The First Time McCain and Obama clashed


The Senate of the United States is a somewhat rarefied place. For those who would look, many of the tales of American history are bound up in it, but in the procedural language of process and manoeuvre that few really understand.

Yet people can understand the civil war through three essentially political processes in that body, sometimes a little more than by emotionally contemplating the horror of slavery. One is the 1820 compromise; another, the 1850 compromise; and a third, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas's great achievement that held off war.

In addition to that, anyone who wants to understand the gilded age should go to the tale of Speaker Reed, which, whilst not concerned with the Senate, illuminates Congress as a whole. The identical resolution which sought to draw Andrew Johnson into constitutional amendments (where presidents technically should not go) in 1865, was also the first indicator of the radical republicans' desire to impeach him, though I won't explain how it worked here. If you know, you'll understand how important the switch to concurrent resolution was. If you don't, it won't matter.

In the twentieth century, Wilson lost the world through an approach to congress and the senate that was rightly criticised in the classic, heartbreaking When The Cheering Stopped. Johnson, as majority Leader, may have helped save it by stopping the Bricker amendments, which would have killed NATO, in the Senate dead.

Strategic process can disappear up itself, into the legal fundament. Sometimes, though, it illuminates character.

That's what happened in 2005, when the young Senator Obama and John McCain, determined to prove radical credentials, first clashed. They sought initially to come together on campaign finance reform. McCain, who thought that he owned the issue, saw a potential apprentice, or maybe sensed a stooge, in Obama; Obama seems to have sensed a chance to distinguish himself as nonpartisan and new.

Their partnership lasted a week, and ended in recrimination, caused by McCain's temper. The wider congressional leaderships took the issue away from both of them, but what the spat revealed is in itself interesting. McCain got angry, and threw out searing press releases. Obama hit back without being personal, and built up capital by associating himself with a final vote.

In the delicate world of the Senate's Bull hierarchy, Obama also did not back down but did not alienate his colleagues with his lack of deference. The man has a subtlety about him which is sinuous. In office, should he be elected, he might attract all sorts of disappointment and delusion, but equally, he may get things done.

Obama seems very directed too. I note that Russ Feingold, in the report to which I have linked above, praised him at a time when Feingold was being touted as the 'Hillary killer' by the likes of the New Republic. Obama was beneath their radar, yet came through. This is a directed man who thinks in the long term, and who can hide in plain sight. Liberals liked him whilst he appealed to centrists; centrists seemed to forget his liberalism.

McCain, of course, revealed himself girded and determined in the Senate battles. He alienates roughly, but carries on, and is direct. That is presumably what carried him through his initially disastrous campaign. I wonder how much of his contempt for Obama, though, which is palpable, is also fear that Obama is a proper Senate-class dreadnought of the sort every Senator thinks they are but that haven't much appeared in American history.

Most American politicians, indeed most politicians, are second or third rate--that's how one gets elected as an alternate choice, and has been since people invented voting. I do think, however, that Republicans underestimate the man who outmanoeuvred McCain in the Senate, and then Clinton in the primaries, at their peril.

Kerry and Gore were caricatures of candidates; if you are Republican, or you think that Obama just doesn't get what he has to do to take the presidency, whilst clearly being capable of fairly ruthless grudges, think on. Look at that first battle. This is real and somewhat Teflon-coated steel you face, and he won't be driven off course.