WASHINGTON — John McCain began his bid for the White House a well-liked and well-respected politician, considered honourable by Republicans and Democrats alike and hailed for his war hero history.
But even onetime McCain boosters have turned on the Arizona senator in the course of this election campaign, with a litany of prominent Republicans maligning him for his pick of the controversial Sarah Palin as his running mate and accusing him of making an unnecessarily nasty run for the top job.
"The choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate, and the resultant campaign based on fear and suspicion, looks frighteningly similar to the politics of Karl Rove," Arne Carlson, the onetime governor of Minnesota, said recently, referring to the divisive mastermind behind President George W. Bush.
Retired Gen. Colin Powell, onetime Ronald Reagan adviser Ken Adelman, conservative commentator Christopher Buckley — they’re among high-profile Republicans who have joined Carlson in his dismay. Many of them say they’re casting their ballots for Democrat Barack Obama next week instead.
Should McCain lose on Tuesday — as most polls are suggesting he will — his reputation and his legacy will undoubtedly suffer serious damage.
"Most candidates just have their political careers at stake in the event of such a loss, but McCain has his political character at stake — it will affect how he will be remembered and perceptions about what kind of politician he was," author Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, said Wednesday.
"If he loses, it diminishes him."
It’s been a curious path to the White House for McCain, a moderate Republican who made a spirited run against Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, becoming the darling of the media as they dubbed him a "maverick" for publicly disagreeing with his party on occasion.
Always in the centre of the political spectrum, McCain was considered a rare creature after eight years of discordant rule by Bush — an electable Republican who might win over undecided voters because of his more progressive views on issues like same-sex marriage, immigration and global warming.
Instead, pundits and politicians alike have been heard to ask frequently during this campaign: "Where’s the old John McCain?"
It started with his pick of Palin, a self-styled hockey mom who is anti-choice, pro-creationist, opposed to same-sex marriage and advocates abstinence-only sex education in schools despite its questionable success within her own family — her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child.
McCain was accused of abandoning his principles with his pick of Palin in order to achieve two goals: to appeal to the party’s evangelical base, and to attract female voters.
Rauch suspects, instead, that McCain was caught off-guard by the media’s focus on Palin’s staunch social conservatism and assumed her personality would be of bigger interest.
"My hunch is that the Palin pick had less to do with strategizing and more to do with McCain’s affection for those outside Washington circles. He felt she was a libertarian, a maverick, someone from far outside the corridors of power and that appealed to him — she was his kind of person."
But after an initial bump in the polls following Palin’s arrival on the scene, McCain’s numbers soon started to drop in the face of economic turmoil and a series of disastrous media interviews by the Alaska governor, who displayed a flimsy grasp of some basic issues facing the United States.
His storied temper began to emerge, and his campaign got increasingly negative, making personal attacks on Obama’s character and associations that soon caused the Republicans to sag further in the polls.
And now the McCain and Palin camps are said to be at war as she positions herself for a presidential run in 2012 while blaming his people for her many gaffes and stumbles on the campaign trail.
