[lbo-talk] CW crystalling around McCain

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Mar 13 19:44:41 PST 2006


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



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