It is becoming increasingly apparent that John McCain’s biggest opponent is himself. The deck was not exactly stacked in his favor from the beginning but he has not been doing much to help himself.
Regardless of who McCain was running against, he would appear old. He is about to turn 72. If elected, he will be the oldest incoming President in our history. We have all heard the jokes about McCain’s age and he has taken to telling these jokes himself in preemptive attempt of mitigating concerns and silencing whispers. However, there is a reason we hear the jokes and whispers – he is old and for some voters this is a concern.
We are accustomed to seeing our President’s annual physical make the nightly news and now we are facing the prospect of a President who is advanced in age and who has suffered numerous injuries in addition to bouts of skin cancer. It is striking to see how eight years in office can physically age a President, ala Bill Clinton, and one can only imagine the withering effects on a man of McCain’s age. So, while his actual opponent goes over seas and is filmed shooting baskets with the troops McCain looks like a man in need of a good game of shuffleboard.
The problem is not really his age though. I don’t think these kinds of worries would be sufficient to eliminate him as viable candidate in most people’s minds. Honestly, there is really nothing he can do, directly. Time and tide wait for no man. However, he could try to appear a little less…well, old.
By this I am not referring to the thinning hair or a shift into the ‘lean and slipper’d pantaloon.‘ McCain’s portrayal of himself often times seems anachronistic.
He peppers many of his speeches with the phrase ‘my friends.’ This was also a favorite phrase of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt who used it liberally in his inaugural address. Public speaking is not McCain’s forte and he has come to use the phrase as somewhat of a crutch, but it so often seems a stilted and forced reminder of man not entirely at ease with the medium of television.
So the guy is not good at giving speeches or appearing on television. What does that mean? Admittedly, this is superficial but we do live in a culture driven by sound bytes. For example, he is also on record saying, “I don’t e-mail. I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail.” That comment has generated guffaws and rebuffs everywhere from Fox to Wired Magazine. In that same article, he talks about learning how to get online by himself.
Alright, let’s stop for a moment. We are now considering a leader who is uncomfortable communicating through television, refuses to communicate via email and is, for all practical consideration, computer illiterate. Moreover, he does nothing to try and cover the later two. I can’t help but wonder how relevant he is and if he understands that he is out of step with the way much of our world operates. We live in a world of information and he publicly shuns the technology of that age preferring, perhaps, the Pony Express. How can one go about leading a nation that one does not understand?
How big of a deal is it that he does not understand technology? Although I find it absurd, it is not necessarily a deal-breaker. How disturbing is that he feels comfortable talking about being flummoxed by things such as getting online? Pretty disturbing. This, more than his actual ignorance, is troublesome in that it reflects he does not understand the value of public perception. This is more indicative of his being out of step than his confusion with email. What else does he not understand?
Apparently McCain also doesn’t understand economics. What makes me think this? Mostly because McCain said he, “doesn’t really understand economics.” He is actually on public record saying this twice. I am not an expert on economics myself but I do understand that if I were running for President in a year in which the economy is on everyone’s mind, I would not go around telling people I did not understand economics. Furthermore, I would find people who are experts on the economy and surround myself with them. McCain tried this with long-time crony Phil Gramm. This is the same Phil Gramm who called the American public a “nation of whiners,” for the way we are upset over our troubled economy. Granted, he has since distanced himself slightly from Gramm, but if he doesn’t understand economics and also cannot be trusted picking economic advisers, what choice do we have but to think of him at odds with running the economy of a nation?
In addition to that, McCain is once again out of step with his disclosure of his lack of understanding of the economy. His choice in an adviser is equally at a loss when he paints those suffering through economic hard times as victims of their own mental state, deluded into thinking the economy is not doing well.
In a race in which McCain has the obvious physical disadvantage of age working against him in many ways, he needs to do more to appear to be in in step with America and the technologies that run our businesses and facilitate much of the communication in our lives. He should be doing more to lessen the perception of his being a somewhat clueless old man. It’s not really the years that are proving a detriment to him – it’s the way he has succumbed to those years and allowed himself to be enveloped in a fog of yesterdays past.
I am not sure what his solution is and I would not be prone to helping him find one if I did, but I can tell you that his problem is that he looks and sounds a lot older than he really is, which is a somewhat surprising feat nevertheless.
