McCain’s Meaning It won’t be over until it’s over — just as with RFK in 1968. by RICHARD COHEN The way John McCain tells it, his campaign ended the day he won the New Hampshire primary — “and a crusade began.” It is about “duty,” “sacrifice,” “honor,” and, he added, something inexplicable as well — something “it’s even hard for me to define.” I’m not sure what it is either, but I have just read a book about something similar: Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. The book is Ronald Steel’s engrossing In Love With Night and while it suggests several analogies, the fact remains that history is never so cooperative as to exactly repeat itself. Yet both men engaged in what could be called crusades, running not only for president but against the orthodoxies — and the leadership — of their own parties. They both touched something in the body politic. Just as Kennedy, who had both idolized and worked for the demagogic Joseph McCarthy, emerged as a liberal idol, so has McCain, a credentialed conservative, been labeled either a liberal or a dangerously unorthodox Republican. In Kennedy’s case, it did not seem to matter to liberals that he was late to the cause of civil rights, late even to the anti-Vietnam War cause, indifferent to civil liberties and often as ruthless and cold as his enemies characterized him. Many liberals admired him nonetheless. With McCain something similar has happened. He is the personification of Western conservatism — anti-gun control, anti-abortion, anti-federal aid for the arts and, to my mind, somewhat reckless in his foreign policy pronouncements. Yet The New York Times, whose editorial position can fairly be called liberal, has endorsed McCain — and independents and Democrats, along with conservatives, have flocked to his campaign. What do the two men have in common? Steel’s book offers some clues. Kennedy was a rigid moralist. So is McCain. Kennedy emerged as an anti-establishment candidate, an unlikely role for a millionaire whose brother had been president. In challenging Lyndon Johnson for the nomination, Kennedy took on much of the Democratic Party — and pushed Hubert Humphrey, the vice president and ultimate nominee, to the right. It was Humphrey, not Kennedy, who was the liberal. And actually, it’s George W. Bush and not McCain who is the more moderate Republican, the champion of compassionate conservatism who has, both in rhetoric and in practice, reached out to minorities. Yet because McCain has called for the abolition of soft money and questioned supply-side economic dogma by not advocating the steepest tax cut possible, he represents a dire threat to GOP orthodoxy. He nailed a thesis to the Republican cathedral — and emerged, as Kennedy had, as an anti-establishment crusader. Like Kennedy, McCain suggests his positions are not fixed. He was imprisoned by the Vietnamese, yet he championed a rapprochement with Vietnam. He fought in the war, yet he befriended the dying anti-war activist, David Ifshin. He refuses to emphasize social issues like abortion and so his zealousness is questioned — and then he had the effrontery, if not the bad political judgment, to attack leaders of the Christian right. Finally, of course, both men were the beneficiaries of kindly press coverage. In McCain’s case, it’s held against him by the GOP establishment. Kennedy, too, was accessible to the press because, as with McCain, he did not fear getting off-message. His message was plain: an end to LBJ’s presidency and his Vietnam policy. McCain’s is also plain: an end to business as usual in Washington, especially the reliance on soft money. The parallels, of course, are not exact. There is no war, and the GOP is not the party in power. But the excitement of the McCain campaign, the candidate’s capacity for polarization, his threat to the GOP leadership, and, most of all, his ability to put himself outside the conventional categories of conservative or liberal, is reminiscent of Robert F. Kennedy. In McCain’s case, no one knows what happens next, but history offers a strong clue: For the GOP nothing will ever be the same. (Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.)