Amy Goodman interviews Matt Welch, author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick:
MATT WELCH: Not only were his parents—father and grandfather in the military, but his father used to go around giving these lectures about how, you know, the naval gap between the US and the Soviet Union was threatening democracy, how we—his nickname was Mr. Sea Power. You know, he would recite British colonialist poetry around the dinner table. They were constantly talking about the necessity for just a huge US navy to guarantee the world’s security. That is the background that John McCain was just marinating in from the time he was a child. And for much of that period, whenever his father or grandfather was not out at sea, they were living on Capitol Hill, usually in some Washington, D.C. capacity. So he was sitting around the breakfast table with senators and congressmen from the time he was a kid. There’s this big notion that he’s a man of the people, which is actually the name of a biography of him, when in fact, down the line, he’s been very much an elitist his entire life, for both good and for ill. He has just been surrounded by, you know, top historians, top senators and congressmen and top military brass.
But this tradition that he comes from is incredibly interventionist and expansionist. It’s really interesting that in the primaries so far, if you look at the exit polls, among people who voted in the GOP primaries who consider themselves antiwar, anti-the-Iraq-war, and among voters who consider themselves angry at George Bush—and that’s a quote—and among independents, McCain is beating his opponents by two-to-one. If you actually look at people who describe themselves as just Republicans, McCain has not yet won a single primary. So he is basically winning the GOP primaries on the back of the antiwar vote, when in fact he would be the most explicitly interventionist president since Teddy Roosevelt, and he certainly makes George Bush look gun-shy by comparison.
AMY GOODMAN: And when it comes to the future in Iraq, talk about his comments about being there for a hundred years.
MATT WELCH: Well, this is what’s interesting about it—well, first of all, he was asked—he has been asked several times, you know, how long are we going to be there, how long do you foresee troops. And he just says, “Hey, look, how long have we been in Korea? No one complains about that, so we can be there for fifty, a hundred years. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that there’s no casualties. But, you know, if there’s no casualties, then the US people will support it.” He doesn’t understand the question of why is it that it might be bad that the US troops would be on foreign soil in a semi-hostile area for a hundred years. He just doesn’t understand the question, which I think is even more revealing than the answer itself. There is no downside, from his point of view, of the US basically being the world’s policeman.
