National Perspective : Forbes, McCain Writings Show How They Want to Measure Up in 2000

How do Americans judge the men and women who would be president? Do we measure them mostly by the views they express or the personal qualities they exhibit?

These are old questions raised again by new books from two of the top-tier GOP presidential contenders. In “A New Birth of Freedom,” Steve Forbes brushes over autobiography and stacks up ideas on taxes, Social Security, the environment and health care like a mason who’s paid by the brick. By contrast, in “Faith of My Fathers,” Sen. John McCain of Arizona offers a compelling life story (and family biography) that is not only free of policy proposals but ends before he even began his political career.

Those editorial choices illuminate the political situations of the two men as they chase GOP front-runner George W. Bush (who’s planning his own book). Forbes, the publisher of a business magazine that bears his family name, has assembled an agenda that champions virtually every cause conservatives prize. But he still faces widespread doubts that he has the experience and personal grit the Oval Office demands. As McCain’s book harrowingly demonstrates, he has passed personal tests more severe than any of this year’s other candidates have faced. But he’s made only limited progress in defining an agenda that excites GOP voters.

As a candidate, Forbes suffers from what might be called the Daniel Webster dilemma. In the first half of the 19th century, Webster was the brightest light in the Senate, a brilliant orator and high-priced lawyer. But when Webster ran (unsuccessfully) for the Whig party’s presidential nomination in 1840, he felt compelled to tell voters he was “a plain man, a farmer” whose “elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin.” And though he grew up in more comfortable surroundings himself, Webster (anticipating Al Gore by some 160 years) reassured his audiences that “many a time I have tilled my father’s field.”

Even Daniel Webster, in other words, had to acknowledge the voters’ preference for leaders who could point to dirt under their fingernails--or at least could show they had climbed over some obstacles on their way to the top. To find obstacles in the family history for his book, Forbes has to reach back to his grandfather, who founded Forbes magazine and struggled to keep it afloat through the Depression. The candidate’s own story has been pretty much prep schools, Faberge eggs and editorial meetings, and, wisely, he doesn’t dwell on it. Instead he lathers on the ideas.

The result is an agenda that none of his rivals can match for breadth: the flat tax, permitting some private investment of Social Security funds, requiring Congress to approve all federal regulations (instead of letting agencies set the rules), rapid deployment of an anti-missile defense, massive use of medical savings accounts, a step-by-step drive to ban abortion, a supply-side prescription for Russia and a hard line for China. And it all comes wrapped in a provocative grand theory about how the decentralizing tendency of the Information Age will inevitably lead to smaller government.

Even on its own terms--as a policy bible, not a page-turner--the book disappoints in places. Forbes has little to say about Medicare; he’s vague on the federal role in education reform; he offers virtually no ideas for reviving the cities. Nor does he identify many specific government programs he would guillotine. But, overall, the book solidifies Forbes’ standing as one of the GOP’s last true revolutionaries. If Republican voters want to return to the barricades of 1995--when the New Deal and Great Society briefly appeared ripe for the reversing--Forbes makes a strong case that he is their man.

But it’s not clear that most Republicans want to embark on such a crusade. Nor is it yet apparent that Forbes can cross the threshold of personal credibility with enough voters to receive a full hearing for his agenda.

McCain’s situation may be the reverse: not much agenda so far, but lots of personal credibility. His book, written with longtime aide Mark Salter, is not only moving but wise. The son and grandson of four-star Navy admirals (whose own careers he traces), McCain was, in his own words, an “arrogant, undisciplined and insolent midshipman” who graduated near the bottom at the Naval Academy. As a young pilot, he wasn’t much less raucous until he married, focused on his military career and set off to Vietnam as a Navy bomber. There, in October 1967, on his 23rd bombing run, he was shot down over Hanoi--and began 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.

What follows is brutal torture, privation and isolation. In captivity, McCain demonstrated a personal fortitude that answers any questions about his capacity to handle the pressure of the White House. Yet the book’s most powerful moment is his realization, in the darkest hours, that what allowed him to survive was not so much his individual strength as his communal allegiances--his religious conviction, love of country and faith in his fellow prisoners. In a genuinely profound section, he writes of learning that “Glory . . . is not a decoration for valor. . . . [It] belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return.” It’s the rare passage in a political book parents will want to read aloud to their children.

McCain is hardly a marble hero; his career is pockmarked with personal and political mistakes. (One of the book’s most attractive aspects is his insistence on bronzing his feet of clay.) But here he displays a broadness of spirit that reflects America at its best. He combines a sense of duty and honor that is refreshingly old-fashioned with a tolerance for human imperfection and difference that is utterly modern. He even manages to find words of reconciliation for anti-war protesters whose visits to Hanoi inevitably “made our life in prison more miserable than it already was.”

McCain hasn’t yet articulated a policy agenda that connects to the powerful message of shared sacrifice in his personal story. And even if he does, it might not matter much if Bush (whose own book is expected to show how his personal and political experiences have shaped his policy beliefs) doesn’t stumble. But the faith that McCain embraces in his book--the belief that courage is enriched by compassion; that honor is a compass, not a cudgel; that glory comes first from serving others--sets a standard that every candidate ought to be judged against, no matter how many ambitious proposals they conceive.

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