McCain, like Obama, is a storyteller. All the best leaders are. Which is why he couldn’t have failed to see that his story — of the freed prisoner from a failed war who rose to greatness — was a story with roots sunk too deeply in the past for this moment. This is even more true for the president that Obama will soon replace. Bush, locked in his Oedipal struggles — father and son, World War II and Vietnam, a faded generation and a fading one — again and again mistook rigidity for fortitude and never really evolved in office, as all presidents must. He rose up, using his innate trust of emotion and impulse, to meet the first challenges of 9/11, but then froze solid. At a time when the nation’s challenges, so fresh, so fast-moving, so startling, demanded constant reappraisal and response, he — the child of a president — thought it was about him: his issues, his battles, his heart. It’s not, at least not now.
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