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To celebrate John McCain’s life and legacy last weekend, I watched Game Change for the first time in several years. I hadn’t seen the TV movie since Trump was elected. I was left feeling… unsettled. It was just ten years ago when a Republican presidential campaign manager refused to double-down on lies and dog-whistle racism, even if the base was begging for it. We’re just a decade removed from McCain respecting Barack Obama’s position as the first African-American presidential candidate and refusing to attack his reverend or his church. It feels so long ago. Anyway, I was moved by the fact that McCain wanted former president Barack Obama to speak at his memorial service. As it turns out, McCain even made a point of requesting this from Obama personally back in April of this year.

A parting lesson in American civility from Sen. John McCain lies in the roster of leaders he personally selected to pay tribute at his memorial service Saturday at the National Cathedral. It was a day in early April when Barack Obama received an unexpected call from McCain, who was battling brain cancer and said he had a blunt question to ask: Would you deliver one of the eulogies at my funeral?

Obama, who is responsible for extinguishing McCain’s second bid for the White House a decade ago, immediately answered that he would. He was taken aback by the request, aides say, as was George W. Bush, another former rival, who received a similar call from McCain this spring.

When the 43rd and 44th US presidents stand on the high altar of the soaring cathedral on Saturday, after the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” anthem is sung, they will not only be celebrating the life of John Sidney McCain III. It will be McCain, too, having a not-so-subtle last word, aimed at another president he made clear he did not want to attend: Donald J. Trump.

I’ve been wondering whether McCain and Obama had somehow developed an intimate relationship after Obama left office, if they had been having quiet conversations over the last year or two that haven’t been publicly discussed as McCain neared the end of his journey.
It turns out, after talking to several friends of both men this week, their relationship isn’t intimate at all, but rather one rooted in mutual respect and a shared sense of alarm at today’s caustic political climate. Their telephone call on that April day was first arranged by advisers, not McCain simply dialing up Obama as he would do with his legion of friends, a sign they were hardly tight.

In fact, the two have spoken by phone only a couple of times since Obama left the White House, aides to both men say, most notably last summer when Obama reached out after McCain cast the deciding vote to salvage the Affordable Care Act. He thanked him. The call was brief. Obama has not been among the long parade of visitors who came to see McCain on his Arizona ranch as he fought brain cancer. George and Laura Bush dropped by not long ago, as did former Vice President Joe Biden, a close and longtime friend of McCain’s in the Senate, who will deliver a eulogy at a memorial service on Thursday in Arizona.

[From CNN]

The rest of the CNN piece is about why McCain made such a point of personally inviting Bush and Obama and why he wanted his memorial and funeral to be lessons in civility. While I loathed McCain when he was running in 2008, he of course looks a million times better than Trump right now. Mostly, I think it’s quaint to think that anyone really believes we can put the white supremacist genie back in the bottle – it’s not like all of the Deplorables are just going to *go away* once Trump is out of office. They’ll be absorbed within the Republican Party and we’ll be able to see it every day. Still, it’s a nice gesture that McCain personally called Obama and requested this.

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