An aggressive McCain may confirm voter doubt

With the presidential race sliding away from him, John McCain needed something big to happen in Friday night’s foreign-policy debate.

He didn’t get it.

McCain did fine, as did Barack Obama. In fact, I personally thought McCain might have gotten the better of the argument. The early polls disagreed, however, suggesting that voters were more impressed with Obama’s performance on a topic that should have been McCain territory.

So what happened? Historically, debates have an effect only if something happens to crystallize some pre-existing doubt about a candidate. When Mike Dukakis was asked how he would react if his wife was raped, his dispassionate response confirmed the sense that the Democrat didn’t have the fire that Americans sought in a president. Likewise, George Bush’s repeated glances at his watch in a 1992 debate confirmed voter suspicion that he wasn’t engaged.

This time, the combative, dismissive approach that McCain adopted toward Obama may have confirmed fears of many voters that as commander in chief, McCain might choose confrontation in a crisis not because that’s what the situation required, but because that is his nature.

That concern was also the subtext of a question posed to McCain in an interview on “60 Minutes” earlier this month. McCain was asked whether as president he would make it policy to “engage in preemptive war against a country that might pose a threat to the United States —- a country that hasn’t attacked us.”

“If it’s a provable direct threat,” the senator responded. “Suppose that the Iranians had nuclear weapons. And you had a whole lot of other information about Iranian intentions and you could make the case to the American people and to the world, I think it’s obvious that we would have to prevent what we are absolutely certain is a direct threat to the lives of the American people.”

Most Americans, including Obama, would agree with McCain. If we are “absolutely certain” that we face “a direct threat to the lives of the American people,” no U.S. president would hesitate to respond militarily.

The problem is, McCain has already demonstrated that his actual threshhold for war is quite a bit lower than he described to CBS.

In 2002 and early 2003, the American people faced the very dilemma posed to McCain on “60 Minutes.” President Bush and his allies were arguing that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was real and direct, and that if we did not act “the smoking gun might come in the form of a mushroom cloud over an American city.”

In those circumstances, McCain made it clear that he considered Iraq a threat that must be addressed pre-emptively, calling Saddam “a clear and present danger” that could not be ignored.

“In an age of weapons of mass destruction and global terrorists bent on acquiring those weapons, the costs of inaction could well be catastrophic,” McCain warned in a speech on the Senate floor.

However, even at the time Iraq did not pose “a provable direct threat” to the United States, the threshhold for action now cited by McCain. And despite some claims to the contrary, we were far from “absolutely certain” that Saddam posed a direct threat to American lives.

Nonetheless, McCain was avid for military action, to the point that he libeled fellow Americans who disagreed with his stance. He was so eager for war that he claimed Saddam “is using opponents of the war in America to advance his own ends, sowing division within our own ranks.”

McCain’s response to the “60 Minutes” question was also revealing for another reason. He took a question about a theoretical threat and immediately gave it an address, Iran. Both McCain and Obama have said that the military option must remain on the table when dealing with Iran, but McCain’s history suggests he may be too eager to use that option.

With his demeanor Friday night, McCain may have taken a nebulous, nagging doubt about his candidacy and crystallized it into something hard and real.

> Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.