer exquisite wife left some former friends viewing him as cruel and opportunistic.

McCain was still married to and living with Carol when he became involved with Cindy Hensley, daughter of a major Anheuser-Busch distributor in Phoenix. She brought wealth and youth to their marriage in 1980 (she was almost 18 years McCain’s junior), but McCain continued to pursue his own selfish path. Cindy was exceedingly lonely in her early-married life in Washington, and eventually returned to a home in Phoenix across the street from her parents, where McCain visited his family on holidays and weekends. It was her parents, not her husband, who discovered (after several years) Cindy’s addiction to narcotic painkillers and confronted her about it. In 2004 Cindy suffered a near fatal stroke due to high blood pressure and lived alone for four months, concentrating on her recovery.

Sarah Palin’s similar story

This syndrome— by which a politician sacrifices his family and friends on the altar of his public ambition— also surfaces, of course, in McCain’s running mate. Sarah Palin has a history of turning on the men who have mentored her and offered her opportunity to lead, doing all possible to demean and knife them. She does not appear to be one who understands or respects loyalty or boundaries that are not in her immediate self-interest.

And who but a self-serving mother would push her unwed, pregnant, 17-year-old daughter into a very public shotgun engagement to a teenager who had already declared, “I don’t want kids”? Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin’s putative son-in-law, has expanded on his personal philosophy on MySpace: “Ya fuck with me I’ll kick [your] ass.” Bristol Palin, it would seem, was attracted to a first love whose instincts are not all that different from her mother’s running mate. McCain and Sarah Palin are surely two people who deserve each other: a fascinating marriage of ruthless ambition, intimidation and fear, veiled by charm, flag and momhood.