Peace With Honor

It took me a little while to figure out what this new John McCain ad reminded me of.

"Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war," McCain tells the camera. "I was shot down over Vietnam and spent five years as a POW. Some of the friends I served with never came home. I hate war. And I know how terrible its costs are."

Never mind that McCain routinely romanticizes war, such as in his books like Faith of My Fathers or Worth The Fighting For (yes, for some reason there's a "the" in there). But let's try and determine what's really going on here. In the midst of a war he's cheerleaded for five years, he comes out and tells us how much he hates war, leaving unsaid any desiresor strategies to end the current one.

It reminded me an awful lot of this Richard Nixon ad from 1968:



Nixon talked in slightly more explicit terms about new leadership and an honorable end to Vietnam. But there was no substance behind the talk. While the visual styles are different, each suited to its time period, these are basically the same ads. Rick Perlstein writes about the Nixon ads in his book Nixonland on page 333:

Nixon's commercials would run without narration as well. The sound would only be music and snippets from stump speeches. The images, rapid-fire collages of still photographs, told the story just as effectively with the sound off, a visual semaphore. TV specialist Harry Treleaven was so proud of their aesthetic force that he screened them for curators at the Museum of Modern Art, hoping they might be added to the collection. The aesthetes were unimpressed: "The good guys are either soldiers, children, or over fifty years old." It was a telling moment: that's why Treleaven believed they belonged in the museum. He responded, "Nixon has not only developed the use of the platitude, he's raised it to an art form" - a mirror of Americans' "delightful misconceptions of themselves and their country." (He meant it as a compliment.) (Gene, the combat photographer who created the spots) Jones's assistant imagined staging the State of the Union the same way - intercut with heart-tugging stills.

While McCain's spots have that personal touch of narration, they really are meant to evoke the same "delightful misconceptions" - meant to make the viewer feel good instead of informed about any agenda or plan for the future. If you felt good about Nixon pursuing an honorable end to the war in Vietnam, you were comfortable with his escalation into Cambodia and carper-bombing of the North. If you feel satisfied with McCain's explanation about his hatred of war, you won't mind so much when he declares it approximately once every 28.4 seconds upon reaching the Oval Office.

This is a blurring strategy, making war into an abstraction that is excruciating but necessary, and avoiding the unnecessary invasion that has saddled us with the occupation of Iraq. The idea that nobody likes war but sometimes there is no choice is a powerful mainstream opinion in America. It has absolutely nothing to do with the current war in Iraq or proposed wars with Iran or Syria or whatever other tiny adversary we have, which is why McCain feels on more solid ground going with the abstraction.

Watch out for this. It's bound to be effective.