John McCain is regularly and justifiably presented as a national hero for the years he spent in a POW camp after having being shot down as a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War. Much of that appeal, of course, taps into the mythical American image of the maverick cowboy who rides into town, accepts the sheriff's badge, chases the bad guys out of town, and rides into the sunset, preferably with the beautiful woman.
This archetypal American hero re-emerges in the movie classic Top Gun as the fighter pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell a.k.a. Tom Cruise. What young boy hasn't, at some point, pretend to be a cowboy or a fighter pilot. It's hard not to think here of our man George W. who, early on in his presidency, tried to convince us that he was a bonafide cowboy while clearing brush on his Crawford ranch or that he was a manly fighter pilot landing on an aircraft carrier to declare "Mission accomplished" in Iraq.
Well, if W. was playing fighter pilot, McCain was really a fighter pilot and in the past few weeks, America has gotten a foretaste of what it would be like to have a "maverick" in charge. Let me tell you, it involves lots of lurches and tonnes of bombs. Who can forget what a bombshell the selection of Sarah Palin was? Or the surprise suspension of the Republican Convention as Hurricane Gustav approached and its resumption in the most virulently partisan tone days later. Or how McCain one day was convinced the fundamentals of the economy were sound and the next was calling for the firing of the SEC chairman.
And now this, with 40 days to the election, McCain claims he is suspending his campaign (as though such a thing were even possible) and calls for the cancellation of the Presidential Debate 18 months in the making. Today at the Clinton Global Initiative, McCain quipped, “I'm an old Navy pilot, and I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck." Again, both his allies and adversaries were caught entirely off-guard. General Wesley Clark, a few months back, got a lot of flack for suggesting that being a fighter pilot involves a different set of decision-making attributes than say an admiral. Trust me, the Navy does not hand over its nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to its fighter pilots for safe-keeping. You make a different set of decisions with 5,000 men under your care than when you're flying solo.
What we have seen in McCain's process is an extremely unpredictable leadership style that leaves the rest of the team trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Guess what? Great attributes in a dogfight, unsettling as a world leader (just ask the North Koreans). In fact, the moral of Top Gun is that the maverick endangers his team. I sure as hell don't want to wake up one morning to find out we went to war with Russia while I was sleeping.
America couldn't have a clearer set of options in selecting its next president. NPR has a piece on Obama's temperament and another on McCain's. I, for one, need to rent Top Gun again to get away from all the excitement.
Update I: To summarize, a fighter pilot is a tactician, an admiral is a strategist. Obama is a strategic thinker, McCain is all tactics all the time.
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