Stop John McCain

Analysis: In accusing the White House of misleading America, the Senator is flashing his independent credentials

JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON

John McCain has been President Bush's indispensable political ally on the war in Iraq. So what was the Arizona Senator and top-shelf 2008 presidential contender up to yesterday in Ohio when he unloaded on the Bush Administration's handling of the war in a speech that, with a few tweaks, could have been delivered by an anti-war Democrat? "I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain said. "Stuff happens, mission accomplished, last throes, a few dead-enders," he went on, citing some of the, ah, less-than-accurate assessments of the Iraq venture made over the years by the President, Vice President and secretary of defense. That kind of overly optimistic talk, McCain said, "has contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."

Several factors are at work here. First, McCain was speaking at a campaign event for fellow Senator Mike DeWine, who needs all the help he can get in his uphill re-election battle. DeWine is the perfect example of the kind of incumbent Republican who would win in a normal mid-term election year but will likely be swept away if anti-Bush, anti-GOP, anti-war sentiment turns voters towards Democrats this fall. Republicans are in trouble for a lot of reasons this year, but Iraq is the biggest. By criticizing Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on Iraq, McCain was trying to help DeWine, who desperately needs to distance himself from an unpopular President and unpopular war.

But McCain had another, more personal agenda. His bid to transform himself from the insurgent challenger of the 2000 campaign into the establishment front-runner in the 2008 field has led him into some unlikely alliances — including the one formed by his peace-making visit earlier this year to see Jerry Fallwell at Liberty University. And it has led to charges, from Democrats and the camps of some presidential rivals, that McCain is sacrificing his straight-talk reputation for the support of big GOP donors and power-brokers.

McCain's aides know the Senator's reputation for independence and integrity is his most valuable political asset. They monitor its health closely. They knew that McCain's efforts to ingratiate himself with the party establishment would lead to stories suggesting the Senator had compromised his principles in order to appease conservatives. They counter those stories by citing the number of times McCain has opposed the President and what it has cost him politically with conservatives. But sometimes McCain himself has to do the reminding, as he did in Ohio. "John didn't say anything he hasn't said before — he's always been critical of the way the war's been handled even though he supports the war and thinks we have to win," an adviser told TIME.com this morning. "But sometimes it's a good idea to remind people that he's still John McCain, telling it like it is. "

Big John

In 2000, John McCain's top advisers could fit in the back cabin of the Straight Talk Express. They often did. For his 2008 presidential race, there will be enough of them that they'll need their own bus, or maybe two. McCain's 2000 campaign Web site was colorful and displayed photos from his flyboy days; now it's black and white, sober and presidential.

These changes are just some of the small ones that come with being at the top of the list of men hoping to win the Republican Party's presidential nomination. McCain may not top every early poll, but he is the front-runner. No other candidate has his organization, experience, fan base, and staff talent. To cement his standing, he delivered two speeches after Election Day to conservative organizations GOPAC and the Federalist Society. Why is he hustling so hard? Because he will be far more closely scrutinized and tested than he was last time. Here are five reasons he'll maybe wish he could go back to being an insurgent:

1. Managing the Iraq decline.

McCain has better military and national security credentials than any of his likely opponents in either party. As ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he'll have a chance to demonstrate his experience in every news cycle if he wants to. That's not all good. So far, McCain has been able both to support the war and criticize its execution. He's been spared the public disapproval that has hurt President Bush. But as voters and the press start to look at him as a president-in-waiting, will they start to penalize him for the failed Iraq policies? His political salvation may be his repeated call for more troops. However unpopular that position, McCain has advocated it for so long he can claim consistency, as well as validation in recent remarks by field commanders admitting that more troops were needed. Now that a small troop increase seems a possibility, McCain is likely to argue that it's too little too late, which means that his position won't be undermined if the bump doesn't help in Iraq.

2. YouTube is watching.

In 2000, John McCain had a YouTube moment before the video network existed. On a bus rolling through California in March 2000, he called televangelist Pat Robertson "evil." For the next several days, he both distanced himself from those remarks and embraced them, launching a failed attack on the agents of intolerance in the Republican Party. The mixed message was a disaster that helped end his campaign.

Now McCain will have to run in the real YouTube era, in which he won't be able play a round of craps without being photographed. Fortunately for him, he gets a lot of leeway—anything short of criminal activity will rightly be seen by voters and the press corps as more signs of his storied authenticity.

But he does have one authentic characteristic that won't play well on the continuous feedback loop: anger. The problem for McCain is not the anger itself—the stories of Bill Clinton's rage are far more legendary and numerous—but the perception pushed, over the years, by his opponents, including George Bush in 2000, that McCain doesn't have the cool head needed for the job. Though he's been under considerable strain in his public career, McCain has never had a real moment of purple rage in front of the cameras (a brusque word to a reporter at the end of the 2000 campaign doesn't count). If caught on camera, his straightest talk might not play well given the whispering campaign. That means that when opponents bait him, he'll mostly have to smile, particularly when some crank confronts him in a parking lot at midnight in Decorah, Iowa, with a video camera. What's so tricky about this, of course, is that maintaining such a constant act of sustained civility is enough to drive even the most docile politician into batty fits of rage.

3. More in sorrow than in anger.

When an adviser to Hillary Clinton made a crack about McCain's behavior during his time as a POW, the senator's advisers knew what to do. They took showy umbrage and Sen. Clinton apologized immediately. It was a political boon. Fights with Hillary help when you're trying to court conservatives: They ratify your front-runner position, and plus, conservatives think she's just awful. A fight that reminds everyone you're a tough former POW is as good as it gets. But most of the time, McCain's campaign needs to ignore its opponents. If McCain wants to look presidential, he has to stay above the fray, busying himself with affairs of the country or preparing to meet some foreign dignitary. To respond to every dart makes a candidate look thin-skinned and touchy, and elevates the attacker to parallel status. (Which is not to say that any candidate should make John Kerry's mistake of failing to battle against attacks that undermine his or her entire candidacy.) Mitt Romney has now called McCain "disingenuous" for saying that states should decide the gay-marriage question and not the courts. It's a risky gambit for the Massachusetts governor, whose position on abortion has evolved over the years, but one the McCain camp should probably ignore. There will be time for squabbling later at the Iowa debates.

4. Do your homework.

In 2000, the McCain campaign approached matters of policy in two ways. The first was to find a way to tie any issue to the corrupting influence of money in the political system, the senator's signature crusade. If reporters wanted a more substantive answer about health care or education policy, they were directed to call John Raidt, McCain's one-man policy shop. When the campaign survived longer than McCain staffers had imagined or prepared for, it seemed as if McCain's policy papers had been photocopied from the back of the envelopes on which they'd been scratched that morning.

Now McCain must have a detailed policy position for everything. So, his campaign is building a serious, front-runner's policy shop that will produce lots of laminated booklets with complicated-looking charts. Former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick will run the shop, and it will house big names like former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who will give economic advice. The McCain team recently also hired Brett O'Donnell, the winning debate-team coach from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, to help with debates and communication.

5. Culture club.

There is a tight little band of aides at the center of the McCain operation and they will have to get used to ceding control over some of the operation (after they teach the candidate to do the same). Every campaign has this problem when it gets big. The work often requires anticipating the needs of the candidate and the veterans think they're the only ones who can do that. Newcomers have their own hangups. They have to relax and not mope that they're being shut out. They can mistakenly convince themselves that their beloved policy suggestion was ignored for turf reasons rather than because it was unworkable. Such aides complain to reporters, who happily write stories of praetorian guards and disarray.

Big campaigns also have to put up with fund-raisers and party bosses who have an endless supply of bad ideas, but of course can't be dismissed immediately. McCain's entertaining streak is also a liability in that staffers will fight for face time with him. And then there's the yen to re-create the past glory of the 2000 campaign.

In the end, if the McCain campaign can meet all these challenges, it will be because of that trial by fire. The staff is tested and emotionally the wiser for it. In 2000, they would have driven the bus straight to Massachusetts to attack Romney on his front lawn for his recent disingenuity charge. This time, they haven't said a word.

McCain Tries to Pick Up Republican Pieces

Andrew Ferguson, Bloomberg

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- The other day on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' -- where he appears with the routine frequency of Topo Gigio popping up on the old Ed Sullivan show -- John McCain contemplated this month's Republican defeat and made sure to bring up the name Ronald Reagan.

``I am a conservative Republican,'' McCain said, ``in the school of Ronald Reagan -- who, by the way, brought our party back after a defeat in 1976 and gave us hope and optimism.''

These days Republicans repeat Reagan's name the way a parched castaway gasps out the word ``Water!'' But McCain's drop of the name had a special resonance.

He is by every measure the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, as Reagan was immediately after the 1976 Republican debacle that brought down incumbent Gerald Ford. Then out of office, Reagan moved quickly to solidify his position.

He did it, in large part, with words. Reagan gave a series of speeches in 1977 that were notable for their criticism, gentle but unmistakable, of his party's establishment -- particularly on the way Republicans had betrayed their commitments to low taxes and smaller government.

With Reagan on his mind, McCain did something similar last week. In a pair of speeches to conservative audiences, he asked, in effect: ``What went wrong for Republicans in 2006, and how do they make it right?''

No Easy Questions

Only for pundits and other numinous beings are these easy questions to answer. Ordinary mortals will find the job frustrating. The results of Nov. 7 were a jumble, yielding no clear, definable course of action for a party groping to regain its majority.

Moderates as well as right-wingers lost their seats two weeks ago. Foes of immigration went down and so did immigration boosters, sometimes in the same state. Voters -- in Michigan and Arizona, for example -- who re-elected liberal Democrats simultaneously approved ballot initiatives that were so conservative the state Republican Party was reluctant to endorse them.

The only thing the losers had in common was that they were Republicans. No incumbent Democrats lost their seats in Congress on election night. The repudiation of the Republican majority was comprehensive -- but why?

Conservative Country

Reagan claimed in 1977 that the U.S. was essentially a conservative country, and McCain worked from the same premise last week.

``I am convinced that a majority of Americans still consider themselves conservative or right of center,'' he told a meeting of the Republican group GOPAC. Americans want fiscal restraint and a balanced budget from their government; they want room for individual initiative and freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

It was to further or guarantee these objectives that voters made Republicans a majority, McCain said, and Republicans let them down.

``We were elected to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free enterprise and private initiative,'' McCain said, ``and then we lavished money, in a time of war, on thousands of projects of dubious, if any, public value.''

Congress's increase in domestic discretionary spending was a crude attempt, according to McCain, ``to bribe the people into keeping us in office.'' The bribery went beyond the petty projects -- the ``bridge to nowhere'' in Alaska -- that made the term ``earmarks'' a common coinage.

Lavish Entitlement

Much worse, McCain said, was the vast expansion of the Medicare entitlement with the prescription-drug benefit. The program, which President George W. Bush proudly considers a landmark, addressed a relatively limited problem facing some older Americans by lavishing all older Americans with an entitlement that will cost a trillion dollars a decade.

In foreign policy too, the government of the Republican majority failed to meet its principles by miscalculating what it would take to win the war in Iraq, and the voters repudiated the Republicans for this as well.

Conceding that ``Americans are tired of Iraq,'' McCain nevertheless repeated a point he's been making since the summer of 2003: ``Without additional combat forces, we will not win this war.''

In plotting a Republican comeback, some of what McCain recommends will sound programmatically popular: enacting a line- item veto, banning earmarks, regulating lobbyists more closely and making the budget less susceptible to accounting tricks.

Voters, according to polls, approve each of these -- at least in the abstract.

Unpopular Positions

Whether they will approve the drying up of federal money that would result is a more difficult question. Indeed, McCain seems to be staking out positions that, taken together, might make him one of the most unpopular politicians in the U.S.

Exit polls on Election Day showed that only one in five voters favored sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. That percentage would fall more if the higher troop levels brought a higher number of U.S. casualties.

It is also unlikely that older Americans, rich or poor, would feel friendly toward a politician who took away their new subsidy to buy otherwise expensive medicine.

McCain has built his career on being a ``conviction politician,'' and now he wants his party to follow his lead by standing by its principles. ``Do the right thing,'' he said last week, ``and the politics will take care of itself.''

It's a brave and admirable strategy for Republicans and Democrats alike, and it seemed to work for Reagan a quarter of a century ago. But what happens if your principles aren't what the public wants?

McCain: Americans 'Rejected Us'

On the heels of devastating GOP losses, Sen. John McCain said "no defeat is permanent" as he called for the Republican Party to return to its common-sense conservatism - and implicitly cast himself as the one who can lead the party's rebirth.

"We lost our principles and our majority. And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first," the Arizona Republican said Thursday in the first of two speeches that could set the tone for a potential presidential campaign.

On the same day he launched a presidential exploratory committee, McCain said voters felt that Republicans valued their incumbency over their beliefs on such conservative standards as limited and efficient government - and he urged a return to those tenets.

"Americans had elected us to change government, and they rejected us because they believed government had changed us," the four-term senator said. "We must spend the next two years reacquainting the public and ourselves with the reason we came to office in the first place: to serve a cause greater than our self-interest."

He spoke before members of the Federalist Society, the organization of more than 25,000 conservatives and libertarians including high-profile members of the Bush administration, the federal judiciary and Congress. Later Thursday, he was delivering a broader speech about the future of the Republican Party to another conservative pillar, GOPAC.

CBlountBlogs

The post-mortems are accumulating, but I think the obvious has to be stated: John McCain and his colleagues in the Gang of 14 cost the GOP its Senate majority while the conduct of a handful of corrupt House members gave that body's leadership the Democrats.

In the Senate three turning points stand out.

On April 15, 2005 --less than three months after President Bush had begun a second term won in part because of his pledge to fight for sound judges-- Senator McCain appeared on Hardball and announced he would not support the "constitutional option" to end Democratic filibusters.

Then, stunned by the furious reaction, the senator from Arizona cobbled together the Gang of 14 "compromise" that in fact destroyed the ability of the Republican Party to campaign on Democratic obstructionism while throwing many fine nominees under the bus.

Had McCain not abandoned his party and then sabotaged its plans, there would have been an important debate and a crucial decision taken on how the Constitution operates.

The result was the complete opposite. Yes, President Bush got his two nominees to SCOTUS through a 55-45 Senate, but the door is now closed, and the court still tilted left. A once-in-a-generation opportunity was lost.

A few months later there came a debate in the Senate over the Democrats' demand for a timetable for withdrawal for Iraq led to another half-measure: A Frist-Warner alternative that demanded quarterly reports on the war's progress, a move widely and correctly interpreted as a blow to the Administration’s Iraq policy.

Fourteen Republicans voted against the Frist-Warner proposal --including Senator McCain-- and the press immediately understood that the half-measure was an early indicator of erosion in support for a policy of victory.

Then came the two leaks of national security secrets to the New York Times, and an utterly feckless response from both the Senate and the House. Not one hearing was held; not one subpoena delivered. A resolution condemning these deeply injurious actions passed the House but dared not name the New York Times. The Senate did not even vote on a non-binding resolution.

Nor did the Senate get around to confirming the president's authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of al Qaeda contacting its operatives in the United States.

Weeks were taken up jamming the incoherent McCain-Kennedy immigration bill through the Judiciary Committee only to see it repudiated by the majority of Republicans, and the opportunity lost for a comprehensive bill that would have met the demand for security within a rational regularization of the illegal population already here.

As summer became fall, the Administration and Senator Frist began a belated attempt to salvage the term. At exactly that moment Senators McCain and Graham threw down their still murky objections to the Administration’s proposals on the trial and treatment of terrorists.

As cooler heads sort through the returns, they will see not a Democratic wave but a long series of bitter fights most of which were lost by very thin margins, the sort of margin that could have been overcome had there been greater purpose and energy arrayed on the GOP's side.

Step by step over the past two years the GOP painted themselves into a corner from which there was no escape. Congressional leadership time and time again took the easy way out and declared truces with Democrats over issues, which ought not to have been compromised. The easy way led to Tuesday's result.

It is hard to conceive of how the past two years could have been managed worse on the Hill.

The presidential ambitions of three senators ended Tuesday night, though two of them will not face up to it.

The Republican Party sent them and their 52 colleagues to Washington D.C. to implement an agenda which could have been accomplished but that opportunity was frittered away.

The Republican Party raised the money and staffed the campaigns that had yielded a 55-45 seat majority, and the Republican Party expected the 55 to act like a majority.

Confronted with obstruction, the Republicans first fretted and then caved on issue after issue. Had the 55 at least been seen to be trying --hard, and not in a senatorial kind of way-- Tuesday would have had a much different result. Independents, especially, might have seen why the majority mattered.

Will the GOP get back to a working majority again? Perhaps. And perhaps sooner than you think. The Democrats have at least six vulnerable senators running in 2008, while the situation looks pretty good for the GOP.

But the majority is not going to return unless the new minority leadership --however it is composed-- resolves to persuade the public, and to be firm in its convictions, not concerned for the praise of the Beltway-Manhattan media machine.

We mentioned a while back that John McCain and his wife, Cindy were trying to sell their house. Now check out their new digs.

KVOA reports that they have spent $4.66 million for a luxury condo in Phoenix. Cindy McCain's trust is buying two condos at 2211 Camelback, a new condo tower that has a rooftop pool and concierge services.

The building has original artwork, a resident "party room" with a separate guest entrance from porte-cochere, fireplace, 50" plasma screen television, wet bar and catering kitchen, business and fitness centers.

Construction should be done by the end of the year. The political duo will be combining the two apartments to create a nearly 7,000-square-foot residence, which is large but still quite a bit smaller than their 11,000 square-foot old house (which according to the listing is still on the market).

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