Today, Explained - The empty seat in Arizona

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

Love him, hate him, or both, Senator John McCain will be remembered as a towering figure of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today explained once more this week comes from Google Play. Google Play has audiobooks that you can download and keep forever on your devices, and they work on multiple devices. For a limited time, you can get $10 off your first audiobook at Google Play, over $10, by visiting g.co slash play slash explained. Opening up Twitter Sunday morning was like entering a choose-your-own-adventure obituary for Senator John McCain. There were people calling him a war hero. There were people calling him a war criminal.

There were people talking about how noble a campaign he ran against Barack Obama in 2008, and others saying how his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate paved the way for President Donald Trump. I saw some reporters sharing stories of how decent he could be when you caught him alone on his campaign tour bus or on an elevator in the Capitol building. And others were quick to point out how he could be when you caught him alone on his campaign tour bus or on an elevator in the Capitol building. And others were quick to point out how he could be a total bully, how coarse he could be. What's clear was this, love him or hate him, maverick or hypocrite, John McCain will go down as one of the most significant political figures of a generation, starting with Vietnam. He was the son and grandson of Navy admirals, and he would joke about how he was, I think,

fifth from the bottom of his graduating class at the Naval Academy. I was an undistinguished member of the class of 1958. My superiors didn't hold me in very high esteem in those days, and I was as relieved to graduate fifth from the bottom of my class as the Naval Academy was to see me go. But he had this family legacy that he was supposed to live up to. Steve Goldstein is a news host at KJZZ.

That's public radio in Phoenix, Arizona. From being with the Naval Academy, he eventually became a Navy pilot. And he was shot down over Vietnam while leading his squad. And he had a very, very bad landing, breaking both his arms. And he was a POW at the so-called Hanoi Hilton for five and a half years. What were his years as a prisoner of war like? He was in very small space with his fellow prisoners as well, and he would talk about how he would keep himself sane. They would play games. They would try to keep their minds sharp. But as time went by, he was seen as such a prize because his father and grandfather were naval admirals, and he was a great propaganda tool.

What is your name? Lieutenant Commander John McCain. Who is your father? Could you name him and tell me who he is? Yes, his name is Admiral John McCain, and he's in London, England now. Doing what? He's commander-in-chief of U.S. naval forces in Europe. And one of the things that at least we know about him is that he refused to be used as a propaganda tool.

At times they would say, we're going to release you, but he would say, no, I'm not going to be released unless my fellow prisoners are. That's probably one of the more prideful moments of his life, I would think. How essential is his Vietnam experience to sort of the mythology of John McCain? Is it everything that sort of forms what's to come? You know, narrative is a big word for us these days. And that was certainly a major part of his narrative. Here is someone who was seen as a heroic figure, the five and a half years as a POW.

And that was obviously very attractive to the Republican Party. And he had that young swagger still at that point, too. You know, in his 40s, he had been a military hero. That definitely made him someone who was very, very attractive. Hello, Ms. Bowling. My name is John McCain. I'm running for Congress. How exactly does he get into politics? When exactly does that happen? Does he get home from Vietnam and immediately parlay his experience into this political career, or does it take a while? It takes a while. He's released in 1973, and his first congressional seat he won in Arizona in 1982. Every door I knock on, obviously, is not a successful venture, but

they seem to appreciate the fact that I take the time to go knock on their door. His second wife, Cindy, her family is well known in Arizona in the alcohol distribution business. And so that's where he decided to settle in Arizona because that's where her family ties were. So he served two House terms. And then he became the successor to the seat that Arizona legend, also former presidential nominee himself, Barry Goldwater, had held. And this was 1986. And as we know, Senator McCain served, just was elected to his sixth term recently. So his first term begins in 1987? 1987, right. And how long before he becomes this sort of towering figure in the Senate? It's not like he shows up on day one and he's the Senator John McCain, right? No, absolutely not. he shows up on day one and he's the Senator John McCain, right? No, absolutely not. Freshman senators should be seen and not heard. The difference

was with Senator McCain that the first real controversial part of his political career, at least, happens not long after that in the midst of the savings and loans scandal. Charles Keating, I'm not sure if that's a name that your listeners will know. After Reagan deregulated the savings and loans in the early 80s, Keating got rich making risky gambles that ripped off the people who invested in two of the companies he ran, American Continental Corporation and Lincoln Savings and Loan. Tens of thousands of everyday Americans, many of them senior citizens, lost millions of dollars on the junk bonds that Keating sold them. Keating was protected from federal regulators, for a while anyway, by a group of senators,

including John McCain. The savings and loan collapse at that point ended up costing taxpayers around $3 billion. Senator Glenn and McCain, along with Senator Cranston, DeConcini, and Regal jointly intervened in meetings with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board on behalf of former Lincoln Savings loan owner Keating in April of 1987, at a time when Lincoln was approaching insolvency. McCain and these other four senators met with regulators who were investigating Keating. Senator McCain received $112,000 in campaign contributions and substantial free transportation for McCain and his family, including three free trips to Keating's vacation resort in the Bahamas. And Senator McCain was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for this. And Senator McCain was able to finesse it.

He made a major apology. This man is a United States senator, and you are about to hear him say something that very few senators have ever said before. Listen carefully. It was a very serious mistake on my part. And it really didn't seem to haunt him the rest of his career based on what he achieved. How much does having his first real big spotlight as a senator being negative influence Senator John McCain? He became a real champion for campaign finance reform. And it seems like stereotypically more of a Democratic issue, but he really took that by the horns in something that became McCain-Feingold, this bipartisan campaign reform act. Party committees had to stop raising so-called soft money, unregulated funds from big donors. It turned out to be a high watermark for campaign finance regulation.

That's 2002, right? Does it take that long for McCain to really put his name on something? I think we have to go back a couple of years, which is really where his ideas for wanting to be involved in campaign finance reform came from. And that's when he decided to run for president in 1999, which the 2000 campaign against George W. Bush. And I don't know if people remember the bus, the Straight Talk Express, so named because McCain was willing to have all sorts of media members on there, ask him any question, he'd give you the straight talk on it. So this famous military hero who'd been serving in the Senate for a while was now, in some cases, the non-establishment candidate, the non-establishment character here.

And compared to Bush, the establishment wanted nothing to do with McCain. And that made him incredibly popular among the average person. And it got him a lot of small donations too, which made him think more seriously about campaign finance reform. This is just about the big donors giving tens of millions of dollars to the party, is the little guy pushed out of this game at this point? McCain thought that if we could somehow limit the power of these big donors, that would give more power to the individual. And then, of course, critics will say now, well, that really backfired with Citizens United. Today, the Supreme Court issued a major and long-awaited ruling on campaign finance. By a 5-4 vote, the way he crossed the aisle to work with a Democrat on major legislation,

this is really the first sign that nationally, that people who, not just those who follow politics on a daily basis, but generally, we're really seeing the maverick character of McCain play out. For better or worse, John McCain takes this whole Maverick thing to the max. I'm Sean Ramos for him. That's next on Today Explained. Google Play has audiobooks. I went just to make sure. And right now you can get $10 off your first audiobook purchase over $10 when you go to g.co slash play slash explained and log in with your Google account. One of the books you can get is New York 2140. New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a bold and brilliant version of New York City in the next century. As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal,

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and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests. Another thing you can listen to is the award-winning podcast Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. It's where you can find in-depth interviews with big-deal people from tech and media Thank you. Wednesday with frequent bonus episodes on Saturdays. You can find it wherever you find your podcasts. Steve, the 2000 Republican race is interesting because you've got this war hero running against the son of a former president who spent the Vietnam War kicking back in Texas. How does that play out for McCain? Well, it's funny.

Initially, it goes quite well, and shockingly enough to the Bush campaign, where McCain does incredibly well with New Hampshire voters who tend to go for a wild card, a person who speaks the truth, or at least as, you know, not to be sarcastic, but at least as close as politicians can get every once in a while. And that was part of the whole McCain straight talk express. South Carolina is where a lot of this turned. There were phone calls that went out to South Carolina Republican voters that indicated that had Senator McCain perhaps had a child out of wedlock, that he had a child that was not white. And he does. It's an adopted daughter. But this was spun in such a way that is John McCain really the type of candidate you want to vote for?

And there were racial overtones to it. My dear friends, my dear friends, there is no place in American politics for this kind of filth and trash. I renounce it. He took that as a personal attack on his family, but it worked. It worked for President, eventually President Bush, who won the South Carolina primary, and the McCain campaign was never the same after that. And how does that change the relationship Senator McCain has with President Bush for the following eight years? It's an interesting mix, but the turning point seems to be the Iraq war.

We're going to win this victory. Tragically, we will lose American lives, but it will be brief. We're going to find out massive evidence of weapons of mass destruction. He thought this was a way for the U.S. to show its strength and actually make positive change. But it also, as we saw, involved more than a decade of U.S. fighting there. And that was something that was a contradiction to a lot of people who had started to become fans of the senator during his presidential run. President Bush said today that he was disgusted by pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers. Not only is it a long-lasting conflict, much like Vietnam, but here we find out that the U.S. is using these enhanced interrogation techniques, aka torture, that John McCain himself suffered

as a POW in Vietnam. The report refutes in detail the contention that Abu Ghraib was the work of what then Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz called a few bad apples. The Senate Armed Services Committee today released a paper trail leading back to the Pentagon. How does he deal with that? He was saying we shouldn't be doing this. Now, he was saying it for a couple of big reasons. One is he thought it was morally reprehensible for the U.S. to take part in that. But then he also had said as well that when you torture, having been someone himself who'd gone through that, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get the information. It may just mean the person who's being tortured just wants you to stop torturing them. And they may say something that's not accurate. This idea of supporting a war that is this prolonged engagement that divides the country, that characterizes the United States as supporters

of torture. It seems to be the first of many quintessential contradictions we see in John McCain's political career, followed by his introduction of Sarah Palin to the world and his stances on immigration and ultimately his reversal on Obamacare. I'm wondering if we could go through those three, starting with Sarah Palin. This is a very odd moment in U.S. history, and I think this is one of those that is one of the great contradictions of John McCain's career. Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. It's got to be all about job creation to shoring up our

economy and putting it back on the right track. Senator McCain had wanted Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman to be his running mate. And I think if people can take their jaws off the floor at this point. So a Republican presidential nominee wanted a Democratic senator to be his running mate because he thought that he and Lieberman were on a better track, that they understood better. The way party politics works, that didn't happen. So then the campaign itself started looking at, OK, what can we do to have an impact here? We're running against the Democratic nominee in Barack Obama, who is capturing imaginations everywhere, running a very strong campaign. We're still fighting in Iraq. The economy is in terrible shape. And so it was almost as though the campaign needed a wild card. And the thought was, well,

let's get someone who is going to shake things up a bit. And McCain went along with choosing Sarah Palin. What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world? I've read most of them, again, with a great appreciation for the press, for the media. What ones specifically? I'm curious. All of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years. Any name of them? I have a vast variety of sources. That gave a lot of people pause to say, well, what if a person in his 70s at that point,

what if something were to happen to him? And this was his successor. And that followed him strongly for a long time. And that was not one of his favorite things to revisit. And then a lot of people blame that for Donald Trump's emergence as a presidential candidate, eventual president. How so? In the sense that Sarah Palin was someone that we didn't know much about. Did she care about public policy?

Did she know about a lot of the issues that were going on in the U.S. and in the world? Did she have the depth? And when you consider what McCain had done, really absorbing himself in so many issues, whether it's from immigration to veteran services to campaign finance reform, why would he pick someone who didn't really have great knowledge of those topics as he did? Political expediency is what a lot of people will probably go down in history saying about that. And would some accuse him of the same regarding immigration, especially out there in Arizona? Well, I think it's a great contradiction because he thought that the people who are already in the country come into the country for trying to do anything other than advance their own lives and do better, not commit crimes. Then his feeling was these people should have a chance at some sense, whether it's part of a guest worker program, whether it's even a path to citizenship. He was very consistent on that. There's 11 million people who are in our country living in the shadows.

I don't believe that anyone has come up with a plan if he wanted to deport them, not to mention the effect it would have on our economy. A majority of them have been in our country for over 10 years. The one inconsistency that people have pointed out is around 2010, he was running for re-election to the Senate, and he had a challenge from the right, a former congressman here from Arizona, who was challenging McCain, saying he was not tough enough. He wanted amnesty for undocumented immigrants. So McCain filmed a commercial, which became kind of infamous here in Arizona, with a former sheriff here in Arizona. Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder.

We're outmanned. Of all the illegals in America, more than half come through Arizona. Have we got the right plan? Plan's perfect. You bring troops, state, county, and local law enforcement together. And complete the dang fins. It'll work this time. Senator, you're one of us. I'm John McCain and I approve this message. McCain got a lot of criticism for that. So wait a second, you wanted comprehensive reform, but now you're not even talking about path to citizenship, guest worker program,

you're just talking about the wall. And then once he won that primary, he moved back a little bit closer to the center where people were used to him being. And I guess the last great instance in this long story political career of John McCain sort of moving to the middle from the right and then maybe back to the right was his reversal on Obamacare. Senator John McCain, just days removed from his cancer diagnosis, stunning the chamber, turning the thumbs down on the repeal bill. It happened just feet away from Republican leader Mitch McConnell, prompting an audible gasp in the chamber. We had the famous thumbs down,

of course, after Vice President Mike Pence was sent to personally lobby Senator McCain because he was the key vote. The Republicans needed his vote in order to do the repeal and I guess eventually replace, but this was a case of repealing the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. And it seemed based on the reaction that people saw on the floor when Senator McCain gave his thumbs down, there was a surprise that Senator McCain had actually gone that direction. His key was this shouldn't be rushed through. This is enormous legislation. We're not just going to do it with this kind of vote. We need to get back to regular order. That phrase kept popping up.

Right. But then just a few months later, he votes for this huge tax cut that includes a repeal of the individual mandate, right? It seems that way as well. Yeah. I mean, I feel like reading about him all weekend, this feels like something that might be a lasting part of his legacy as much as being this, you know, prisoner of war who came back and ran for senator and ran for president. The fact that he was vociferously against Obamacare, then comes in to vote to save it, then cast this vote that dismantles a huge part of it. I mean, it just feels like he didn't have this firm ideology that you would expect from a senator of his stature. Yeah, Sean, ideology is an interesting

thing because I think a lot of voters, a lot of the general public, not everybody, but a lot will say, well, why does that person always have to follow this ideology? Why does this Republican or this Democrat always vote with their party? Why aren't they stepping out more? Of course, we're hearing a lot about that with President Trump. People may, in his party, may mildly criticize him. So one of the frustrations, I think, for a lot of people, but also, frankly, one could also say a compliment to Senator McCain, is that he was someone who was not always predictable. And that frustrated people a lot because there would be Democrats who'd say, oh, okay, Senator McCain voted in favor of this or opposed to that.

That's amazing. No other Republican would do that. And then a few days later or a few months later in the case of this Affordable Care Act situation, he would disappoint them. So I actually think that's one of the things that makes him so unique because he actually is one of the few politicians who would occasionally surprise us. He was someone who was not shy about talking to the media and expressing himself, enjoyed being in the spotlight. There's no question about that. Senator, can we count on you to maybe run again in 2004? I think that would electrify the country, and we would certainly enjoy the process of it.

Somebody said that if you're a United States senator, unless you're under indictment or detoxification, you automatically consider yourself a candidate for president of the United States. And my old friend Mo Udall said that presidential ambition is a disease which can only be cured by embalming fluid. So I think both of those are fairly true adages. He's also someone who has been criticized in the past for having a temper. You know, you're going to have to shut up or I'm going to have you arrested. Get out of here, you low-life scum. He was willing to let people in to some extent. He allowed us to see him as a human, which very, very rarely do we see politicians do that. It's being reported that John McCain basically planned his own funeral,

and he wants both George W. Bush and Barack Obama there, both of these men who bested him for our highest office. Why do you think that is? I think unlike our current office holder, who Senator McCain is trying to make sure is not at his funeral, regardless of losing to President Bush, losing to President Obama, he thought once they got in office, even if he disagreed with him about certain issues, even if the general public may have, that he saw them as fine representatives of the White House. I wonder, as someone who's interviewed him yourself a few times, as someone who's followed him for a long time, how do you think John McCain in his last few months and weeks

was looking back on what was inarguably this epic political journey that was coming to an end? It seemed like he had a great perspective that many, if any of us lived that long, would want to have as well, which is that he actually called himself very lucky. And if he actually means that, it says a lot about how he viewed his own life, that he, yes, five and a half years in POW camp, but he did survive, went on to become the presidential nominee of his party, had a big family, very successful in that sense. So I think the life John McCain lived is one of the most fascinating public lives we've ever seen in this country.

In fact, Sean, late in 2017, when Senator McCain was accepting an honor in Philadelphia, he actually is quoted as saying, I'm the luckiest guy on earth. I have served America's cause, the cause of our security and the security of our friends, the cause of freedom and equal justice all my adult life. I haven't always served it well. I haven't even always appreciated what I was serving. But among the few compensations of old age is the acuity of hindsight. I see now that I was part of something important

that drew me along in its wake, even when I was diverted by other interests. I was, knowingly or not, along for the ride as America made the future better than the past. And I've enjoyed it, every single day of it. The good ones and the not-so-good ones.

I've been inspired by the service of better patriots than me. Thank you again for this honor. I'll treasure it. Thank you. The show is over, but your chance to get $10 off your first audiobook purchase at Google Play that's over $10 is not. Just go to g.co slash play slash explained and check out over a thousand audiobook titles that you can choose from.