{"id":620591,"date":"2018-08-31T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T18:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=620591"},"modified":"2018-09-04T15:24:18","modified_gmt":"2018-09-04T21:24:18","slug":"in-search-of-the-faith-and-optimism-that-drove-john-mccain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/08\/in-search-of-the-faith-and-optimism-that-drove-john-mccain\/","title":{"rendered":"In search of the faith and optimism that drove John McCain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"John

Heath Haussamen \/ NMPolitics.net<\/p>

John McCain speaking at a campaign rally in Mesilla in 2008.<\/p><\/div>\n

COMMENTARY:\u00a0<\/strong>The first time I interviewed Sen. John McCain, he spoke lovingly about Tom Udall and his family. Then he told me he hoped Udall lost his bid that year for the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n

It was 2008. McCain was campaigning for president in Albuquerque. Udall and Steve Pearce were battling to replace the retiring Pete Domenici.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of philosophy,\u201d McCain told me<\/a> about his support for Pearce, a fellow Republican. Udall is a Democrat.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake, McCain was a staunch conservative. The right-wing Club for Growth gives him a lifetime score of 81 percent<\/a>. That compares to 24 percent for Maine\u2019s Susan Collins and 34 percent for Alaska\u2019s Lisa Murkowski, both Republicans.<\/p>\n

\"Heath

Heath Haussamen<\/p><\/div>\n

But it was McCain\u2019s belief in what we have in common, not what divides us, that drove him. He reached across the aisle in search of solutions to critical issues like campaign finance, immigration and health care.<\/p>\n

Looking back on my interview with McCain<\/a> following his death on Saturday, I felt the loss not only of a rare leader, but also a culture of respect and love that once characterized Washington.<\/p>\n

McCain brought up the Udalls because I asked him about public lands. He had worked with former Rep. Morris \u201cMo\u201d Udall, Tom\u2019s uncle, to protect millions of acres in Arizona.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love and revere the Udall family,\u201d McCain said.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, then-Sen. Chris Dodd, a Democrat, visited Las Cruces<\/a> to honor Domenici, a Republican, during the first annual Domenici Public Policy Conference. Domenici reached out to Dodd when he first joined the Senate, inviting him over for a barbeque and sparking a lifelong friendship, Dodd shared.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love this man,\u201d Dodd said. He lamented the mean-spirited culture overtaking the U.S. Senate \u2013 and America.<\/p>\n

These men were all partisans. I once listened to a frustrated Domenici rail on his cell phone against \u201cthe damn Democrats\u201d while I waited to ask him a question. In a 2008 speech<\/a>, now-Sen. Udall attacked Pearce and McCain by linking them to George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

And these men made mistakes, as the Sarah Palin debacle illustrates. I look back on a Palin campaign stop in Roswell<\/a> \u2013 still the whitest crowd I\u2019ve been in, and the first place I saw homemade signs degrading Barack Obama for his ethnicity \u2013 as a prelude to the Trump era.<\/p>\n

But a true leader like McCain is willing to admit mistakes and apologize, prioritizes civility and respect, and zealously guards a belief that we can accomplish anything if we work together.<\/p>\n

McCain expressed that optimism to the end. Though we sometimes fight, his parting statement to America<\/a> read, if we remember what we have in common and \u201cgive each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country,\u201d we\u2019ll survive \u201cthese challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, that\u2019s hard for me to believe. Our president, in many ways the antitheses of McCain, spends his days trolling and bullying others. Bottomless pits of dark money fund ads that program us to hate each other. The U.S. Senate is no longer a bastion of civility and respect. \u201cThe lions of the Senate are gone,\u201d Sen. Collins told The New York Times<\/a> after McCain died. \u201cIt is very sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

But McCain\u2019s final words make me want to believe.<\/p>\n

\u201cTen years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel it powerfully still.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heath Haussamen<\/a>\u00a0is NMPolitics.net\u2019s editor and publisher.\u00a0Agree with his opinion? Disagree? NMPolitics.net welcomes your views. Learn about submitting your own commentary\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was Sen. John McCain\u2019s belief in what we have in common, not what divides us, that drove him. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":621039,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,10],"tags":[3684,116],"class_list":["post-620591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-haussamen-columns","tag-john-mccain","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}