John McCain's death on August 25th is intriguing not only for its "who", but for it's "when". Not only for McCain's history as a veteran of one of America's darkest wars but for the very real, very present political implications his death will have almost immediately in the United States Senate.
Such is the complex web of a politician's life.
I don't know if I'm the correct person to be saying anything of consequence about John McCain. I was not quite 10 years old when he last reached his zenith in the public eye by acquiring the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. All that I can recall is that he was not overly popular with Republicans and Democrats alike, at least not compared with his counterpart in that election.
That unpopularity was, as I've come to learn, a hallmark of John McCain's career. He did not go out of his way to appease but stood firm in his beliefs. That is something I cannot help but admire.
John McCain's journey began as a navy pilot during the Vietnam War, during which his plane was shot down and he was taken captive and tortured for nearly six years. Focusing on the intricacies of national history that had brought the United States to that point, McCain would eventually run for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1982, serving two terms before succeeding conservative icon Barry Goldwater in the Senate in 1986.
In a Senate career that subsequently spanned more than 30 years, McCain was never afraid to do things his own way, even when that meant deviating from his party. His bipartisan efforts to reform immigration and campaign finance are lasting vestiges to the kind of person he was.
Even in the last years of his life, McCain could not be silenced, not when faced with the rise of Trumpism and the jumbled mess that such hardened battle cries have usually offered forth. He was a key vote in the defeat of an Obamacare replacement and remained critical of the President up until the end and after.
President Trump did not attend Sen. McCain's funeral at the National Cathedral on September 1st, per McCain's own wishes.
Politically his importance expands beyond death too. Given the Republican Party's already razor-thin majority in the upper chamber (51-49 including McCain's seat), who fills that seat is vitally important, even in the event that Republicans do not retain the Senate beyond this fall. That's because there is still a number of decisions to be made between now and November, not the least of which is confirmation on President Trump's latest Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
Yet, even in the face of those big-picture questions, McCain's death feels like the loss of something more.
I don't know to what degree I personally would have agreed with McCain's politics. If his "maverick" moniker were to prove true, we would probably have seen eye to eye sometimes, but not always. Yet, the decorum that Sen. McCain not only spoke of but practiced in everyday life is one that burned a gentle light against the harsh night that has destroyed civility in modern American politics.
Nowhere can that be seen better than in the attendees of McCain's funeral: Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, Henry Kissinger, Warren Beatty, Russ Feingold, Michael Bloomberg, and perhaps most telling of all both Barack Obama and George W. Bush. The two men who had denied Sen. McCain the presidency (Bush defeating his fellow Republican in the 2000 presidential primaries) had nothing but kind words for a man who was not lacking in compassion.
Friends and enemies, in the most political sense, both gathered to pay tribute to what McCain's daughter deemed "the death of American greatness".
Dramatic, surely, but given this world we live in, I don't believe it overly so.
