McCain as "dangerous maverick"

Gawker's Nick Denton, of all people, perfectly articulates the core reason why, in the end, I will probably vote for Obama:

It's precisely because [McCain is] such a maverick that voters shouldn't trust him with power. The Democrats should accept McCain as a maverick—a dangerous maverick—and turn that quality against him. ...

John McCain is indeed adventurous; his selection of an untested running mate whom he had met only once attests to his willingness to take a gamble. Even at the cost of popularity in his party, McCain has often been a politician of stern principle. These are engaging qualities; and ones shared to some degree by Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential nominee. The pair were presented this week by some supporters as "maverick squared."

But these are the attributes not of an American president but of a defiant prisoner in a Hanoi prison camp; an unbowed dissident in the Soviet Union; or head of state in one of those countries with a presidency sufficiently powerless that it can be given as a lifetime achievement award to the keeper of a nation's conscience.

By contrast, the American presidency is an executive role. Decisions require deliberation; principle must be put to one side in the interest of a messy compromise; pride must be swallowed. My personal test is a hypothetical reenactment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. If McCain were president, could he really ignore the more belligerent rantings of America's enemies? Would he, like Jack Kennedy, have made the face-saving concession that helped the Soviet Union withdraw missiles from Cuba? If the phone rings at 3am in the White House, it's McCain the proud martyr I worry about rather than careful Barack Obama.

Obama may indeed have less experience in politics than John McCain. It is slightly unsettling that a man so ambitious never filled out his resumé with a management job. But he is at least deliberate in his thinking and decisionmaking; one can imagine him as the boss of a company; he has the temperament of a chief executive. John McCain, the maverick, doesn't.

(Hat tip: Ben Smith.)

As I wrote in comments the other day, I have grave doubts about Obama -- but even graver ones about McCain:

I am troubled by [Obama's] lack of experience. I worry about whether he's tough and steely enough to lead on security issues. I worry he won't deviate from Democratic orthodoxy even when it's clear he should. I don't really buy his "transformational" schtick, or the concept that he's going to fundamentally "change politics." (I admit I got swept up in it a bit, back in January and February, but I now see much more clearly that he's just a really effective pol, not some sort of saintly post-pol.) A key aspect of his appeal, his "judgment" on Iraq, is significantly eroded by the fact that he was wrong about the surge, whereas McCain was right. He has shown a distressing willingness to let unworthy lines of attack from his campaign (race card, RFK, etc.) percolate for quite a while before swooping in to condemn them once the damage is done. His associations with certain radical characters like Rev. Wright and Ayers are mildly troubling, though not disqualifying, but they accentuate my concerns about his having liberal blinders. I fully accept that his "bipartisan" cred is vastly overstated, and in fact, that McCain has a history far superior to him in this regard (though much of it is just that, "history"). And so on, and so forth. . . .

[But] I start out with doubts about McCain, too. I tend to think his much-vaunted "judgment" and "maverick" streak is really more a combination of opportunism, self-aggrandizement and a distressing overreliance on personal pique as justification -- to others and to himself -- for various actions. This is impetuousness masquerading as judgment. Of course, he shares the opportunism and self-aggrandizement with Obama, so they're basically a wash, but the pique issue is McCain-specific. On security, he's got almost the opposite problem as Obama. I fear he'd be trigger-happy. And, on balance, I'd rather have someone's who is overly reluctant to pull the trigger than someone who is overly eager to do so. I imagine it'll be easier for Biden & co. to convince Obama to change his mind when he's reluctant, than for McCain's advisers to change his mind once he's gotten angry and decided to bomb the hell out of somebody. These are gross generalizations, I know, but they are my impressions.

With regard to the "pique" issue, McCain's absurd flirtations with leaving the Republican Party in 2001 and 2004 are proof of this. Unlike with Jeffords or Lieberman, you cannot trace an ideological transformation whereby such a move would have made any sense whatsoever. It is only out of pique -- anger at Bush, disgruntlement with people in the party who didn't like him -- that McCain would have considered doing such a drastic thing.

Bottom line, Obama seems more rational, deliberative, and -- his talk about transformational "change" notwithstanding -- pragmatic. (It is his pragmatism that helps reassure me Obama won't enact a radical-left agenda. That would be extremely impractical, as it would guarantee he'd be a one-term president and the Democratic majorities in Congress would disappear like that.) McCain, by contrast, seems more emotional, impulsive, and unpredictable. I find the former traits far more appealing in a potential president than the latter. As I said, these are gross generalizations. But gross generalizations are often more than a little true, and unless McCain can convince me these ones aren't, he won't be able to win my vote.

Back in May, I wrote that "if you put a gun to my head right now and made me choose, I think -- *think* -- I'd vote for McCain." And I meant it, whatever some members of the peanut gallery might think. But it's not true anymore -- not so much because of anything either candidate has done (though the veep selections are part of it), but because I'm focusing in a little more clearly on just what I want in a president, and recognizing that, sometimes, "toughness" is overrated.

Denton's Cuban Missile Crisis analogy is excellent. Myself, I tend to think more in terms of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city. Neither a President Obama nor a President McCain would let such an unthinkable atrocity go unanswered or unavenged; it's right-wing lunacy to think that Obama would roll up into a ball and play Kucinich in that scenario. But it is not lunacy, I don't believe, to think that McCain might let his impulsive tendencies take over in a crucial situation, to very bad effect. And, even in the direst scenario imaginable -- nay, especially in the direst scenario imaginable -- I don't want a president who's going to go off half-cocked and start bombing everybody in sight, with little or no strategic planning, and perhaps on the basis of flimsy evidence regarding who, exactly, attacked us. I would want a considered, measured, and utterly overwhelming response -- properly targeted to achieve the objective. That remains no less true if the objective happens to be annihilation of somebody or other.

At present, I have more confidence in Obama than McCain this regard. And the selections of Biden and Palin, respectively, turned this from a slight "lean" to a heavy "lean."

UPDATE: In comments, I write: "Thinking it through a bit more, it strikes me that, actually, McCain going off half-cocked and bombing somebody is probably not my biggest worry (though it's not non-existent). My bigger worry, upon reflection, is McCain going off half-cocked with his rhetoric, thus escalating a situation where de-escalation would have been possible."