Feb. 11, 2008
McCain Buries His Progressive Past
The New Republic: Front-Runner's Inconsistency Has Voters Wondering How He'd Act As President
-
Republican presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speaks at the Baltimore County Republicans Lincoln Day dinner in Halethorpe, Md. Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008. (AP)
-
Play CBS Video Video Conservatives Shun McCain With Mitt Romney suspending his faltering campaign, the argument over John McCain's now apparently certain nomination escalated among GOP conservatives. Jeff Greenfield reports.
-
Video McCain Probable Nominee Sen. John McCain is so far ahead in delegates for the GOP presidential nomination that he may be unstoppable. Mitt Romney has a tough decision after Huckabee stole lots of votes. Chip Reid reports.
-
Video Eye To Eye: McCain's Next Move Republican Mitt Romney suspended his presidential campaign Thursday after a weak showing on Super Tuesday. Jeff Greenfield spoke to Nicolle Wallace about what this means for frontrunner John McCain.
-
Photo Essay John McCain Some call him a hero, some a maverick. Will Americans call him Mr. President?
-
Video Library On The Campaign Trail An up-close look at life on the road with the major presidential candidates.
A couple of years ago, as part of his campaign to reassure conservatives of his ideological reliability, John McCain sat for an interview with Stephen Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and fervent advocate of supply-side economics. In the course of the interview, McCain acknowledged that not all his positions were acceptable to the right, but he hinted that further rightward evolution might be possible. "His philosophy is best described as a work in progress," wrote Moore somewhat hopefully. As McCain put it, "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated."
I knew I had heard McCain say something like this before. I dug out an old interview I had conducted with him back in January 2000. At the time, he was just beginning to alienate the Republican establishment by contradicting its most cherished economic orthodoxies. McCain acknowledged that he was moving to the left, and I asked why this evolution was happening so late in his career. Sure enough, I found the same confession: "In the interest of full disclosure," he told me, "I didn't pay nearly the attention to those issues in the past. I was probably a 'supply-sider' based on the fact that I really didn't jump into the issue."
At the time, this was one of the most endearing things I had ever heard a politician say. He was candidly confessing his own failure, and he left me feeling that he was bound to move closer to my viewpoint as he studied the issue more carefully. But seeing McCain offer up almost the same line to Moore - and getting the same gratified reaction - was jolting.
The prevalent view of McCain is that he is a generally conservative figure with a few maverick stances and an unwavering authenticity. Nearly every liberal editorial board that has made a Republican endorsement has chosen McCain, and nearly all have offered variations on the same theme. "Voters may disagree with his policies, but few doubt his sincerity," editorialized The Boston Globe. "The Arizona senator's conservatism is, if not always to our liking, at least genuine," concluded the Los Angeles Times. This is the consensus: McCain's basically a right-winger, but at least you know where he stands.
Actually, this assessment gets McCain almost totally backward. He has diverged wildly and repeatedly from conservative orthodoxy, but he has also reinvented himself so completely that it has become nearly impossible to figure out what he really believes.
Political conversions are hardly new or scandalous. McCain's ideological transformation is unusual for two reasons: First, he has moved across the political spectrum not once - like Al Smith or Mitt Romney - but twice. And, second, he refuses to acknowledge his change.
McCain ran for his Senate seat as Barry Goldwater's ideological heir, and, with the exception of a couple maverick episodes - his crusades against Big Tobacco and for campaign finance reform - he fulfilled that pledge. But something dramatic changed during, and after, his 2000 presidential campaign.
Conservatives complain constantly of McCain's disloyalty, but the full extent of that disloyalty is not widely known. Even though it is in the public record, McCain's voting behavior during Bush's first term is almost never mentioned in the press anymore. Yet McCain's secret history is simply astonishing. It is no exaggeration to say that, during this crucial period, McCain was the most effective advocate of the Democratic agenda in Washington.
In health care, McCain co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Ted Kennedy, a patients' bill of rights. He joined Chuck Schumer to sponsor one bill allowing the re-importation of prescription drugs and another permitting wider sale of generic alternatives. All these measures were fiercely contested by the health care industry and, consequently, by Bush and the GOP leadership. On the environment, he sponsored with John Kerry a bill raising automobile fuel-efficiency standards and another bill with Joe Lieberman imposing a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was also one of six Republicans to vote against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
McCain teamed with Carl Levin on bills closing down tax shelters, forbidding accounting firms from selling products to the firms they audited, and requiring businesses that gave out stock options as compensation to reveal the cost to their stockholders. These measures were bitterly opposed by big business and faced opposition not only from virtually the whole of the GOP but even from many Democrats as well.
McCain voted against the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. He co-sponsored bills to close the gun-show loophole, expand AmeriCorps, and federalize airport security. All these things set him against nearly the entire Republican Party.
Republicans who fought the legislative battles of those days now regard the prospect that McCain could become their party's standard-bearer with incredulity. These figures are stumbling around in rage and disbelief, like Jimmy Stewart in "It's A Wonderful Life" discovering that his beloved hometown has been taken over by Henry Potter. Former Senate Republican Conference chairman Rick Santorum bitterly noted that "almost at every turn, on domestic policy, John McCain was not only against us, but leading the charge on the other side." Former House speaker Dennis Hastert - in what, by his somnolent Midwestern standards, counts as an angry tirade - complained that McCain usually "allied with Democrats."
And, indeed, by 2002 the Arizona senator had transformed himself beyond recognition. McCain was not exactly a conventional liberal. He still opposed abortion (though he could muster little passion on the subject). And he remained a hawk (though, at the time, many Democrats were hawks as well). Yet he was also more willing to fight the business lobby than were most moderate - and even many liberal - Democrats.
McCain was best described as a progressive - like Teddy Roosevelt, whom he cited constantly. McCain tended to see politics as a contest between the national interest and the selfishness of private agendas, and he favored a role for government in counterbalancing the excesses of organized wealth. In 2002, for instance, he was asked about the Bush administration's view, with regard to the Enron scandal, that "[t]he company had a duty to inform its shareholders and its employees about things that were going on inside the company. That's not a federal government responsibility." McCain thundered in response, "Well, Theodore Roosevelt would not agree with at least that rhetoric....We have had regulatory agencies always to curb the abuses or potential abuses of the capitalist system."
Even McCain's most putatively conservative stance, his opposition to pork-barrel spending, fell comfortably within the progressive tradition. Pork-barrel programs by definition are those requested by legislators rather than federal agencies. They do not have to justify their effectiveness and usually serve parochial, rather than national, interests. Opposition to pork is in keeping with the reformer's battle against the machine.
It hardly signals any general animus toward government. Pork, after all, represents just a sliver of the federal budget. True movement conservatives hope to scale back the federal government to something approximating its pre-New Deal size. They approve of fighting pork, but so do liberals. This is an issue that divides politicians from non-politicians, not left from right.
Roosevelt, as McCain knew full well, abandoned the GOP over what he regarded as its subservience to big business. McCain did not leave his party, but he came close. The Washington Post (at the time) and The Hill (again last year) reported that, in 2001, McCain met with Democratic leaders to ponder a party switch. McCain and his allies deny these accounts, which are obviously devastating to his current prospects, and reporters almost never mention it in their McCain coverage. They also rarely mention how, in 2004, John Kerry wooed him to join his ticket as vice president. The reported half-dozen conversations the two held on the topic are about a half-dozen more than would have been needed if McCain truly was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican.
By Jonathan Chait
If you like this article, go to www.tnr.com, which breaks down today's top stories and offers nearly 100 years of news, opinion and analysis.
| If you like this article, go to www.tnr.com, which breaks down today's top stories and offers nearly 100 years of news, opinion, and criticism. |
More From Opinion
The secrets of tennis legend 
- 1
- 2
- next
See all 23 CommentsMy concern now is the course for the Super Delegates to take. They had best honor our votes and give their "Super Electoral Votes" to the popular vote of the people. Our voices, our votes, had better be taken seriously or I see a rise in revolt against the electoral system, the Democratic Party, and the politicians that used their votes against our choice.
Should Obama NOT receive the Super Delegates vote if he wins by plurality, I will vote for the Green Party candidate and protest loudly against that obvious lack of honesty with the electorate.
" . . he has also reinvented himself . . . "
You mean flip-flop?
Get over it, time to move on with your so-called life.
Posted by TheGateway1 at 12:29 AM : Feb 12, 2008"
Um, no he didn''t, that''s simply not true. Gore won the popular vote by 543,816 votes but lost the electoral college vote 266-271. Florida''s contested electoral college votes gave Bush the win and those were decided by the Supreme Court who stepped in and declared that Florida''s recount method was unconstitutional. In the end 5 out of 9 different recounts gave the Florida votes to gore.
Your information is simply false.
Get over it, time to move on with your so-called life.
Posted by TheGateway1 at 12:29 AM : Feb 12, 2008
Also wrong! Illegal "caging lists" that the Repugs used to challenge voters eligibility to vote is how the election was stolen.
Posted by skyk at 06:12 AM : Feb 12, 2008
I have never seen the Southern societal morality defines so well. I would add several additional things though concerning Southeners 1. The fear is never enlighted but is always based on bigotry and intolerance - religion is used to control not to free 2. They almost never actually practice what they preach - they just don''t recognize the hypocrisy 3. self-righteousness is rampant - they still believe the Civil war was a noble endeavor; enslavement of a race based on biblical interpretation 4. ignorance is bliss - creationism, pseudo-medicine, and disregard for science is embraced as a strength.
To get this country back on track we need a candidate that appeals to the rest of the country so we can get rid of the fear, intolerance, and ignorance embraced by Repub politicians such as DeLay, Frist, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush and played out so well to their Southern base.
Do we really want this in the WH?
Even our "journalists" can''t spell or use grammar correctly.
Even our "journalists" can''t spell or use grammar correctly.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted by Puritan9 at 05:55 PM : Feb 11, 2008
+ report abuse
Oh you think it''s new? You should spend a little time in the south! They have been doing this in the south since the civil war. They find a fear, create a "Sin" to attach to it and poof, no one listens. You can''t talk to them, you can''t reason with them and you can''t change anything. That''s the way the Religious Reich likes it and thats why they are so upset about being kicked out of schools.
Get over it, time to move on with your so-called life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted by TheGateway1 at 12:29 AM : Feb 12, 2008
That is just NOT true. Al Gore had and always will have the most votes cast in the election of 2000. I think we must especially after Bush, address the system that allowed him to become president. If we are truly one nation and one people the Electorial College has no place in this nation. It''s time we went to a true election and may the best person win.
Posted by bobbyduck1 at 11:48 PM : Feb 11, 2008"
You need a history lesson, bobbyduck1
It all happened before.
wiki the "United States presidential election, 1876"
Democrat Samuel J Tilden won a clear majority of the popular vote and would have brought about the end of 16 years of Republican rule. Disputed counts of Electoral Votes was settled by an Electoral commission composed in part by 3 Republican and 2 Democrat Supreme Court members voting along party lines. I learned that in high school history.
What I didn''t learn about was "The Compromise of 1877". In this deal, Southern Democrrats agreed to let the Republican Hayes be President. In exchange, Republican Hayes ended Reconstruction and removed federal troops from the southern states. This put an end to Federal protection of Civil Rights for freed slaves in the south for the next 80 years.
Southern Democrats sold out their elected president to reestablish white rule in the south, and Republicans agreed to sell out southern blacks so they could maintain their hold on the Presidency.
Both partys disgraced themselves.
I see 3 worthwhile candidates still standing, and I think that we will be SO much better off after the 8 years are over following the only coup d''etat that I know of in our history - a president appointed by 5 sycophants in black robes. GWB has had nothing but bad ideas and bad policies that have ruined so very much that was American before. I''ll take Barack, Hillary, or John after this nightmare! Gladly!
Want that finger on the nuclear button?
- 1
- 2
- next
See all 23 Comments