On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, ABC's the Note was quoted as saying
> <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238>
>
> However, the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican nomination was John
> McCain when the SRLC began, as it was when it ended. (Note George F.
> Will's comments during the "This Week" roundtable that the stars are
> beginning to align for McCain in 2008).
Krugman had a pretty good column on McCain today:
The New York Times
March 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Right's Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a
moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't
the straight talker he claims to be.
Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former
opposition to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in
good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go
to the most fortunate among us."
But now at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when
the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger Mr. McCain is
happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to
extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will
worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very
high incomes.
When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During
the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback,"
anticipating the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years
later. Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty
regimes even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he
singled out Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Mr. McCain's aggressive views
on foreign policy, and his expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to
commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain why he, not George W.
Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits such as
William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.
Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading
Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good
idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the
quagmire. "If success requires an increase in American troop levels in
2006," he wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there."
He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to
find these troops.
When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat
Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr.
Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking
positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's
spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist
new anti-abortion law.
The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the
appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and
incest were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no
sense: the South Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely
because it prohibits abortions even for victims of rape or incest.
The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the
hard right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's
recent voting record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the
Senate's third most conservative member.
What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes from the
fact that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from
the Bush administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture
bill.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Guantánamo. President Bush,
when signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that
he was free to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain
protested, but there are apparently no hard feelings: at the recent
Southern Republican Leadership Conference he effusively praised Mr.
Bush.
And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in
a while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he
always returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against
continue unabated.
So here's what you need to know about John McCain.
He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to
send troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South
Dakota anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would
find a way around that legislation's central provision show that he's
a politician as slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.
He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes
don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum;
they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party.
And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras
are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of
opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush
administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr.
McCain always toes the party line.
It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign George W.
Bush was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as
a straight-shooter. As Mr. Bush has said, "Fool me once, shame on
shame on you. Fool me you can't get fooled again."
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company