# John McCain John McCain (1936–2018) was an Arizona Republican Senator (1987-2018), the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, a [[Vietnam War]] Navy pilot whose North Vietnamese captivity (October 1967 - March 1973, 5½ years, including extended torture and solitary confinement) made him one of the most prominent American POW figures of the 20th century, and the leading **internationalist Republican** Senator of the post-Reagan era — the principal Senate carrier of the Willkie-Dewey-Eisenhower-Rockefeller-Bush 41 tradition into the post-2016 period. His Senate career across 31 years included: the 1987 [[Keating Five]] scandal that nearly ended his career early; the 1990s campaign-finance reform partnership with Russ Feingold (the **McCain-Feingold Act of 2002**); the post-2001 sustained [[Iraq War]] support; the 2008 presidential nomination he won against [[Mitt Romney]], Mike Huckabee, and others; the [[2008 Presidential Election]] by [[Barack Obama]] 365-173; the post-2008 senior-statesman-of-the-Republican-Senate role; the 2017 thumbs-down vote that killed the Trump-era Obamacare repeal attempt; and his August 2018 death from brain cancer. His **2008 selection of Sarah Palin** as his running mate produced one of the most controversial VP-pick consequences in modern American history. Palin's initial post-convention rally produced a brief McCain polling surge that the September financial-crisis cascade and Palin's subsequent television-interview struggles eliminated. The Palin pick is conventionally treated as the operational beginning of the populist-right insurgency that would consume the Republican Party through the Tea Party (2009-2014) and the Trump 2016 campaign — McCain's establishment-Republican coalition was structurally undermined by his own VP selection's mobilization of a constituency that the post-McCain Republican Party would substantially capture. The 2017 ACA-repeal "**thumbs down**" vote — McCain's July 28, 2017 Senate floor vote against the "Skinny Repeal" Republican Obamacare-rollback bill, accompanied by an explicit thumb-down gesture toward the well — became the canonical case of Senate Republican defiance of [[Donald Trump]] in the first Trump term. The vote substantially preserved the ACA and earned McCain Trump's sustained personal hostility through and after McCain's death. ## Right-wing relevance McCain occupies a structurally complicated position in contemporary right-wing memory. The post-2016 Republican Party has substantially repudiated McCain — Trump's "I like people who weren't captured" 2015 attack on McCain's POW status was an early signal; McCain's 2018 funeral excluded Trump and was structured as an explicit rebuke of the post-2016 Republican direction. Contemporary MAGA-era right-wing media treats McCain as the operational symbol of the "establishment Republican" tradition that Trump's movement displaced. The contemporary right's relationship to McCain's foreign-policy hawkishness, his constitutional-norms support, and his post-2017 ACA defense is uniformly negative; the right's continued (selective) invocation of his POW record is principally rhetorical. ## Connections - [[Barack Obama]] — 2008 opponent; victor. - [[George W. Bush]] — Outgoing Republican president 2008; whose record McCain inherited. - [[Donald Trump]] — Sustained Republican rival; the 2017 ACA-vote conflict. - [[Sarah Palin]] — McCain's 2008 VP pick. ## See also - [[2008 Presidential Election]] — McCain's loss. - [[Straight Talk Express]] — the campaign bus and maverick brand. ---