John McCain Is No Teddy Roosevelt, But We Should Be Glad He Thinks He Is

By John Aloysius Farrell

John McCain, in an interview with The New York Times, says “I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.”

Sorry, Mac. The phrases  “conservative Republican” and “Theodore Roosevelt” are contradictory. Having spent much of the spring at the Library of Congress, plowing happily through Roosevelt’s correspondence, memoirs and White House papers, I am forced to dismiss the claim.

Surely, when looking at the two Republicans, I can find some similarities. They both were ardent patriots, courageous young warriors, and political mavericks. Like McCain, Roosevelt relished the West, and laughter, and the clash of politics, and his tribe of children.

In at least one way, McCain is a better man. The Mac I’ve watched in the Senate and on the campaign trail has a profound humility, an understanding of human weakness, and a willingness to forgive, bred no doubt in his own experience as the victim of torture in a North Vietnam prison camp.

But it is one thing to be a Senate maverick – to split with your colleagues, as McCain has done, on issues like global warming, immigration, judicial appointments and campaign finance – and another to be Teddy Roosevelt.

There is no Theodore Roosevelt “mold.” TR was sui generis. A shooting star. A raging force of nature.

He is on Mount Rushmore with Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson not because he did anything that matched their accomplishments, but because of the force of an incredible, singular personality.

In contrast to McCain, Roosevelt was young and fresh and vigorous. He embodied “change” in an era when Americans were clamoring for things new. (In that, TR more resembles Barack Obama.)

And there is, simply, no Republican Party tradition of “conservative…in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.”

Roosevelt was a liberal. A progressive. A Republican reformer with his own popular following who spent most of his political career outraging and dumbfounding the conservative core of the GOP, and then split from it in a famous clash, to found the Progressive Party.

From the start of his political career, as the youngest member of the New York legislature, Roosevelt made his name in politics by exposing corruption in both Republican and Democratic machines. As a reformer, he tangled with Republican elders while serving on a federal civil service commission, and as New York City police commissioner. After his exploits in the war with Spain, Roosevelt was prepared to run for governor in New York as an Independent, before being nominated as a Republican.

In Albany, the liberal Governor Roosevelt was such a pain to the state’s conservative business interests that the state’s Republican boss, Tom Platt, contrived to have him buried in the vice-presidency, just to get him out of New York.

Mark Hanna, the Republican Party’s leading organizer, fundraiser and strategist, was aghast. “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?” he asked the boys. Then he wrote his good friend, President William McKinley, urging him to take care of his health.

The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket was elected. Platt chortled: “We’re all off to Washington to see Teddy take the veil.” And then McKinley was assassinated and, at 42, Roosevelt became America’s youngest president.

On McKinley’s funeral train, Hanna was devastated. “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man,” he said. “I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die. Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States.”

Roosevelt took office as the Progressive movement was starting to crest. He had an ingrained distaste for  extremism, and condemned labor union violence with as much ardor as he criticized capitalist cruelty. He built up the U.S. Navy, and brandished his famous “big stick” abroad (though he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomacy.)

But for the next decade or more he dominated American politics by shoving the United States in a leftward direction, ending a half century of conservative, pro-business Republican rule.

Almost immediately, Roosevelt clashed with robber barons like J.P. Morgan, and ordered the Justice Department to take antitrust action against the monopolists. In the great anthracite coal strike of 1902, he recognized organized labor as a legitimate voice in the industrial affairs of the country. He plundered the Democratic Party platform of some of its most popular planks, like railroad regulation, and food and drug safety. He pushed for the adoption of an income tax, and a federal estate tax on the inheritances of wealthy families. He set precedents in federal regulation of manufacturing and commerce. He launched the federal government on an ambitious program of environmental protection and conservation.

“I am trying to keep the Left-Center together,” Roosevelt told a friend.

And ultimately, in 1912,  disappointed with the performance of Republican President William Howard Taft, Roosevelt led the liberals out of the Republican National Convention in Chicago, and helped found the Progressive Party. By splitting the Republicans, he ensured the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration much of the Progressive program was enacted.

McCain is not unique in naming Teddy  as a model. The Bush family has, in the past, claimed a kinship with Theodore Roosevelt – then given the nation conventionally conservative Republican presidencies.

It is a way for GOP candidates to secure the conservative base of the party, while reassuring  the press and public that their intent is “compassionate” or “kinder and gentler.”

McCain could be a good president – maybe even a great one – if, once elected, he governed like Theodore Roosevelt. You can make the argument that McCain, as much as Obama, has the potential to reach out to the other party, and move past partisanship.

But since his losing campaign for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain has been retreating in a conservative, conventional direction. He has been wooing the GOP’s right-leaning base and, to date, is showing little appetite for any bold confrontations with the bosses and robber barons of our day.

A case in point from the Times interview. When asked if the theory of evolution should be taught in the public schools, McCain took a craven way out. “It’s up to the school boards,” he said. “That’s why we have local control over education.”

That kind of political cowardice is a prescription for American decline.

He is no blazing comet like Teddy Roosevelt.