Hot-head McCain Cool At New School

United States Senator John McCain may have a reputation as a hot-head. He may be deeply mistrusted by the conservative base. But he certainly struck the right note when he gave a commencement speech at the New School for Social Research in New York City on May 19, 2006.

You’ll remember that the open-minded faculty and students at the New School, noted for its tolerance for diverse viewpoints, demonstrated against Sen. McCain during his speech. And let us not forget, writes conservative Ann Coulter,

the raw heroism of Jean Rohe, the student at the New School who gave a speech attacking the commencement speaker, Republican Sen. John McCain, at the commencement ceremony.

Yes, it must have taken courage to make a speech echoing the sentiments of the students and faculty at the School. In what league, then, would we put Ann Coulter, who is regularly heckled and abused when she gives speeches at college campuses? Not to mention the College Republicans who invite her?

But John McCain gave a speech exactly tailored to his audience. said he:

[W]e love our liberties much. And among those liberties we love most, particularly so when we are young, is our right to self-expression. That passion for self-expression sometimes overwhelms our civility, and our presumption that those with whom we have strong disagreements, wrong as they might be, believe that they, too, are answering the demands of their conscience.

After mentioning Vietnam, Darfur, and Rwanda, he tells of a young American who went to Hanoi to give an anti-war speech during the Vietnam war. McCain got the chance to listen to it on the radio in his prisoner-of-war cell in Hanoi.

We met some years later. He approached me and asked to apologize for the mistake he believed he had made as a young man.

Thank you, Senator McCain for saying those things at the New School for Social Research. Some day, an ordinary American kid like Jean Rohe, who grew up singing folk songs, spent a year at Smith College, and counts among her dearest friends the people she met at a summer studying at the Universidad de la Habana in Cuba, may also apologize to you for her gross insult.

But then again, maybe not.