Americans are cynical - McCain
02/04/2008 20:27  - (SA)  

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Washington - US Republican presidential candidate John McCain believes many Americans are cynical about their country, and their idea of liberty is "the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee".

What these people need, he will argue on Wednesday, is a good dose of public service.

McCain is on a nostalgic tour of places important to developing his character as he fights for media coverage dominated by the extended Democratic battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

McCain has clinched the Republican presidential nomination and is biding his time while Democrats decide who will face him in the November election.

He is also spending a lot of time explaining a previous statement that the US could be in Iraq for 100 years.

McCain has spent all week talking about his transformation from bad boy to war hero, and there will be more of the same at Annapolis.

"In truth, my four years at the Naval Academy were not notable for exemplary virtue or academic achievement, but rather for the impressive catalogue of demerits I managed to accumulate," he will say, according to speech excerpts.

Scepticism is healthy

McCain, a 71-year-old Arizona senator who would be the oldest person ever elected to a first presidential term, will argue that Americans need to take up a cause greater than themselves - join the military, help feed the hungry, seek public office.

"Many Americans are indifferent to or cynical about the virtues that our country claims," the former Vietnam prisoner of war will say.

In part, he says, it is because some have suffered economic dislocations while others profit as never before, and in part, it is a "reaction to government's mistakes and incompetence and to the selfishness of some public figures."

He comes close to calling some Americans spoiled, saying they are cynical because "the ease which wealth and opportunity have given their lives led them to the mistaken conclusion that America, and the liberties its system of government is intended to protect, just aren't important to the quality of their lives."

Scepticism is healthy, he will say, "But when healthy scepticism 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."

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