Former President George H.W. Bush has his thousand points of light, former President Bill Clinton has AmeriCorps, President Bush has compassionate conservatism and now Sen. John McCain has his own call to the duties of citizenship.
“If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you are disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them,” the presumed Republican presidential nominee said in a morning speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1958.
“The good citizen and wise person pursues happiness that is greater than comfort, more sublime than pleasure. The cynical and indifferent know not what they miss. For their mistake is an impediment not only to our progress as a civilization but to their happiness as individuals,” he said.
While in the middle of a weeklong tour of places that shaped his life, Mr. McCain, who sewed up the Republican presidential nomination last month, told reporters he also is at work on a list of about 20 names of potential vice-presidential nominees, but said narrowing those selections will take time.
He said he knows his running mate will be scrutinized because of his age. Now 71, he would be the oldest person to become U.S. president.
The senator from Arizona is spending this week looking back at the events of those 71 years and sharing the lessons he says he has learned, growing from a “rather callow, conceited and often stupid” young man into a wiser, older soul.
The recurring theme of his speeches is service: his own, his family’s, that of his Navy comrades and, in yesterday’s speeches in Annapolis and Pensacola, Fla., a call to service for all Americans. He told Americans not to become cynical about their country.
“When healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee,” he said.
Mr. McCain has offered several avenues for service, and said he wants to expand those opportunities.
Mr. McCain this week told students at Episcopal High School in Alexandria that he supported expanding AmeriCorps, the program started in the Clinton administration that recruited workers to perform community service in the United States in exchange for a stipend and money for college.
He said he would expand the Peace Corps, and encouraged students to consider military service. To that end, he criticized universities that refuse to allow ROTC programs on their campuses, calling that “unfair, ungrateful and very poor citizenship.”
Mr. McCain’s speeches also have been filled with examples of errant ways of his youth.
Yesterday, he recounted his “self-indulgent behavior” as a young aviator: “I once knocked down power lines in southern Spain, flying too low for no good reason, and temporarily cut the electricity to a great many Spanish homes.”
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