McCain's Tragic Flaw

If I remember correctly, what I learned about drama in high school English and literature classes (not much by the way), there is a concept known as the "tragic hero." Tragic heroes differ from regular heroes in that the tragic one's contain within their characters' some tragic flaw that ends up bring on their own ruin. In the best classical literature and drama the flaw is directly linked to the thing that makes them heroic in the first place. I'll leave it to you guys to come up with examples from literature. I'm sure LTG and Seventh Sister can think of more and better examples than I can.

But I suggest that McCain is such tragic hero and thus poorly suited to be our President despite his obvious hero status. McCain is hero because of his famous captivity in a North Vietnamese POW camp where he was tortured and abused. He parlayed his heroism here into prominent political career, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate.

But some of his deepest character flaws follow from this heroic event. First, his political campaigns are riddled with hypocrisy. To be be the pure hero, McCain must appear to be humble about it. He must appear to deny his own heroism. However, since he's no great intellect (he graduated 894th out of 899 cadets at the Naval Academy in 1958), his main qualification for political office originates with a heroism he must at least appear to downplay. The result is that McCain and his surrogates frequently say that he doesn't like to talk about his captivity all the while making that captivity the centerpiece of his own biography and many of his public statements.

Second, in an interview on February 18 of this year, while Democrats were too busy going after each other to notice, McCain said this: '"I hate the gooks," McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. "I will hate them as long as I live."'

Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying we should think McCain isn't a hero because he's a hypocrite and a racist. Nor am I saying that his racist attitude towards Vietnamese people isn't understandable (if extremely unfortunate) under the circumstances. If McCain were a relative of mine, I'd shake my head in private at these flaws and recognize them as part of his human response to an experience no man should endure.

I am saying that these traits are undesirable in a President. Vietnam is a particularly important country. As China rises in importance, our relationships with countries that border China will become critical. Vietnam is also a rising and rapidly changing economy in it's own right. Saying you hate them all is hardly a reasonable basis for diplomatic dialogue. What's more, such statements would be seen by the World, and our closest allies in particular, as a continuation of the hate based foreign policy of the Bush-Cheney administration.