Back at the Ranch with St. Ronnie

John McCain is in high dudgeon over David Hayes, an environmental advocate in the Clinton Department of the Interior, now tabbed to return to the Interior Department to attempt to undo the disastrous Reagan-Bush-Bush land rape policies. In a 2006 policy paper, Hayes dared to lump Saint Ronald with Dubya in the line of the conservative faux macho: the "rugged, gun-toting individualist who fiercely guards every man’s right to drill, mine, log, or do whatever he damn well pleases on the land."

Perhaps because I am an émigré Westerner, I normally find the Hollywood-cowboy style that transplants from other regions affect to be amusing or annoying, depending on the context. When the "Rancher" stereotype infests national politics, the pose is pernicious. Reagan set the persona in stone. From the Mississippi valley to the film industry to a horsey life at his secondary residence in Santa Barbara, he played the role he was cast in. Bush 43 is an Eastern-born, Eastern-schooled preppie, even if he has adopted the West Texas frat boy pose. The scrubby "ranch" in Crawford, devoid of livestock but abounding in brush to clear, cannot cloak him with the man-on-horseback image that Reagan sold to the public.

And what can we say of McCain? Settling in Arizona's condos and gated communities after a career burning fossil fuel and wrecking government-issued equipment in the service of his country, he has embraced the anti-green fanaticism of his political role models. He moved to the desert to plunder it. But why is Reagan's memory more sacred to him than Bush's? Is there some lingering resentment over South Carolina 2000 there? Nonetheless, McCain's proposed vote against Hayes would fall in line with all the other fat-cat carpetbaggers who have despoiled the West.