by CASEY LABRACK

For most politicians, the upside of being down in the polls is the ability to say and do what they want.

* Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., having failed to garner enough support as we approach the primaries, now only has to try and please Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
* Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, is free to promise to create a cabinet-level “Department of Peace,” knowing that he’ll never have to figure out how that would actually work.
* President Bush, who knows that at this point he’ll be reviled for anything he does, figured he might as well commute Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s jail sentence. He called our bluff: we all put up with it, and Bush must have felt like he had finally become king, accountable to no one.

Bush really has become the dictator of a people so jaded as to accept authoritarianism for the status quo. But, with “Scooter” Libby, Bush was playing a dangerous game. There was a crucial week in July when I really felt that if neither Libby nor Paris Hilton served jail time, we would all rise up and overthrow this government.

The point is that, given what should be liberating unpopularity, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has chosen now, of all times, to walk the Republican straight and narrow. A force to be reckoned with in the 2000 presidential primaries, McCain was known as a maverick, especially in his clashes with evangelicals like the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. So, in light of the principle explained above, McCain the underdog should have been like a renegade folk hero. Instead, he first started presidential-run rumors in 2006 by giving the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University. The straight-talk express is on rails.

Reuters Photographer / Reuters
Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., exhibits the kind of vigor and charisma his campaign has become known for.

McCain has also been outspoken in his opposition to troop withdrawal. Here McCain is both a loyalist and a maverick, sticking to party line and defying the wishes of a majority of Americans. McCain has criticized the execution of the war in Iraq in a number of ways, but ultimately supports the mission there, whatever that is lately. How ironic, that a man who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam fails to see the connection between the two wars: both lacking a clear mission, an exit strategy, international support, and domestic support when vital U.S. interests are at stake.

McCain’s opposition to withdrawal is all the more ironic given a speech he made in 1994 advocating withdrawal from Haiti. Speaking in favor of a motion to extract Marines from the trouble on the ground in Haiti, McCain said “(T)he resolution offers support for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces as soon as possible. In my view that does not mean as soon as order is restored to Haiti. It does not mean as soon as democracy is flourishing in Haiti. It does not mean as soon as we have established a viable nation in Haiti. As soon as possible means as soon we can get out of Haiti without losing any American lives.”

Wow, that Haiti must have been a real quagmire. It reminds me of this clip of Dick Cheney, also from 1994, where Cheney argues against overthrowing Saddam Hussein: “Once you…took down Saddam’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily start to see pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like the claim…in the north you’ve got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you’ve threatened the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire.”

Cheney and McCain’s eerily prescient statements underscore how strange it is to see these old, hypocritical white men actually making sense. Evidently, policy decisions show the same kind of decay with old age as driving ability. I think McCain, who would be the oldest president ever as of inauguration, ought to just take up shuffleboard.