The Nation on McCain
When I saw that hard-left magazine The Nation had a piece entitled ‘The Real McCain’, I guessed it was a typical hatchet job from the progressive rag. I was pleasantly surprised to see some pretty good analysis. I don’t need to agree with a piece 100%, or even 25%, to recommend it; all I ask is that it acknowledge the real issues at stake and shed some light on them, and on that basis, Ari Berman’s piece is a success.
A particularly succint summation of McCain’s challenge:
There have always been two sides to McCain: the conservative loyalist and the unpredictable maverick so often featured in the media. In preparation for 2008, McCain has largely chosen to unveil and market the conservative side. Many conservatives are warming to his routine; some are even beginning to like and trust him. It’s fair to assume, though, that the more orthodox conservatives agree with McCain, the more he risks alienating moderates and forfeiting the independence that makes him unique and suggests he could become a great President. It’s an uncomfortable predicament for a pragmatic problem solver with sky-high approval ratings and crossover appeal. “He’ll have to decide whether he wants to be CBS’s favorite senator or the Republican nominee,” says Norquist. “He can’t do both.”
The conservative offensive includes more than just welcome tough talk on Iraq:
McCain has signed a “No Pork Pledge,” fought against wasteful bridges in Alaska and urged deep cuts to nondefense and non-homeland-security-related spending–cuts that Democratic Senate minority leader Harry Reid dubs “immoral.” At a recent appearance before the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, McCain described himself as a “Barry Goldwater Republican” who “revere[s] Ronald Reagan and his stand of limited government.” The routine has won him praise from the likes of National Review editor Rich Lowry, who recently wrote: “For the first time in years, conservatives have listened to McCain talk about a high-profile domestic issue and have nodded their heads vigorously.”
Here’s a bit I particularly liked:
In fact, McCain has always been far more conservative than either his supporters or detractors acknowledge. In 2004 he earned a perfect 100 percent rating from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and a 0 percent from NARAL. Citizens Against Government Waste dubs him a “taxpayer hero.” He has opposed extension of the assault-weapons ban, federal hate crimes legislation and the International Criminal Court. He has supported school vouchers, a missile defense shield and private accounts for Social Security. Well before 9/11 McCain advocated a new Reagan Doctrine of “rogue-state rollback.”
“He’s a foreign policy hawk, a social conservative and a fiscal conservative who believes in tax cuts but not at the expense of the deficit,” says Marshall Wittmann, a former McCain staffer and conservative activist who now works at the Democratic Leadership Council. McCain’s ideology resembles an exotic cocktail of Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan–a conservative before conservatism was bankrupted by fundamentalism and corporatism. His centrist reputation simply proves how far right the center has shifted in Republican politics. “The median stance for Senate Republicans in the early 1970s was significantly to the left of current GOP maverick John McCain,” write political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Off-Center. “By the early 2000s, however, the median Senate Republican was essentially twice as conservative–just shy of the ultraconservative position of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.”
No doubt Berman means this as a warning to the readers of the Nation, one that may very well resonate with all 27 current subscribers. The political reality, however, is that McCain should take those sentences, run off 60 million copies, and deposit one in the mailbox of every person who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, because it will be music to their ears.
Who would have thought that the best case yet for a McCain presidency would come from the pages of The Nation?…
I especially like this part: “His centrist reputation simply proves how far right the center has shifted in Republican politics.”
As I watch the Republican Party descend ever further into self-destructive madness, it’s unfortunate that words of wisdom need to come from The Nation. No offense to your regulars, including the inestimable fatman, but we’re acting like spoiled children. We pretend that campaign finance reform is the end of free speech and that the Supreme Court’s “imposition of radical liberal ideology” is killing the country and we just sound like a bunch of nattering idiots to everyone else. This needs to change, and fast.
Inestimable? Why thank you, Ryan. More later. (It’s past my bedtime.)
Here’s the rub for McCain: He can expect to get more such press, which would in the abstract be a great help in the general election, but which will kill him in the primaries when ads can be run titled “Is John McCain a Conservative” and selective quotes used–and these will be targeted at the voters who know and hate The Nation.
BTW, the EU has apparently decided that that Iranian laptop with the warhead plans on it is legit. http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/International/2005/11/25/1322463-sun.html
The U.N. responded with a collective yawn.
…and this isn’t going to help McCain either…
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007600
McCain, Giuliani, and (yes) Rice are all more centrist that George W. Bush on pretty much every national topic other than national security (aka: GWoT). Yet those three are the Republican front-runners for ’08, right? Thus McCain’s positions on economic issues, particularly taxes, will be less of an issue for him – as compared to the other leading candidates who hold similar views.
If he can focus the electorate on his “fiscally responsible” position then I don’t think he will be hurt so badly by his soft-hearted (unsupported by the facts) view of tax cuts being overly generous to the rich. It is one thing to advocate “tweaking” a policy (his word: “reform”) and yet another to fight for abolition of a policy; the Bush tax cuts in this case.
So, we need to stay tuned. Should McCain succeed in clearly articulating his point-of-view of smallish government, lower taxes, lower spending, etc. then I think he will do well. If his opponents successfully cast him as hawkish on security but left-wing liberal on tax/economic issues, then, well, he will go as he did in ’00.
steves -
I think that’s doubtful at best. You assume that Republican primary voters are economically conservative when there is absolutely no evidence that they are. They are certainly conservative about taxes, in that they all operate under the delusion that they too will someday be rich and they’ll really miss that extra few thousand that they can’t spend on a third yacht, but that’s not the same. If they were really economically conservative, they would have revolted a whole lot more convincingly against Bush.
If anything, the GOP’s problem with McCain on economic issues is that he’s just plain too conservative for them. He won’t support boondoggles like the Medicare drug bill and that turns off a lot of the modern GOP.
*Insert requisite witticism about the irony that the modern GOP is more willing to spend than any Democratic administration, you know, ever.*
Perhaps and I do think that to the extent it is the lead issue (not guaranteed btw) Security will help McCain. But aren’t many Republican voters disillusioned by the Bush Administration’s profligate spending? I know I am. He gets a bit of a pass because much of the spending is on causes with which many conservatives agree – security, disaster relief – but Medicare “reform” and pork such as that in the Transportation bill are troubling in the extreme.
Will McCain strike some balance here and gain as a result? We’ll see. But I guess I have to agree with you on the tax cut softness in that the impact of tax cuts is immediate, which puts that issue in a more prominent place for most voters.