John McCain: The Cadaverick
Typical of All Bad Marriages
John McCain, in his battle with Barack Obama to become 44th president of the United States, proved himself a terrible salesman and a worse campaign manager. He had the easiest products to sell — capitalism, justice, and freedom — but was outgunned by an inexperienced man who masterfully hawked socialism to the masses as a means to “fix†the economy, while spending lavishly with other people’s money.
By bashing Wall Street and Washington as sources of evil, instead of specific fraudulent CEOs and politicians, McCain inadvertently sullied capitalism, stoked the wrath of American citizens, and enabled Obama’s quest to redistribute wealth.
Competing with Obama/Biden, chief cheerleaders for the unconstitutional and pernicious Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), gave McCain the opportunity to become a unique voice for gender equality and to help right the legislative and judicial wrongs perpetrated against men. To wit: He could have pledged, for example, that all future Crystal Gail Mangums — the stripper who falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape — be thrown in prison, but he did no such thing. Instead, Mangum is a free woman publishing a book about life as a professional victim.
So, through his loss, John McCain, the man who promoted himself as a maverick, ultimately became a “cadaverick.†A maverick is generally defined as a lone dissenter who takes an independent stand apart from his associates. I admire those who defy conventional wisdom — as long as they move people to produce positive, transformational results. But, to wear the maverick badge as a general strategy makes as much sense as constantly running up the down escalator, just because it can be done.
Instead of a campaign taking a bold, ingenious, and differentiated course, McCain’s was filled with chaotic, errant, and erratic decisions.
McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate. She impressed me at first. But, then, it became clear that she was not VP material — and that McCain had chosen her blindly, in haste. He staked his reputation and future on Palin, who made a big splash at the Republican National Convention, but, because of her lack of mental gravitas, quickly became an embarrassment. For example, Carl Cameron of Fox News reported to Bill O’Reilly that Palin didn’t even know that Africa is a continent.
With Palin, McCain was stuck in a bad marriage of his own creation, typical of all bad marriages: mismatched parties, joined together for the wrong reasons, replete with resentment and backstabbing.
Another example of John McCain’s erratic judgment: he suspended his campaign in the face of a financial-bailout vote on Capitol Hill and threatened to withdraw from the scheduled presidential debate at Ole Miss that Friday.
Instead of rushing to Washington to accomplish something — either to protest the bill’s passage or to markedly change it — McCain emerged from the smoke with no results. The debate was held after all, but, in 90 minutes of sparring, McCain never once mentioned the campaign-halting financial calamity that was paralyzing America. Meanwhile, Obama coolly glided through the whole mess, unscathed.
While understandable that America chose the better campaigner, it is disconcerting that America elected a man who spent only five months in the US Senate before declaring his bid for the presidency, possesses a long legacy of espousing socialist views, and has associated with left-wing America-haters like Reverend Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and Khalid Rashidi. Yet, Americans disregarded Obama’s alarming pedigree, and McCain was reluctant to make a huge issue of it.
Gray-Haired Executives
In his campaign rhetoric, Obama made light of experience, claiming judgment as more important. After all, what else did he have to sell? But, he was convincing because his opponent, John McCain, was always displaying such a lack of judgment, despite his experience. Where I come from, though, judgment is the result of experience.
I live in Silicon Valley, the land of technology startups created by young, green, energetic idealists. Typically, they get their fledgling companies off the ground, gain some traction, and then hit the wall. What happens next?
They bring in the gray-haired executives with experience and judgment — chosen according to their associations and records of management philosophy and results — to run them properly. Google and Tesla, the new manufacturer of electric cars, are perfect examples. So, if companies need experienced execs with judgment to run them, why is this not true of a country of 300 million people?
The NoNonsense Bottom Line
America now faces a dangerous future — filled with threats from terrorists and unfriendly nations, an unstable financial industry, a heightened cry for entitlements and redistributed wealth, the risk of rising taxes, and the potential reduction of individual freedom that accompanies socialism — with an inexperienced, left-leaning leader at the helm. And, two days of precipitous post-election drops on the New York Stock Exchange prove it.
Obama and Biden would not be bound for the White House were it not for the male vote. What did men think about when electing them? Taxes? Defense? Economic opportunity? Did men vote logically, or were they totally emotional? Based on the contest between a known veteran conservative who ran an erratic campaign and a novice socialist who ran a smooth one, it isn’t clear.
One factor men did not consider in choosing Obama/Biden: personal liberty. Based on my experience, personal liberty is the last thing men care about. They just don’t care. VP-elect Joe Biden has singlehandedly destroyed the lives of thousands of American men with his unconstitutional VAWA.
Crystal Gail Mangum was able to falsely accuse three Duke University lacrosse players of rape, with impunity, because of Joe Biden’s VAWA, which gives women license to destroy men. How many men know or care about that? Few. How many women know or care about that? Fewer. That’s why Joe Biden soon will occupy the VP mansion.
Had John McCain fought to eliminate the legislative and judicial injustices against men, he could have emerged as a true maverick — because, in this gynocracy, no politician has the guts to take on the feminist lobby.
Instead of exposing Obama’s weaknesses and emerging as a unique executive, John McCain, the man with experience and judgment, dithered and dashed and was diffuse in his message. And, that is why this self-proclaimed maverick is now a cadaverick, a moniker shared by the men who voted to destroy their personal liberties.
About the Author
Marc H. Rudov is a globally known radio/TV personality and author of 90+ articles and the books Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables (ISBN 9780974501727), and The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth (ISBN 0974501719). Mr. Rudov, the 2008 recipient of the National Coalition of Free Men’s “Award for Excellence In Promoting Gender Fairness In The Media,†is a regular guest on Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto and The O’Reilly Factor.
Rudov’s books, articles, blog, and podcasts are available at TheNoNonsenseMan.com.
Copyright © 2008 by Marc H. Rudov. All rights reserved.
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Stumble It!
November 6th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Cadaverick. Nice! I like it.
But I really don’t ):
November 6th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Lesser of two evils politics is quite predictable. No matter how bad one choice is, the other is always worse.
November 6th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
From what I saw and heard of the four candidates, they all stuck to the standard victim-female tropes, and I think it would be hard to single any out.
The great advantage about holding generally left-leaning feminist governments accountable however, is they can be held accountable, to the gold standard of equality, where as, when confronting a conservative woman, man or administration about women’s disproportionate power and rights, conservative antifeminists will coldly shrug it off, because they think female power is the natural way, and never believed in, initiated or aspoused gender equality anyway. So the great news is, we now have at least four years to lobby for broadening the remit of VAWA and IVAWA to fully include men for instance, equalize paternity rights, rape anonymity, sentencing, the draft, wage earner burden, and so on. The average lay feminist inclined woman does not seem so bad, however misinformed she might be, and however misplaced her anger and rhetoric towards men might correspondingly be, compared to a lipstick and heels house whore conservative, who is more likely through an expensive education to have digested the facts about men and women’s true power/rights/relations, but then chosen to remain gracefully silent, whilst actively doing men down with adherence to the tried and tested rules of traditional gender role management.
The modern social democratic governments of Scandinavia are the ones bringing men’s rights at last, as they have an ethical responsibility to deliver on gender equality.
American MRAs now have a chance to get something done. Don’t be surprised if, in preserving the facade of victim feminism, the new U.S. administration affects changes helping men’s issues (like health) largely under the radar, and without fanfare. Norway, the number one country on the Gender Development Index, only recently felt able to go up front with men’s issues by announcing a ‘men’s panel’, to discuss ‘men’s lack of rights’, and even there, the phrases can be read as a continuation of governmental considerations of men’s rights in the negative – but still, they are getting things done, and so can America.
November 7th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
tom, feminism is 100% leftist.
The only conservatives who have anything to do with it are the ones who are afraid of feminists (the ones who confuse being a man with being a doormat). Aka “RINO’s”.
To get rid of feminsim means to get rid of leftists, and to kick the cowards out of the Republican party.
You leftists are stuck with being who you are. Hopefully you can regain your manhood (it would so help the mrm), but I doubt you can. You actually believe you still have testicles.
November 8th, 2008 at 6:16 am
With retarded comments like your last one, Squiggy, is there any wonder the Republicans lost the election? You sound very mobilized, but look around.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
The exit polling showed that the vote was just about exactly evenly split among those thirty and over, and among men.
It was those under thirty (66/32), and women (56/43) who strongly broke for Obama. Except for blacks, the most polarized group was single women, who voted 75/25 for Obama.
The McCain campaign early on settled on trying to beat Obama by largely using Hillary’s playbook, figuring that if it almost worked with the D’s that it would work even better in a general election. They tried to augment it with McCain’s heroism and service-to-country (and maverick) themes, but I don’t think they factored in that Obama would be even better in the second half from already having seen most all the plays in the first half against Hillary.
It was really a series of missed opportunities for McCain, as they could have, for example, gone after Biden not only on VAWA but even more strongly on the economic populism front for his having been the main Democrat proponent for the re-write of the bankruptcy laws, which on the fourth try went through in 2005. They made no issue of the fact that Biden started down that road shortly after having sold his million dollar home to a credit card company executive, in 1998-9.
And I’ll never figure out why they didn’t hammer home the narrative that the 35% meltdown in the markets which started shortly after the conventions was due to widespread fear among investors as to what an Obama presidency would do to business, employment and consumer spending, and the economy, which was a plausible explanation given Obama’s frontrunner status. Instead they just seemed to go along with the dominant media narrative that it was all Bush’s and the Republican’s fault.
There were quite a few such puzzlements concerning things they didn’t do. We’ll likely never know why, whether they were aware of some of these things and found they didn’t focus group test or poll well, or whether they were just oblivious. Overall, I think the evidence shows Palin helped McCain, especially among women, and married white women in particular, though I certainly think they could have used her even better than they did.
McCain did 11 pts worse overall with men than Bush did in 2004, so I need add little on that topic except to say that if the D’s are going to openly pander to women to attract them, the R’s are almost forced, if they have any brains at all, to directly and openly do everything they can to appeal to and attract men.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:46 am
I saw the McCain ads in Northern Virginia and were puzzled at their amateurishness. For example, a ship was shown swaying in a storm with a voiceover: “We need an experienced man at the helm!” This message is both abstract and redundant. Hillary had already bashed at Obama as inexperienced so why spend what little money he had repeating it? Same thing with Ayers. Great point, but whatever values voters were going to stay away from Obama made up their mind already. People weren’t going to change their mind on that alone.
Rudov’s other points are well known: McCain could have gone after Obama on the economy but he wasn’t much better. He signed off on the pork-barrel bailout. He was going to pay people’s mortgages. That’s not just non-fiscal conservativism, it’s BAD business sense!
The few things that McCain did well he didn’t trumpet: Trying to get people choice in their cable bills (buy the channels we like, don’t pay for the ones we don’t), his medical choice plan that Obama unfairly maligned, and this may stun you: The Iraq War and the success of our troops there. The left has written a narrative of the Iraq war that makes it out to be the civil war. Wars are ugly things, but this war is run far far far better than most others including the Korean war or WWII.
Finally, I disagree with Rudov about Sarah Palin. Granted, she probably wasn’t the smartest egg in the carton but her flubs weren’t worse than Biden’s or Obama’s 57 states. As usual, the “maverick” allowed the left to write the rules and he walked by them. Palin should have said that she wasn’t going to take a test and allow her critics to go on a fishing expedition. Ronald Reagan said it best: No apologies, no regrets.
Ok, one more thing: Men are the untapped republican electorate. We’ve put most presidents over the top but are ignored because we’re so reliable but there’s still room for growth. If women can produce a 75/25 margin, so can men. Men are generally conservatives in that we work, we produce rather than consume, and we don’t rely upon government to protect us as much. We are the crossover/gateway for republicans to get into minority, working class votes.