The hunt for the real McCain
JOHN MCCAIN and his fiercest enemies all publicly agree: He is and always has been a right-wing conservative. McCain recently insisted: "I think my voting record clearly indicates that on economic issues, national security issues, social issues -- I'm pro-life -- so I think I could make an argument I've had a pretty clear 20-some-year record basically being conservative." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, voicing a common liberal sentiment, wrote that McCain "isn't a moderate
Indeed, those of us who saw McCain as lurching to the ideological left a few years ago are now being portrayed as delusional romantics at best -- and partisan schemers at worst.
"McCain has always been a conservative, antiabortion, pro-military Republican who took more moderate positions on a few key issues," wrote Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz. "If he runs, he could well win the White House, shutting out the Democrats for the third straight election. And that is rallying the pundits of the left."
McCain's allies, and delighted conservatives, are joining in the taunts. There's hardly anyone left to defend the proposition that McCain had ever been anything but a conservative.
In George Orwell's "1984," the totalitarian regime had, only a few years before, been allied with rival power Eurasia. But, as the narrator explains, "since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one," the regime could insist it had always been at war with Eurasia, and everybody believed it.
Fortunately, we live in a free country, where one can access the written record through databases of old newspaper and magazine articles. Apparently I'm the only journalist who bothers to use them, so let me remind everybody of a few pertinent facts.
In the first two years of George W. Bush's presidency, McCain became, in the words of one prominent Democrat, "the leader of the loyal opposition." McCain voted against both of Bush's major tax cuts.
In addition to shepherding campaign finance reform through Congress -- against the administration's efforts to kill it quietly -- he co-sponsored a patients' bill of rights with John Edwards (D-N.C.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.); co-sponsored with Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) a measure to allow the importation of generic prescription drugs; co-sponsored with John Kerry legislation to raise auto emissions standards; and co-sponsored legislation with Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) to close the "gun-show loophole" and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in compliance with the Kyoto accords. On all these things he sided with Democrats against the White House and virtually every Republican.
