What Really Happened in the U.S. Attorneys MessA look at the case of Carol Lam.By Byron York
On Thursday Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating the U.S. attorneys matter. Sampson’s appearance comes a few days after word that another top Justice Department aide, Monica Goodling, has informed the committee that she will take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination if she is called to testify. In a statement, Goodling’s lawyer blasted committee Democrats, charging that chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy and others “have already publicly drawn conclusions about the conduct under investigation.”
The most incendiary charge leveled by Democrats, and particularly by committee member Sen. Charles Schumer, is that the Bush administration fired the U.S. attorneys to stop criminal investigations that targeted Republicans. The worst example, Schumer has alleged, is the firing of Carol Lam, the California U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted former Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham for bribery. Lam was fired, Schumer charges, to keep her from investigating others in the GOP. “The most notorious [case] is the Southern District of California, San Diego,” Schumer said on NBC’s Meet the Press on March 18. “Ms. Lam, the U.S. attorney, had already brought about the conviction of Duke Cunningham. It came out in the newspapers that she was continuing to pursue that investigation, and it might lead to others — legislative and others — and in the middle of this investigation, she was fired.”If that indeed happened, it would be reasonable to guess that there might be some clues in the more than 3,000 pages of e-mails and other documents pertaining to the U.S. attorneys matter released by the Justice Department. But that’s not the case. In fact, the e-mails show a much different dynamic at work. The picture that emerges from the evidence in the Lam case is of a Justice Department at profound policy odds with the U.S. attorney, preparing to take action against her, but at the same time ignoring or brushing off outsiders who criticized Lam on the very grounds that troubled Department officials. Added to that was a bureaucratic morass that made it impossible for the Department to do anything quickly. Together, those factors created a situation in which Department officials pursued a reasonable goal — finding a new U.S. attorney for Southern California — while denying to outsiders that they were doing it, taking far too long to get it done, and mismanaging its execution. In other words, it was an operation in which Justice Department officials did virtually everything wrong — except what they’re accused by Democrats of doing.A POLITICAL OFFICEIn 2001, for a brand-new Bush administration trying to move fast on many fronts, finding a new United States attorney for the Southern District of California wasn’t easy. Actually, finding any U.S. attorneys for the state of California wasn’t easy. Although they are officially nominated by the president, U.S. attorneys in each federal district — California is divided into four such areas — are traditionally chosen by the senior official of the president’s party in the state. Often that is a senator, but if there is no senator of the president’s party, the responsibility passes to the governor. And if there is no governor of the president’s party — well, the White House tries to figure out another way.That was the problem facing George W. Bush in California, with Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. The president’s solution was to rely on a selection committee headed by a man named Gerald Par sky, a Los Angeles investment banker who ran the Bush campaign in California and who also helped in the search for nominees to lower-court federal judgeships.It wasn’t an easy job; the position of U.S. attorney for the Southern District had been wracked by politics in the previous decade. In 1993, Bill Clinton replaced the Republican U.S. attorney, a career prosecutor and veteran of 20 years in the Justice Department, with Alan Bersin, a law professor who had no prosecutorial experience but who had been a classmate of Clinton’s at Yale and head of the Clinton campaign in San Diego. (Bersin pledged to vigorously pursue Clinton priorities like environmental law.) In March 1998, Bersin resigned to become head of the San Diego school system. The man who was thought to be the hands-down choice to replace Bersin was prosecutor Charles LaBella, but LaBella ruined his chances when he was chosen to lead the Justice Department’s investigation into the 1996 campaign-finance scandal. Frustrated with the restrictions put on his investigation by then-Attorney General Janet Reno, LaBella publicly called for an independent counsel — an act that deeply angered the Clinton White House. When the time came to pick a new U.S. attorney, LaBella was passed over. An interim prosecutor, never confirmed by the Senate, took the job.After George W. Bush took office, several names were mentioned for the job, including San Diego city attorney Casey Gwinn, who had the support of Republican congressmen from the area. By August 2001, a few more names were in the mix, including Charles LaBella himself and San Diego Superior Court judge Carol Lam. But months passed, and nothing happened. The word in Bush circles was that diversity concerns and political considerations were holding things up. “They had to have Asian-American women,” recalls one lawyer who was involved with the process. Lam fit that bill, but she was also an independent — not a Republican. In the end, though, she got the job; the Bush administration formally nominated her in August 2002, and she was confirmed by the Senate in November. It had taken the president more than a year and a half to place a U.S. attorney in San Diego.So a troubled selection process ended. But a troubled tenure began, a tenure that would end in December 2006, when Lam was one of the eight U.S. attorneys whose firings would become the latest scandal roiling Washington.IT DIDN’T START WITH DUKEThe key allegation in the Lam case is that she was fired because she was going to continue to prosecute cases that grew out of the Cunningham matter. But the documents release by the Justice Department show that officials there were dissatisfied with her work and were considering replacing her well before the first allegations against Cunningham ever arose, in a June 2005 story in the San Diego Union-Tribune.It all got started in December 2003, with an article in another paper, the Riverside, California Press-Enterprise. The story was headlined “Border Agents Face Uphill Fight: Even after arrest, prosecutions of smugglers are rare due to lack of resources,” and it quoted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents the area, criticizing federal authorities for not prosecuting criminal alien smugglers. A month later, the paper published a follow-up story detailing how an alien smuggler named Antonio Amparo-Lopez had been arrested at a border checkpoint but later let go.Issa was disturbed by the story. On February 2, 2004 — 15 months before the Cunningham case began — he wrote a letter to Lam citing the Amparo-Lopez case and asking for “the rationale behind any decision made by your office to decline or delay prosecution of Mr. Amparo-Lopez.”Six weeks later, Lam wrote back, telling Issa to direct his complaint to the Justice Department in Washington. Two months after that, on May 24, Issa got a brief letter from Assistant Attorney General William Moschella, offering no explanation for Lam’s decision not to prosecute Amparo-Lopez. Moschella’s answer was, in full: “Based upon all of the facts and circumstances of his arrest, the United States Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Mr. Amparo-Lopez.”Unhappy with Moschella’s non-answer, on July 30, 2004 — still nearly a year before the Cunningham case broke — Issa wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft. This time, Issa was joined by other California Republican congressmen, including David Dreier, Chris Cox, Jerry Lewis, Dana Rohrbacher, Cunningham, and several others. “It is our understanding that on numerous occasions when the Department of Homeland Security has apprehended alien smugglers and have requested guidance from the U.S. Attorney’s office, they have been told to release these criminals,” the congressmen wrote. “It is unfortunate and unacceptable that anyone in the Department of Justice would deem alien smuggling, on any level by any person, too low of a priority to warrant prosecution in a timely fashion.”This time, it took the Justice Department six months to respond. When the Department finally got around to it, in a January 25, 2005 letter to Issa, Moschella defended the Department’s performance and offered no solutions. Issa grew more frustrated. “We were stumped in terms of getting information to explain the scope of the problem,” says Frederick Hill, a spokesman for the congressman. “We put the word out on the street that we were interested in getting more information about this.” Issa was hoping for a tip — perhaps from someone inside a law-enforcement organization — to give him the information he had been seeking. But even though the Justice Department was offering Issa no answers and no help, his complaints were apparently registering. On March 2, 2005 (still a few months before the Duke Cunningham case broke), as officials considered a proposal to get rid of all 93 U.S. attorneys in the country, Kyle Sampson, the attorney general’s chief of staff, placed Lam’s name on a short list of those to be replaced. Her name was put in the category of “weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors; chafed against administration initiatives, etc.” Sampson’s memo included the date on which Lam took her oath of office — November 18, 2002 — which meant that her four-year term would not expire until November 2006.Issa, meanwhile, kept writing letters. In September 2005, Issa and his fellow California lawmakers bypassed the Justice Department and wrote directly to President Bush, warning of “a crisis along the Southwest border that needs your attention” and specifically complaining about the San Diego U.S. Attorney’s office. Six weeks later, Issa got a brush-off letter from Candida Wolff, the president’s assistant for legislative affairs. Nothing was done.
THE BRUSH-OFFAfter more than a year of complaining, Issa had gotten nowhere. On October 15, he tried yet again, writing to Lam about another notorious alien smuggler, Alfredo Gonzales, who had been caught and not charged. “Your office has established an appalling record of refusal to prosecute even the worst criminal alien offenders,” Issa wrote. A week later, Issa and his fellow California Republicans wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, citing Lam’s “lax prosecutorial standard” and asking for a meeting to discuss their frustration.What Issa didn’t know was that officials inside the Justice Department shared his concerns about Lam. Several documents appear to confirm that: First, there was Sampson’s March 2005 memo listing the possibility of ousting Lam. Then, in January 2006, Sampson wrote a memo to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers saying, “I recommend that the Department of Justice and the Office of the Counsel to the President work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. attorneys.” If the decision to fire them was made, Sampson wrote, then Lam should be one of those considered for replacement. In April 2006, Sampson wrote an e-mail to Miers listing Lam as one of the U.S. attorneys who should be fired.But none of that was public, and none of that was shared with Rep. Issa. But then, something happened to bring the problem into the open when Issa finally got the tip he had been hoping for. “We had a source in the Department of Homeland Security give our office a big stack of documents,” says Hill. Included in the documents were reports of cases logged by border stations in Lam’s district. There was case after case after case of smugglers being caught but never prosecuted. Issa was appalled.He gave the document to the Associated Press, which reported that “the vast majority of people caught smuggling immigrants across the border near San Diego are never prosecuted for the offense.” The story was then picked up by CNN’s Lou Dobbs. And that, finally, got the Justice Department’s attention.The revelations came amid increasing concern about the problem of illegal immigration. Suddenly lots of people wanted to know why Carol Lam wasn’t doing more. Even California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein inquired. And as they did with Issa, Justice Department officials told Feinstein that everything was O.K. “Please rest assured that the immigration laws in the Southern District of California are being vigorously enforced,” Moschella wrote to Feinstein — at a time when Department officials themselves were not at all assured that the immigration laws in the Southern District of California were being vigorously enforced.For her part, Lam argued strongly that Issa had gotten bad information, which he then passed on to the AP and CNN. “Representative Issa has been misled,” Lam wrote in a statement. “The document he calls a ‘Border Patrol Report’ is actually an old internal Border Patrol document, relating to a single substation, that has been substantially altered and passed off as an official report.”Issa did not accept Lam’s explanation. The cases were real, he argued. “Your failure to address the substantive issues raised in the memo is consistent with previous news reports and comments I have repeatedly heard from Border Patrol agents who work closely with your office,” Issa told Lam. Inside the Department, the reaction was skeptical, too. Shortly afterward, officials began a statistical study of Lam’s operation. The numbers showed that immigration prosecutions in the San Diego district had gone down since 2004, even as they continued to rise in other border U.S. attorney districts. “When you compare San Diego’s performance using 111 Assistant U.S. Attorneys…and New Mexico, with 59 Assistant U.S. Attorneys but still generating more cases than San Diego, it seems that San Diego should be doing much more,” said an internal email from the office of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty.After the study was done, Kyle Sampson sent an email to one of McNulty’s top assistants. “Has [the deputy AG’s office] ever called Carol Lam and woodshedded her re: immigration enforcement?” Sampson asked. “Has anyone?” And the answer was no, although Lam surely knew that Justice officials were unhappy with her performance on that issue. A couple of months later, those officials were still studying her performance. “What is perhaps most striking to me is the fact that of the Southwest Border Districts [Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and South and West Texas], the Southern District of California is the only one that prosecuted fewer immigration cases in 2005 than it did in 2001 and 2002,” wrote one analyst. “Southern District of California is the only SW Border District to average a negative (-4.15%) rate of growth in the number of annual immigration prosecutions during the 2001-2005 period, which is all the more noteworthy given that with the exception of Arizona (which averaged just over 9% annual growth), the other SW Border Districts averaged double-digit growth rates over the same period.”The internal e-mails and documents indicate that unhappiness with Lam had finally reached a critical point inside the Department. There were concerns beyond the issue of immigration — Lam’s performance on the enforcement of gun laws was another troublesome area — and by Fall 2006, Justice began making preparations to replace her when her term expired in November. In December, the Department told Lam she was out. SLUGGISH, INSULAR, AND ARROGANTSo that is the story, at least as far as we know it now. The one factor that does not appear in the documents is the Duke Cunningham case, which Democrats claim was the reason Lam was fired. The only connection specifically alleged so far is a circumstantial one: On May 11, 2006, Sampson wrote a memo urging action on the Lam matter the day after Lam informed the Department she was pursuing an investigation that would target Republicans. In the memo, Sampson referred to “the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires.”Some Democrats have pointed to the memo as a smoking gun. But there are problems with their theory. The first is that Sampson wrote his memo in response to an inquiry the day before from the White House, and his note was basically a resending of an e-mail he had sent the month before. More importantly, the evidence shows that Sampson urged that Lam be fired in notes written in March 2005, January 2006, and April 2006 — all before Lam informed Washington of her prosecution plans. The notion that Lam’s most recent investigation was the cause of her firing simply doesn’t have much support in the documents.But the documents do reveal serious problems inside the Justice Department. The papers that have been made public show a Department that was sluggish, insular, and arrogant in its handling of the U.S. attorneys matter. Officials had no interest in hearing from critics, even those from the president’s own party, and they were not inclined to act until political pressure forced them to. All that is bad, and they deserve the criticism they get for it. But they didn’t fire Carol Lam to stop a criminal investigation.— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
The Case for McCain
After speaking with conservatives, and following not only my heart, but my head, I know that McCain is the best man for the job in 08. I actually supported him in 2000, but once the primaries were over, I threw my support to President Bush.
(I obviously wasn't going to vote for Gore...ugh...)
I have been a long time fan of Senator McCain. I've also been quite outspoken about some of the things he's done/bills he's sponsored, but for the most part, I'm still a fan. He can't be all that bad, he's been in office since the 80's & he wins by such a large margin every election (in AZ) that I find it hard to believe that there are that many that disagree with me.
McCain is a Federalist. He believes in states rights, which limits federal governments role in the lives of american citizens. He's a nationalist. He loves America and gave up so much to become the man that he is today. There's something that he's not...and that's a coward. He spent years in a prison camp. He's spent years fighting in the trenches of the house & senate. He's got the experience. He's got the voting record.
Where do Giuliani and Romney stand on "conservative" issues? -Giuliani is far from being even moderate, especially when stating that abortions should be funded by tax payer dollars...HELL NO I WONT PAY FOR THAT! & Romney can't make up his mind...
I'm not saying McCain is perfect. I'm not saying he's got all the answers. I'm going to say exactly what I said about President Bush vs John Kerry, circa 04...
"At least we know where he stands. He'll tell you what he thinks, what he wants, what ought to be done, and then he'll do it. There's no turning back. No talking him out of it. He knows whats right and he acts on that."
That's what we need in America. To hell with opinion polls and surveys. Everyone in America is pissed off about something. Don't you see that we are as bad, or ever worse than that Democrats? When did Republicans decide it was okay to tear each other down, or to say that one issue is more important than the other? If we don't wake up, we are going to have a democrat controlled congress & white house.
Open up your eyes and realize that he's not pandering now. He's still a straight shooter. He's mended his ways (and this has been a long time coming, so everyone who wants to leave a nasty comment can save it) since the 2000 election. He's working hard to make sure our country stays free, strong, secure.
Do you think any democrat can or willdo that?
...Its not about right or left. Its about right & wrong. Who is right to lead our country?...
(I obviously wasn't going to vote for Gore...ugh...)
I have been a long time fan of Senator McCain. I've also been quite outspoken about some of the things he's done/bills he's sponsored, but for the most part, I'm still a fan. He can't be all that bad, he's been in office since the 80's & he wins by such a large margin every election (in AZ) that I find it hard to believe that there are that many that disagree with me.
McCain is a Federalist. He believes in states rights, which limits federal governments role in the lives of american citizens. He's a nationalist. He loves America and gave up so much to become the man that he is today. There's something that he's not...and that's a coward. He spent years in a prison camp. He's spent years fighting in the trenches of the house & senate. He's got the experience. He's got the voting record.
Where do Giuliani and Romney stand on "conservative" issues? -Giuliani is far from being even moderate, especially when stating that abortions should be funded by tax payer dollars...HELL NO I WONT PAY FOR THAT! & Romney can't make up his mind...
I'm not saying McCain is perfect. I'm not saying he's got all the answers. I'm going to say exactly what I said about President Bush vs John Kerry, circa 04...
"At least we know where he stands. He'll tell you what he thinks, what he wants, what ought to be done, and then he'll do it. There's no turning back. No talking him out of it. He knows whats right and he acts on that."
That's what we need in America. To hell with opinion polls and surveys. Everyone in America is pissed off about something. Don't you see that we are as bad, or ever worse than that Democrats? When did Republicans decide it was okay to tear each other down, or to say that one issue is more important than the other? If we don't wake up, we are going to have a democrat controlled congress & white house.
Open up your eyes and realize that he's not pandering now. He's still a straight shooter. He's mended his ways (and this has been a long time coming, so everyone who wants to leave a nasty comment can save it) since the 2000 election. He's working hard to make sure our country stays free, strong, secure.
Do you think any democrat can or willdo that?
...Its not about right or left. Its about right & wrong. Who is right to lead our country?...
Slow Train Coming
Lexington
Slow train coming
Mar 8th 2007; From The Economist print edition
The last time he ran for president John McCain spent months rolling around New Hampshire in a bus, the Straight Talk Express. This time he has swapped the bus for a giant locomotive. He has hired high-price political consultants, some from the Bush entourage, tapped into a network of rich donors and established operations across the country. Yet the locomotive remains stubbornly stuck in the station.
Mr McCain is trailing Rudy Giuliani by as much as 25 points. His attempt to build bridges with the right has alienated his former friends in the centre without converting conservatives. And he seems to be dogged by bad luck—his recent announcement that he is going to run, for example, was marred by his faux pas about American lives being “wasted” in Iraq.
Why is the McCain express still immobile? The most important reason is the senator's outspoken support for George Bush's decision to send five more brigades to Iraq. This has not only put him on the wrong side of an unpopular war (two-thirds of the population oppose the “surge”); it has also strengthened the impression that he is speaking for the White House.
The other reason is his botched transformation from maverick to establishment figure. Mr McCain tried to turn himself into the inevitable Republican champion by mending fences with all the people he had upset in the past—from the Bush camp to the religious right to conservative activists. This made sense after his failure of 2000 (remember the old adage that Democrats like to fall in love while Republicans like to fall in line). But it is proving hard to pull off, with independents accusing him of pandering and conservatives still nursing their old wounds.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Mr McCain will be static for ever. Mr Giuliani is a flawed front-runner. He has huge strengths as the architect of New York's turnaround and as the hero of September 11th 2001, to be sure. But he has equally huge weaknesses. His private life is tangled (his relationship with his son, Andrew, is so strained that he did not even turn up to his graduation). His business affairs are more tangled still. He has a foul temper and a mean streak as wide as the Hudson river. “Absolutely not,” was the response of Ed Koch, another former New York mayor and a political rival, to the suggestion that Mr Giuliani is a racist. “He's nasty to everybody.”
Mr Giuliani also seems unprepared for a national campaign. Last week George Will introduced him to the annual meeting of CPAC—a gathering of more than 6,000 red-meat activists—by saying that conservatism comes in many flavours, with Mr Giuliani the Thatcherite one. A nice point. But the former mayor then delivered a meandering speech that left the audience dispirited. His campaign may collapse as quickly as it inflated.
The Giuliani bubble is as much a proof of the weakness of the other anti-McCain candidates as it is a long-term threat to Mr McCain himself. The strongest competition to Mr McCain arguably came from Mitt Romney rather than Mr Giuliani (the rest of the candidates are midgets compared with the big three). Mr Romney has a long record of managerial competence—a huge selling point after George Bush's serial incompetences. He is also an efficient politician: his speech at CPAC was as smooth as Mr Giuliani's was ragged.
But the failure of the Romney campaign to catch fire is good news for Mr McCain. Mr Romney's Mormonism is proving more of a problem than many people expected: a quarter of Americans claim that they would not vote for a Mormon. But what is really damaging him is his opportunistic flip-flopping over abortion and gay marriage. If he is willing to pander on these issues as a candidate, might he not pander as president?
Conservative activists might warm to Mr McCain if they took another look at him. It is true that he has quarrelled with conservative pressure groups. But that is often because he sees them as obstacles to achieving conservative ends, such as a balanced budget or clean politics. It is true that Mr McCain refused to endorse the Federal Marriage Amendment. But he did so for the eminently conservative reason that these sorts of issues should be decided by the states rather than the federal government. It is true that Mr McCain has pushed for more federal funding for stem-cell research. But he has also been more consistently conservative on abortion than any of the other first-tier candidates.
Conservatism's best hope
Mr McCain has a rare ability to present conservative ideas in a language that moderates and independents can find appealing. He also has a rare ability to break with the conservative establishment on subjects where they are obviously batting on a losing wicket, such as global warming. This could make him the best candidate for reviving conservatism from its current dismal state—and also the best candidate for keeping conservatism alive in a Washington where the Democrats rule Capitol Hill.
Mr McCain has also often been right about the war. He was one of the first major politicians to call for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. He repeatedly criticised George Bush's tolerance of torture as a stain on America's good name. Even his support for Mr Bush's “surge” may not be as much of a liability as it appears. The bulk of Republican primary voters are in favour of giving the war one last chance; and Mr McCain's willingness to risk his political career over Iraq burnishes his tarnished reputation as a straight-talker.
His biggest weakness has to do with age rather than ideology. He will be 72 if he is elected to the White House, and his face is visibly scarred from bouts with skin cancer. But he has the energy and attitude of a much younger man, and seems to absorb energy from his audience. And he also boasts the most impressive biography in American politics. The McCain Express will not stay stuck in the station for ever.
Slow train coming
Mar 8th 2007; From The Economist print edition
The last time he ran for president John McCain spent months rolling around New Hampshire in a bus, the Straight Talk Express. This time he has swapped the bus for a giant locomotive. He has hired high-price political consultants, some from the Bush entourage, tapped into a network of rich donors and established operations across the country. Yet the locomotive remains stubbornly stuck in the station.
Mr McCain is trailing Rudy Giuliani by as much as 25 points. His attempt to build bridges with the right has alienated his former friends in the centre without converting conservatives. And he seems to be dogged by bad luck—his recent announcement that he is going to run, for example, was marred by his faux pas about American lives being “wasted” in Iraq.
Why is the McCain express still immobile? The most important reason is the senator's outspoken support for George Bush's decision to send five more brigades to Iraq. This has not only put him on the wrong side of an unpopular war (two-thirds of the population oppose the “surge”); it has also strengthened the impression that he is speaking for the White House.
The other reason is his botched transformation from maverick to establishment figure. Mr McCain tried to turn himself into the inevitable Republican champion by mending fences with all the people he had upset in the past—from the Bush camp to the religious right to conservative activists. This made sense after his failure of 2000 (remember the old adage that Democrats like to fall in love while Republicans like to fall in line). But it is proving hard to pull off, with independents accusing him of pandering and conservatives still nursing their old wounds.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Mr McCain will be static for ever. Mr Giuliani is a flawed front-runner. He has huge strengths as the architect of New York's turnaround and as the hero of September 11th 2001, to be sure. But he has equally huge weaknesses. His private life is tangled (his relationship with his son, Andrew, is so strained that he did not even turn up to his graduation). His business affairs are more tangled still. He has a foul temper and a mean streak as wide as the Hudson river. “Absolutely not,” was the response of Ed Koch, another former New York mayor and a political rival, to the suggestion that Mr Giuliani is a racist. “He's nasty to everybody.”
Mr Giuliani also seems unprepared for a national campaign. Last week George Will introduced him to the annual meeting of CPAC—a gathering of more than 6,000 red-meat activists—by saying that conservatism comes in many flavours, with Mr Giuliani the Thatcherite one. A nice point. But the former mayor then delivered a meandering speech that left the audience dispirited. His campaign may collapse as quickly as it inflated.
The Giuliani bubble is as much a proof of the weakness of the other anti-McCain candidates as it is a long-term threat to Mr McCain himself. The strongest competition to Mr McCain arguably came from Mitt Romney rather than Mr Giuliani (the rest of the candidates are midgets compared with the big three). Mr Romney has a long record of managerial competence—a huge selling point after George Bush's serial incompetences. He is also an efficient politician: his speech at CPAC was as smooth as Mr Giuliani's was ragged.
But the failure of the Romney campaign to catch fire is good news for Mr McCain. Mr Romney's Mormonism is proving more of a problem than many people expected: a quarter of Americans claim that they would not vote for a Mormon. But what is really damaging him is his opportunistic flip-flopping over abortion and gay marriage. If he is willing to pander on these issues as a candidate, might he not pander as president?
Conservative activists might warm to Mr McCain if they took another look at him. It is true that he has quarrelled with conservative pressure groups. But that is often because he sees them as obstacles to achieving conservative ends, such as a balanced budget or clean politics. It is true that Mr McCain refused to endorse the Federal Marriage Amendment. But he did so for the eminently conservative reason that these sorts of issues should be decided by the states rather than the federal government. It is true that Mr McCain has pushed for more federal funding for stem-cell research. But he has also been more consistently conservative on abortion than any of the other first-tier candidates.
Conservatism's best hope
Mr McCain has a rare ability to present conservative ideas in a language that moderates and independents can find appealing. He also has a rare ability to break with the conservative establishment on subjects where they are obviously batting on a losing wicket, such as global warming. This could make him the best candidate for reviving conservatism from its current dismal state—and also the best candidate for keeping conservatism alive in a Washington where the Democrats rule Capitol Hill.
Mr McCain has also often been right about the war. He was one of the first major politicians to call for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. He repeatedly criticised George Bush's tolerance of torture as a stain on America's good name. Even his support for Mr Bush's “surge” may not be as much of a liability as it appears. The bulk of Republican primary voters are in favour of giving the war one last chance; and Mr McCain's willingness to risk his political career over Iraq burnishes his tarnished reputation as a straight-talker.
His biggest weakness has to do with age rather than ideology. He will be 72 if he is elected to the White House, and his face is visibly scarred from bouts with skin cancer. But he has the energy and attitude of a much younger man, and seems to absorb energy from his audience. And he also boasts the most impressive biography in American politics. The McCain Express will not stay stuck in the station for ever.
Friday, March 09, 2007
The Coming McCain Moment
National Review: The Coming McCain Moment
Taking a second look
By Ramesh PonnuruNational Review
"I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today," says Sen. John McCain, holding a copy of the paper with his picture on the front page. "McCain firm on Iraq war," it says above the fold. He flips it over to show the rest of the headline: "despite cost to candidacy." "I can't worry about it," he says. "With something like this, you just can't let it concern you. The issue is too important."
Actually, McCain's campaign is doing better than it seems to be. It is true that the unpopularity of the Iraq War, and specifically of the surge he has long advocated, is dragging his poll numbers down. It is true as well that in many polls he is now behind Rudolph Giuliani.
But Giuliani is a useful opponent for McCain. The good news of the senator's season is that another rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has so far failed to unite the Right behind him. In a McCain-Romney race, Romney would have most conservatives and portions of the party establishment behind him - and might win the nomination.
Giuliani is a different story. He supports taxpayer funding of abortion, sued gunmakers for selling guns, and went to court to keep New York City from giving the names of illegal immigrants to the federal government. Polls show that many Republican voters are unaware of these aspects of the former mayor's record. It is hard to see how he wins the nomination once they learn about them. In a three-way race, some people who prefer Romney to McCain will nonetheless back McCain to head off Giuliani. This year, then, a real threat to McCain has failed to materialize - and a fake one has replaced it.
McCain's apostasies from conservatism, unlike Giuliani's, are well known. The mayor's polls form a ceiling. McCain's could be a floor, if conservatives are willing to reconsider their view of him. If they do, then the current Giuliani moment will be succeeded by a McCain moment. I think conservatives will give him a second look - as they should.
It has become common to complain about the weak Republican field. Actually, it is a strong field. The three leading contenders are smart, competent, serious, articulate, and accomplished. (So is Newt Gingrich, who ranks fourth.) In some of these respects they exceed the incumbent. It just isn't a very orthodox field.
Romney, at least in his 2007 version, is the most conventionally conservative. If elected, he could make a fine president. But he has a big disadvantage as a presidential candidate: He is a Mormon. In December, a FoxNews poll found that 32 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a candidate if he were Mormon. Speculation about the effect of Romney's Mormonism on his chances has centered on evangelical Christians' theological differences with him. But evangelicals were only slightly more hostile to Mormon candidates than the population at large. Democrats were much more hostile. So even if Romney's conservative social positions get him through the primaries, his religion is a liability in the general election. (It may be that many secular-minded voters consider Mormonism particularly alien and threatening.)
This is unfair to Romney, and to his coreligionists. But this country has elected a non-Protestant president precisely once in its history. If the Republicans were going into 2008 with a large margin of error, it might be worth finding out how voters would react to a Mormon candidate. But Republicans are not going into this election in a strong position. Nominating a Mormon is too risky.
RUMBLES LEFT AND RIGHT
Most of McCain's conservative detractors concede that he would be a formidable candidate in November 2008. They question his ideological bona fides. But it would be a remarkably narrow definition of conservatism that excluded McCain.
"I think the important thing is you look at people's voting record," says McCain, "because sometimes rhetoric can be a little misleading." Over the course of his career, McCain has compiled a pretty conservative voting record. Neither Giuliani nor Romney, as McCain implied, has a record to match. An objective observer looking at Bush and McCain in 1999 would have had to conclude that, based on their histories, McCain was the more conservative of the two.
The senator's reputation changed during his exciting, disastrous 2000 presidential campaign. During the previous years, he had become a true believer in campaign-finance reform. His attack on monied special interests, and his bitterness at the Bush campaign's attacks on him, seemed to pull him left across the board: on tax cuts, on the environment, on health care. The effect was to enhance McCain's standing with independent voters and journalists while repelling conservatives. What further soured conservatives was that they were then starting, for the first time, to take a strongly negative view of campaign-finance reform, hardening into the conviction that it was an assault on free speech (and particularly on conservative organizations).
Independent voters and Democrats gave McCain some primary victories, but without Republicans he could not win the nomination. Still, he was America's most popular politician, and for the next few years he continued to play the "maverick" Republican - and to reap the rewards in his press clippings, which annoyed conservatives at least as much.
From 2004 onward, however, McCain has been moving rightward again, emphasizing his support for the Iraq War and the War on Terror. So far, this move appears to have cost him support among independent voters and reporters without buying him many friends on the right. Conservatives still have the impression of him they formed when he was tacking left. Besides, even in the last two years he has taken some stands to which a lot of conservatives object.
The good news for conservatives is that some of McCain's un-conservative positions concern trifling subjects, and some of them have little ongoing relevance. (Some of them are important, though, and I'll get to them later.) After 9/11, McCain shepherded a bill to federalize airport security through the Senate. That's not an issue that's going to come up again. The corporate-accounting scandals gave McCain an opportunity to rail against malefactors of great wealth, which he took. He zinged Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission for its inaction and urged more transparency in executive pay. But he gives no sign of itching to impose more regulations now. He supported a scheme of taxes and regulation to fight smoking. His bill didn't become law, but it is no longer an issue since most of its provisions were adopted by the states.
Even campaign-finance reform isn't the issue it once was. President Bush signed McCain's bill, and the senator says he doesn't want any more legislation. "I think that we need to give this law a chance to work." He doesn't think the Federal Election Commission needs any new powers, although, like most Republicans, he does want it to crack down on "527 groups" that fund political ads.
McCain supported a "patient's bill of rights" that would regulate HMOs. But that bill has gone nowhere, and even if it passed it would not be a large step toward socialized medicine. It was small change compared with the gargantuan Medicare prescription-drug entitlement of 2003. (President Bush, and many conservative congressmen, supported that bill; McCain voted against it.)
McCain wants to make people who buy guns at gun shows pass a background check, ending what he considers a loophole in current law. Gun-rights activists have strong objections to this proposal. But they will have to measure his offense against Giuliani's past, and never-repudiated, advocacy of licensing gun owners.
Some conservatives hold McCain's participation in the "Gang of 14" against him. In 2005, most Senate Republicans, frustrated by unprecedented Democratic filibusters against judicial nominees, wanted to change the rules to prevent such filibusters. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans reached an agreement: The Republicans would leave the rules alone so long as the Democrats used the filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances." There were good arguments for and against the deal, although there were no good arguments for the preening collective self-regard with which the 14 senators announced it. McCain notes that months after his intervention, the Senate confirmed both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He thinks it "would have been almost impossible" to confirm them in the aftermath of a bitter fight over a rules change. "That's why they called it the nuclear option, the Senate was about to blow up." Conservatives might disagree with that assessment, while still regarding it as the type of prudential calculation on which allies can disagree.
In 2005 and 2006, McCain differed with the Bush administration about how to interrogate suspected terrorists. The senator, having survived torture himself at the hands of the North Vietnamese, understandably wanted tough anti-torture language put into law. The administration worried that such language, particularly if susceptible to creative interpretation, might make it impossible to conduct coercive interrogations even if they fell short of torture. In the end, Republicans reached a deal that preserved tough interrogations while addressing McCain's concerns.
That leaves three substantial issues between McCain and conservatives. The first is global warming. McCain has been a believer throughout the Bush years. Most conservatives have associated the fight against global warming with environmental zealotry and overregulation. But McCain has tried to come up with a free-market solution, and he is now emphasizing nuclear power as a way to fuel this country without emitting greenhouse gases. "I don't often like to imitate the French," he says, but France is right to use nuclear power. His proposal, with Joe Lieberman, may not get the balance exactly correct, but right now it looks as though McCain was more prescient than most conservatives.
McCain was one of a few Republicans to vote against Bush's tax cuts. He said that the tax cuts were fiscally reckless and too skewed to the rich. But he now accepts those tax cuts as a done deal. Reversing them now, or allowing them to expire, would constitute a tax increase, and McCain has never voted for a general tax increase. When I ask him whether there were any circumstances in which he would accept a tax increase, for example to get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts, he says, "No. None. None." It seems pretty clear that a President McCain would seek spending cuts before tax cuts. But if you take him at his word - and he is a man who takes honor seriously - he won't raise taxes.
Finally, there is immigration. McCain sees eye to eye with Bush on this issue. He thinks a guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration, and that we should give illegal immigrants already here a path to citizenship since we aren't going to deport them all. A lot of conservatives want tougher border security, period. Nothing McCain can do now will please some of his critics. But if his bill passes this year, he may try to move on. Or he could try to mollify his reasonable critics by supporting an amendment. Last year, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia proposed that the bill's border-enforcement provisions go into effect first, and be shown to work, before illegal immigrants could start on their path to citizenship. McCain is open to the concept.
A SOCIAL CONSERVATIVE
McCain gets a bad rap from social conservatives. He opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment on the theory that states should set their own marriage policies. But he opposes same-sex marriage, too, and says that he would support a constitutional amendment if the federal courts ever tried to impose it on reluctant states. As a practical matter, it is hard to see how any president could get such an amendment enacted without that type of provocation.
The senator has been rock-solid on abortion. Unlike anyone else in the race, he has a pro-life record stretching back to the early 1980s. Like President Bush, he says that the Supreme Court made a mistake in Roe; he goes further than Bush when he adds that the Court should overturn it. He voted to confirm all of the sitting conservative justices, plus Robert Bork.
McCain muddied the waters with one foolish remark in 1999. He was trying to make the point that the country is not ready for abortion to be prohibited, but in the course of trying to say that he said that the country wasn't ready for Roe to go. He corrected himself quickly, but that lone remark has been used to portray him as a secret pro-choicer or a flip-flopper.
He really has broken ranks with pro-lifers twice. In the early 1990s, he voted to fund research using tissue from aborted fetuses, and he now supports federal funding for research on embryos taken from fertility clinics. But he draws the line at stem-cell research involving cloned human embryos. He says that he would prohibit that, even mistakenly claiming that he has co-sponsored legislation to that effect.
Social conservatives think that Republicans have repeatedly betrayed them. At the highest levels of national politics, that's not true. The reason that social conservatives haven't achieved many of their objectives even though they have helped to elect a lot of Republicans over the last generation is that those objectives are hard to achieve. It has been slow work to fight the pervasive liberalism of the elite legal culture. But when President Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy and the first President Bush appointed David Souter, they weren't trying to betray conservatives; they didn't know how those justices would turn out. McCain thinks that type of mistake can be avoided if presidents pick nominees who don't just say the right things, but have track records of judging soundly. He's right. Conservatives' reception of McCain shouldn't be colored by historical mythology.
For some conservatives, these discrete issues matter less than what they say about McCain's instincts. His friendly relations with journalists - one of his campaign aides was only half-joking in 2000 when he called the media McCain's "base" - often make conservatives suspicious. But McCain's steadfast support for the Iraq War, and his advocacy of the surge, belie the claim that he will do anything for good press.
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who has long clashed with McCain, says that the senator is worse than a flip-flopper: By voting right, tacking left, and then tacking right, he has shown himself to be devoid of principle. But as the foregoing review of his record suggests, most of McCain's zigzags have been matters of tone and emphasis, not changes of position. He hasn't switched his views as much as Romney or even Giuliani.
There are genuinely disconcerting elements to McCain's politics. He talks about cutting spending, but he rarely connects limited government to individual freedom. He is an inveterate moralist, which eludes many observers because he is concerned about honor rather than virtue. In many of the cases discussed earlier, his moralism slid very quickly into support for regulation: of campaign contributions, of tobacco, even of boxing. At times, his rhetoric about the need for individuals to subsume themselves in the life of the nation verges uncomfortably close to idolatry of the state.
But McCain's merits are considerable as well. He has been tough on spending, and been willing to ally with the most conservative members of the Senate to fight earmarks. He has been a stalwart free trader: "Since Phil Gramm left, there's no greater free-trader in the Senate than I am." (McCain supported Gramm's presidential campaign in 1996, and Gramm is supporting his now.) Curbing the growth of entitlements, he says, will be one of his top priorities as president. He has long supported personal accounts.
Leave all of that aside for a moment. For a lot of conservatives, the War on Terror is paramount. That's why some of them are willing to overlook Giuliani's faults. But if toughness on terrorism trumps everything else, with toughness defined as competent execution of the administration's basic strategy - and that's the way it has to be defined for this argument to work for Giuliani at all - then McCain is hands down the best candidate. He has better national-security credentials than Giuliani, having been involved in foreign policymaking for more than two decades while the latter has barely been involved at all. More than any other candidate, he has shown a commitment to winning in Iraq. He has supported it, indeed, more vigorously than Bush has waged it, and he has put his career on the line.
McCain has the moral authority to get a country that has grown tired of the war to listen to him, an authority President Bush has seen slip away. That isn't just because he is a former prisoner of war with one son serving in the Marines and another in the Naval Academy - although that helps. It is because he is not seen as playing politics with the war, as most Democrats and Republicans are, and he never will be.
Conservatives may need to reach some understandings with McCain before throwing their support to him: on the vice-presidential nominee, on immigration, maybe even on the number of terms McCain will serve as president. (He is 70.) But he can win both the nomination and the election. He is plenty conservative. And he deserves a long second look.
March 9, 2007
Taking a second look
By Ramesh PonnuruNational Review
"I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today," says Sen. John McCain, holding a copy of the paper with his picture on the front page. "McCain firm on Iraq war," it says above the fold. He flips it over to show the rest of the headline: "despite cost to candidacy." "I can't worry about it," he says. "With something like this, you just can't let it concern you. The issue is too important."
Actually, McCain's campaign is doing better than it seems to be. It is true that the unpopularity of the Iraq War, and specifically of the surge he has long advocated, is dragging his poll numbers down. It is true as well that in many polls he is now behind Rudolph Giuliani.
But Giuliani is a useful opponent for McCain. The good news of the senator's season is that another rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has so far failed to unite the Right behind him. In a McCain-Romney race, Romney would have most conservatives and portions of the party establishment behind him - and might win the nomination.
Giuliani is a different story. He supports taxpayer funding of abortion, sued gunmakers for selling guns, and went to court to keep New York City from giving the names of illegal immigrants to the federal government. Polls show that many Republican voters are unaware of these aspects of the former mayor's record. It is hard to see how he wins the nomination once they learn about them. In a three-way race, some people who prefer Romney to McCain will nonetheless back McCain to head off Giuliani. This year, then, a real threat to McCain has failed to materialize - and a fake one has replaced it.
McCain's apostasies from conservatism, unlike Giuliani's, are well known. The mayor's polls form a ceiling. McCain's could be a floor, if conservatives are willing to reconsider their view of him. If they do, then the current Giuliani moment will be succeeded by a McCain moment. I think conservatives will give him a second look - as they should.
It has become common to complain about the weak Republican field. Actually, it is a strong field. The three leading contenders are smart, competent, serious, articulate, and accomplished. (So is Newt Gingrich, who ranks fourth.) In some of these respects they exceed the incumbent. It just isn't a very orthodox field.
Romney, at least in his 2007 version, is the most conventionally conservative. If elected, he could make a fine president. But he has a big disadvantage as a presidential candidate: He is a Mormon. In December, a FoxNews poll found that 32 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a candidate if he were Mormon. Speculation about the effect of Romney's Mormonism on his chances has centered on evangelical Christians' theological differences with him. But evangelicals were only slightly more hostile to Mormon candidates than the population at large. Democrats were much more hostile. So even if Romney's conservative social positions get him through the primaries, his religion is a liability in the general election. (It may be that many secular-minded voters consider Mormonism particularly alien and threatening.)
This is unfair to Romney, and to his coreligionists. But this country has elected a non-Protestant president precisely once in its history. If the Republicans were going into 2008 with a large margin of error, it might be worth finding out how voters would react to a Mormon candidate. But Republicans are not going into this election in a strong position. Nominating a Mormon is too risky.
RUMBLES LEFT AND RIGHT
Most of McCain's conservative detractors concede that he would be a formidable candidate in November 2008. They question his ideological bona fides. But it would be a remarkably narrow definition of conservatism that excluded McCain.
"I think the important thing is you look at people's voting record," says McCain, "because sometimes rhetoric can be a little misleading." Over the course of his career, McCain has compiled a pretty conservative voting record. Neither Giuliani nor Romney, as McCain implied, has a record to match. An objective observer looking at Bush and McCain in 1999 would have had to conclude that, based on their histories, McCain was the more conservative of the two.
The senator's reputation changed during his exciting, disastrous 2000 presidential campaign. During the previous years, he had become a true believer in campaign-finance reform. His attack on monied special interests, and his bitterness at the Bush campaign's attacks on him, seemed to pull him left across the board: on tax cuts, on the environment, on health care. The effect was to enhance McCain's standing with independent voters and journalists while repelling conservatives. What further soured conservatives was that they were then starting, for the first time, to take a strongly negative view of campaign-finance reform, hardening into the conviction that it was an assault on free speech (and particularly on conservative organizations).
Independent voters and Democrats gave McCain some primary victories, but without Republicans he could not win the nomination. Still, he was America's most popular politician, and for the next few years he continued to play the "maverick" Republican - and to reap the rewards in his press clippings, which annoyed conservatives at least as much.
From 2004 onward, however, McCain has been moving rightward again, emphasizing his support for the Iraq War and the War on Terror. So far, this move appears to have cost him support among independent voters and reporters without buying him many friends on the right. Conservatives still have the impression of him they formed when he was tacking left. Besides, even in the last two years he has taken some stands to which a lot of conservatives object.
The good news for conservatives is that some of McCain's un-conservative positions concern trifling subjects, and some of them have little ongoing relevance. (Some of them are important, though, and I'll get to them later.) After 9/11, McCain shepherded a bill to federalize airport security through the Senate. That's not an issue that's going to come up again. The corporate-accounting scandals gave McCain an opportunity to rail against malefactors of great wealth, which he took. He zinged Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission for its inaction and urged more transparency in executive pay. But he gives no sign of itching to impose more regulations now. He supported a scheme of taxes and regulation to fight smoking. His bill didn't become law, but it is no longer an issue since most of its provisions were adopted by the states.
Even campaign-finance reform isn't the issue it once was. President Bush signed McCain's bill, and the senator says he doesn't want any more legislation. "I think that we need to give this law a chance to work." He doesn't think the Federal Election Commission needs any new powers, although, like most Republicans, he does want it to crack down on "527 groups" that fund political ads.
McCain supported a "patient's bill of rights" that would regulate HMOs. But that bill has gone nowhere, and even if it passed it would not be a large step toward socialized medicine. It was small change compared with the gargantuan Medicare prescription-drug entitlement of 2003. (President Bush, and many conservative congressmen, supported that bill; McCain voted against it.)
McCain wants to make people who buy guns at gun shows pass a background check, ending what he considers a loophole in current law. Gun-rights activists have strong objections to this proposal. But they will have to measure his offense against Giuliani's past, and never-repudiated, advocacy of licensing gun owners.
Some conservatives hold McCain's participation in the "Gang of 14" against him. In 2005, most Senate Republicans, frustrated by unprecedented Democratic filibusters against judicial nominees, wanted to change the rules to prevent such filibusters. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans reached an agreement: The Republicans would leave the rules alone so long as the Democrats used the filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances." There were good arguments for and against the deal, although there were no good arguments for the preening collective self-regard with which the 14 senators announced it. McCain notes that months after his intervention, the Senate confirmed both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He thinks it "would have been almost impossible" to confirm them in the aftermath of a bitter fight over a rules change. "That's why they called it the nuclear option, the Senate was about to blow up." Conservatives might disagree with that assessment, while still regarding it as the type of prudential calculation on which allies can disagree.
In 2005 and 2006, McCain differed with the Bush administration about how to interrogate suspected terrorists. The senator, having survived torture himself at the hands of the North Vietnamese, understandably wanted tough anti-torture language put into law. The administration worried that such language, particularly if susceptible to creative interpretation, might make it impossible to conduct coercive interrogations even if they fell short of torture. In the end, Republicans reached a deal that preserved tough interrogations while addressing McCain's concerns.
That leaves three substantial issues between McCain and conservatives. The first is global warming. McCain has been a believer throughout the Bush years. Most conservatives have associated the fight against global warming with environmental zealotry and overregulation. But McCain has tried to come up with a free-market solution, and he is now emphasizing nuclear power as a way to fuel this country without emitting greenhouse gases. "I don't often like to imitate the French," he says, but France is right to use nuclear power. His proposal, with Joe Lieberman, may not get the balance exactly correct, but right now it looks as though McCain was more prescient than most conservatives.
McCain was one of a few Republicans to vote against Bush's tax cuts. He said that the tax cuts were fiscally reckless and too skewed to the rich. But he now accepts those tax cuts as a done deal. Reversing them now, or allowing them to expire, would constitute a tax increase, and McCain has never voted for a general tax increase. When I ask him whether there were any circumstances in which he would accept a tax increase, for example to get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts, he says, "No. None. None." It seems pretty clear that a President McCain would seek spending cuts before tax cuts. But if you take him at his word - and he is a man who takes honor seriously - he won't raise taxes.
Finally, there is immigration. McCain sees eye to eye with Bush on this issue. He thinks a guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration, and that we should give illegal immigrants already here a path to citizenship since we aren't going to deport them all. A lot of conservatives want tougher border security, period. Nothing McCain can do now will please some of his critics. But if his bill passes this year, he may try to move on. Or he could try to mollify his reasonable critics by supporting an amendment. Last year, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia proposed that the bill's border-enforcement provisions go into effect first, and be shown to work, before illegal immigrants could start on their path to citizenship. McCain is open to the concept.
A SOCIAL CONSERVATIVE
McCain gets a bad rap from social conservatives. He opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment on the theory that states should set their own marriage policies. But he opposes same-sex marriage, too, and says that he would support a constitutional amendment if the federal courts ever tried to impose it on reluctant states. As a practical matter, it is hard to see how any president could get such an amendment enacted without that type of provocation.
The senator has been rock-solid on abortion. Unlike anyone else in the race, he has a pro-life record stretching back to the early 1980s. Like President Bush, he says that the Supreme Court made a mistake in Roe; he goes further than Bush when he adds that the Court should overturn it. He voted to confirm all of the sitting conservative justices, plus Robert Bork.
McCain muddied the waters with one foolish remark in 1999. He was trying to make the point that the country is not ready for abortion to be prohibited, but in the course of trying to say that he said that the country wasn't ready for Roe to go. He corrected himself quickly, but that lone remark has been used to portray him as a secret pro-choicer or a flip-flopper.
He really has broken ranks with pro-lifers twice. In the early 1990s, he voted to fund research using tissue from aborted fetuses, and he now supports federal funding for research on embryos taken from fertility clinics. But he draws the line at stem-cell research involving cloned human embryos. He says that he would prohibit that, even mistakenly claiming that he has co-sponsored legislation to that effect.
Social conservatives think that Republicans have repeatedly betrayed them. At the highest levels of national politics, that's not true. The reason that social conservatives haven't achieved many of their objectives even though they have helped to elect a lot of Republicans over the last generation is that those objectives are hard to achieve. It has been slow work to fight the pervasive liberalism of the elite legal culture. But when President Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy and the first President Bush appointed David Souter, they weren't trying to betray conservatives; they didn't know how those justices would turn out. McCain thinks that type of mistake can be avoided if presidents pick nominees who don't just say the right things, but have track records of judging soundly. He's right. Conservatives' reception of McCain shouldn't be colored by historical mythology.
For some conservatives, these discrete issues matter less than what they say about McCain's instincts. His friendly relations with journalists - one of his campaign aides was only half-joking in 2000 when he called the media McCain's "base" - often make conservatives suspicious. But McCain's steadfast support for the Iraq War, and his advocacy of the surge, belie the claim that he will do anything for good press.
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who has long clashed with McCain, says that the senator is worse than a flip-flopper: By voting right, tacking left, and then tacking right, he has shown himself to be devoid of principle. But as the foregoing review of his record suggests, most of McCain's zigzags have been matters of tone and emphasis, not changes of position. He hasn't switched his views as much as Romney or even Giuliani.
There are genuinely disconcerting elements to McCain's politics. He talks about cutting spending, but he rarely connects limited government to individual freedom. He is an inveterate moralist, which eludes many observers because he is concerned about honor rather than virtue. In many of the cases discussed earlier, his moralism slid very quickly into support for regulation: of campaign contributions, of tobacco, even of boxing. At times, his rhetoric about the need for individuals to subsume themselves in the life of the nation verges uncomfortably close to idolatry of the state.
But McCain's merits are considerable as well. He has been tough on spending, and been willing to ally with the most conservative members of the Senate to fight earmarks. He has been a stalwart free trader: "Since Phil Gramm left, there's no greater free-trader in the Senate than I am." (McCain supported Gramm's presidential campaign in 1996, and Gramm is supporting his now.) Curbing the growth of entitlements, he says, will be one of his top priorities as president. He has long supported personal accounts.
Leave all of that aside for a moment. For a lot of conservatives, the War on Terror is paramount. That's why some of them are willing to overlook Giuliani's faults. But if toughness on terrorism trumps everything else, with toughness defined as competent execution of the administration's basic strategy - and that's the way it has to be defined for this argument to work for Giuliani at all - then McCain is hands down the best candidate. He has better national-security credentials than Giuliani, having been involved in foreign policymaking for more than two decades while the latter has barely been involved at all. More than any other candidate, he has shown a commitment to winning in Iraq. He has supported it, indeed, more vigorously than Bush has waged it, and he has put his career on the line.
McCain has the moral authority to get a country that has grown tired of the war to listen to him, an authority President Bush has seen slip away. That isn't just because he is a former prisoner of war with one son serving in the Marines and another in the Naval Academy - although that helps. It is because he is not seen as playing politics with the war, as most Democrats and Republicans are, and he never will be.
Conservatives may need to reach some understandings with McCain before throwing their support to him: on the vice-presidential nominee, on immigration, maybe even on the number of terms McCain will serve as president. (He is 70.) But he can win both the nomination and the election. He is plenty conservative. And he deserves a long second look.
March 9, 2007
The Coming McCain Moment
National Review: The Coming McCain Moment
Taking a second look
By Ramesh PonnuruNational Review
"I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today," says Sen. John McCain, holding a copy of the paper with his picture on the front page. "McCain firm on Iraq war," it says above the fold. He flips it over to show the rest of the headline: "despite cost to candidacy." "I can't worry about it," he says. "With something like this, you just can't let it concern you. The issue is too important."
Actually, McCain's campaign is doing better than it seems to be. It is true that the unpopularity of the Iraq War, and specifically of the surge he has long advocated, is dragging his poll numbers down. It is true as well that in many polls he is now behind Rudolph Giuliani.
But Giuliani is a useful opponent for McCain. The good news of the senator's season is that another rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has so far failed to unite the Right behind him. In a McCain-Romney race, Romney would have most conservatives and portions of the party establishment behind him - and might win the nomination.
Giuliani is a different story. He supports taxpayer funding of abortion, sued gunmakers for selling guns, and went to court to keep New York City from giving the names of illegal immigrants to the federal government. Polls show that many Republican voters are unaware of these aspects of the former mayor's record. It is hard to see how he wins the nomination once they learn about them. In a three-way race, some people who prefer Romney to McCain will nonetheless back McCain to head off Giuliani. This year, then, a real threat to McCain has failed to materialize - and a fake one has replaced it.
McCain's apostasies from conservatism, unlike Giuliani's, are well known. The mayor's polls form a ceiling. McCain's could be a floor, if conservatives are willing to reconsider their view of him. If they do, then the current Giuliani moment will be succeeded by a McCain moment. I think conservatives will give him a second look - as they should.
It has become common to complain about the weak Republican field. Actually, it is a strong field. The three leading contenders are smart, competent, serious, articulate, and accomplished. (So is Newt Gingrich, who ranks fourth.) In some of these respects they exceed the incumbent. It just isn't a very orthodox field.
Romney, at least in his 2007 version, is the most conventionally conservative. If elected, he could make a fine president. But he has a big disadvantage as a presidential candidate: He is a Mormon. In December, a FoxNews poll found that 32 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a candidate if he were Mormon. Speculation about the effect of Romney's Mormonism on his chances has centered on evangelical Christians' theological differences with him. But evangelicals were only slightly more hostile to Mormon candidates than the population at large. Democrats were much more hostile. So even if Romney's conservative social positions get him through the primaries, his religion is a liability in the general election. (It may be that many secular-minded voters consider Mormonism particularly alien and threatening.)
This is unfair to Romney, and to his coreligionists. But this country has elected a non-Protestant president precisely once in its history. If the Republicans were going into 2008 with a large margin of error, it might be worth finding out how voters would react to a Mormon candidate. But Republicans are not going into this election in a strong position. Nominating a Mormon is too risky.
RUMBLES LEFT AND RIGHT
Most of McCain's conservative detractors concede that he would be a formidable candidate in November 2008. They question his ideological bona fides. But it would be a remarkably narrow definition of conservatism that excluded McCain.
"I think the important thing is you look at people's voting record," says McCain, "because sometimes rhetoric can be a little misleading." Over the course of his career, McCain has compiled a pretty conservative voting record. Neither Giuliani nor Romney, as McCain implied, has a record to match. An objective observer looking at Bush and McCain in 1999 would have had to conclude that, based on their histories, McCain was the more conservative of the two.
The senator's reputation changed during his exciting, disastrous 2000 presidential campaign. During the previous years, he had become a true believer in campaign-finance reform. His attack on monied special interests, and his bitterness at the Bush campaign's attacks on him, seemed to pull him left across the board: on tax cuts, on the environment, on health care. The effect was to enhance McCain's standing with independent voters and journalists while repelling conservatives. What further soured conservatives was that they were then starting, for the first time, to take a strongly negative view of campaign-finance reform, hardening into the conviction that it was an assault on free speech (and particularly on conservative organizations).
Independent voters and Democrats gave McCain some primary victories, but without Republicans he could not win the nomination. Still, he was America's most popular politician, and for the next few years he continued to play the "maverick" Republican - and to reap the rewards in his press clippings, which annoyed conservatives at least as much.
From 2004 onward, however, McCain has been moving rightward again, emphasizing his support for the Iraq War and the War on Terror. So far, this move appears to have cost him support among independent voters and reporters without buying him many friends on the right. Conservatives still have the impression of him they formed when he was tacking left. Besides, even in the last two years he has taken some stands to which a lot of conservatives object.
The good news for conservatives is that some of McCain's un-conservative positions concern trifling subjects, and some of them have little ongoing relevance. (Some of them are important, though, and I'll get to them later.) After 9/11, McCain shepherded a bill to federalize airport security through the Senate. That's not an issue that's going to come up again. The corporate-accounting scandals gave McCain an opportunity to rail against malefactors of great wealth, which he took. He zinged Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission for its inaction and urged more transparency in executive pay. But he gives no sign of itching to impose more regulations now. He supported a scheme of taxes and regulation to fight smoking. His bill didn't become law, but it is no longer an issue since most of its provisions were adopted by the states.
Even campaign-finance reform isn't the issue it once was. President Bush signed McCain's bill, and the senator says he doesn't want any more legislation. "I think that we need to give this law a chance to work." He doesn't think the Federal Election Commission needs any new powers, although, like most Republicans, he does want it to crack down on "527 groups" that fund political ads.
McCain supported a "patient's bill of rights" that would regulate HMOs. But that bill has gone nowhere, and even if it passed it would not be a large step toward socialized medicine. It was small change compared with the gargantuan Medicare prescription-drug entitlement of 2003. (President Bush, and many conservative congressmen, supported that bill; McCain voted against it.)
McCain wants to make people who buy guns at gun shows pass a background check, ending what he considers a loophole in current law. Gun-rights activists have strong objections to this proposal. But they will have to measure his offense against Giuliani's past, and never-repudiated, advocacy of licensing gun owners.
Some conservatives hold McCain's participation in the "Gang of 14" against him. In 2005, most Senate Republicans, frustrated by unprecedented Democratic filibusters against judicial nominees, wanted to change the rules to prevent such filibusters. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans reached an agreement: The Republicans would leave the rules alone so long as the Democrats used the filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances." There were good arguments for and against the deal, although there were no good arguments for the preening collective self-regard with which the 14 senators announced it. McCain notes that months after his intervention, the Senate confirmed both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He thinks it "would have been almost impossible" to confirm them in the aftermath of a bitter fight over a rules change. "That's why they called it the nuclear option, the Senate was about to blow up." Conservatives might disagree with that assessment, while still regarding it as the type of prudential calculation on which allies can disagree.
In 2005 and 2006, McCain differed with the Bush administration about how to interrogate suspected terrorists. The senator, having survived torture himself at the hands of the North Vietnamese, understandably wanted tough anti-torture language put into law. The administration worried that such language, particularly if susceptible to creative interpretation, might make it impossible to conduct coercive interrogations even if they fell short of torture. In the end, Republicans reached a deal that preserved tough interrogations while addressing McCain's concerns.
That leaves three substantial issues between McCain and conservatives. The first is global warming. McCain has been a believer throughout the Bush years. Most conservatives have associated the fight against global warming with environmental zealotry and overregulation. But McCain has tried to come up with a free-market solution, and he is now emphasizing nuclear power as a way to fuel this country without emitting greenhouse gases. "I don't often like to imitate the French," he says, but France is right to use nuclear power. His proposal, with Joe Lieberman, may not get the balance exactly correct, but right now it looks as though McCain was more prescient than most conservatives.
McCain was one of a few Republicans to vote against Bush's tax cuts. He said that the tax cuts were fiscally reckless and too skewed to the rich. But he now accepts those tax cuts as a done deal. Reversing them now, or allowing them to expire, would constitute a tax increase, and McCain has never voted for a general tax increase. When I ask him whether there were any circumstances in which he would accept a tax increase, for example to get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts, he says, "No. None. None." It seems pretty clear that a President McCain would seek spending cuts before tax cuts. But if you take him at his word - and he is a man who takes honor seriously - he won't raise taxes.
Finally, there is immigration. McCain sees eye to eye with Bush on this issue. He thinks a guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration, and that we should give illegal immigrants already here a path to citizenship since we aren't going to deport them all. A lot of conservatives want tougher border security, period. Nothing McCain can do now will please some of his critics. But if his bill passes this year, he may try to move on. Or he could try to mollify his reasonable critics by supporting an amendment. Last year, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia proposed that the bill's border-enforcement provisions go into effect first, and be shown to work, before illegal immigrants could start on their path to citizenship. McCain is open to the concept.
A SOCIAL CONSERVATIVE
McCain gets a bad rap from social conservatives. He opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment on the theory that states should set their own marriage policies. But he opposes same-sex marriage, too, and says that he would support a constitutional amendment if the federal courts ever tried to impose it on reluctant states. As a practical matter, it is hard to see how any president could get such an amendment enacted without that type of provocation.
The senator has been rock-solid on abortion. Unlike anyone else in the race, he has a pro-life record stretching back to the early 1980s. Like President Bush, he says that the Supreme Court made a mistake in Roe; he goes further than Bush when he adds that the Court should overturn it. He voted to confirm all of the sitting conservative justices, plus Robert Bork.
McCain muddied the waters with one foolish remark in 1999. He was trying to make the point that the country is not ready for abortion to be prohibited, but in the course of trying to say that he said that the country wasn't ready for Roe to go. He corrected himself quickly, but that lone remark has been used to portray him as a secret pro-choicer or a flip-flopper.
He really has broken ranks with pro-lifers twice. In the early 1990s, he voted to fund research using tissue from aborted fetuses, and he now supports federal funding for research on embryos taken from fertility clinics. But he draws the line at stem-cell research involving cloned human embryos. He says that he would prohibit that, even mistakenly claiming that he has co-sponsored legislation to that effect.
Social conservatives think that Republicans have repeatedly betrayed them. At the highest levels of national politics, that's not true. The reason that social conservatives haven't achieved many of their objectives even though they have helped to elect a lot of Republicans over the last generation is that those objectives are hard to achieve. It has been slow work to fight the pervasive liberalism of the elite legal culture. But when President Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy and the first President Bush appointed David Souter, they weren't trying to betray conservatives; they didn't know how those justices would turn out. McCain thinks that type of mistake can be avoided if presidents pick nominees who don't just say the right things, but have track records of judging soundly. He's right. Conservatives' reception of McCain shouldn't be colored by historical mythology.
For some conservatives, these discrete issues matter less than what they say about McCain's instincts. His friendly relations with journalists - one of his campaign aides was only half-joking in 2000 when he called the media McCain's "base" - often make conservatives suspicious. But McCain's steadfast support for the Iraq War, and his advocacy of the surge, belie the claim that he will do anything for good press.
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who has long clashed with McCain, says that the senator is worse than a flip-flopper: By voting right, tacking left, and then tacking right, he has shown himself to be devoid of principle. But as the foregoing review of his record suggests, most of McCain's zigzags have been matters of tone and emphasis, not changes of position. He hasn't switched his views as much as Romney or even Giuliani.
There are genuinely disconcerting elements to McCain's politics. He talks about cutting spending, but he rarely connects limited government to individual freedom. He is an inveterate moralist, which eludes many observers because he is concerned about honor rather than virtue. In many of the cases discussed earlier, his moralism slid very quickly into support for regulation: of campaign contributions, of tobacco, even of boxing. At times, his rhetoric about the need for individuals to subsume themselves in the life of the nation verges uncomfortably close to idolatry of the state.
But McCain's merits are considerable as well. He has been tough on spending, and been willing to ally with the most conservative members of the Senate to fight earmarks. He has been a stalwart free trader: "Since Phil Gramm left, there's no greater free-trader in the Senate than I am." (McCain supported Gramm's presidential campaign in 1996, and Gramm is supporting his now.) Curbing the growth of entitlements, he says, will be one of his top priorities as president. He has long supported personal accounts.
Leave all of that aside for a moment. For a lot of conservatives, the War on Terror is paramount. That's why some of them are willing to overlook Giuliani's faults. But if toughness on terrorism trumps everything else, with toughness defined as competent execution of the administration's basic strategy - and that's the way it has to be defined for this argument to work for Giuliani at all - then McCain is hands down the best candidate. He has better national-security credentials than Giuliani, having been involved in foreign policymaking for more than two decades while the latter has barely been involved at all. More than any other candidate, he has shown a commitment to winning in Iraq. He has supported it, indeed, more vigorously than Bush has waged it, and he has put his career on the line.
McCain has the moral authority to get a country that has grown tired of the war to listen to him, an authority President Bush has seen slip away. That isn't just because he is a former prisoner of war with one son serving in the Marines and another in the Naval Academy - although that helps. It is because he is not seen as playing politics with the war, as most Democrats and Republicans are, and he never will be.
Conservatives may need to reach some understandings with McCain before throwing their support to him: on the vice-presidential nominee, on immigration, maybe even on the number of terms McCain will serve as president. (He is 70.) But he can win both the nomination and the election. He is plenty conservative. And he deserves a long second look.
March 9, 2007
Taking a second look
By Ramesh PonnuruNational Review
"I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today," says Sen. John McCain, holding a copy of the paper with his picture on the front page. "McCain firm on Iraq war," it says above the fold. He flips it over to show the rest of the headline: "despite cost to candidacy." "I can't worry about it," he says. "With something like this, you just can't let it concern you. The issue is too important."
Actually, McCain's campaign is doing better than it seems to be. It is true that the unpopularity of the Iraq War, and specifically of the surge he has long advocated, is dragging his poll numbers down. It is true as well that in many polls he is now behind Rudolph Giuliani.
But Giuliani is a useful opponent for McCain. The good news of the senator's season is that another rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has so far failed to unite the Right behind him. In a McCain-Romney race, Romney would have most conservatives and portions of the party establishment behind him - and might win the nomination.
Giuliani is a different story. He supports taxpayer funding of abortion, sued gunmakers for selling guns, and went to court to keep New York City from giving the names of illegal immigrants to the federal government. Polls show that many Republican voters are unaware of these aspects of the former mayor's record. It is hard to see how he wins the nomination once they learn about them. In a three-way race, some people who prefer Romney to McCain will nonetheless back McCain to head off Giuliani. This year, then, a real threat to McCain has failed to materialize - and a fake one has replaced it.
McCain's apostasies from conservatism, unlike Giuliani's, are well known. The mayor's polls form a ceiling. McCain's could be a floor, if conservatives are willing to reconsider their view of him. If they do, then the current Giuliani moment will be succeeded by a McCain moment. I think conservatives will give him a second look - as they should.
It has become common to complain about the weak Republican field. Actually, it is a strong field. The three leading contenders are smart, competent, serious, articulate, and accomplished. (So is Newt Gingrich, who ranks fourth.) In some of these respects they exceed the incumbent. It just isn't a very orthodox field.
Romney, at least in his 2007 version, is the most conventionally conservative. If elected, he could make a fine president. But he has a big disadvantage as a presidential candidate: He is a Mormon. In December, a FoxNews poll found that 32 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a candidate if he were Mormon. Speculation about the effect of Romney's Mormonism on his chances has centered on evangelical Christians' theological differences with him. But evangelicals were only slightly more hostile to Mormon candidates than the population at large. Democrats were much more hostile. So even if Romney's conservative social positions get him through the primaries, his religion is a liability in the general election. (It may be that many secular-minded voters consider Mormonism particularly alien and threatening.)
This is unfair to Romney, and to his coreligionists. But this country has elected a non-Protestant president precisely once in its history. If the Republicans were going into 2008 with a large margin of error, it might be worth finding out how voters would react to a Mormon candidate. But Republicans are not going into this election in a strong position. Nominating a Mormon is too risky.
RUMBLES LEFT AND RIGHT
Most of McCain's conservative detractors concede that he would be a formidable candidate in November 2008. They question his ideological bona fides. But it would be a remarkably narrow definition of conservatism that excluded McCain.
"I think the important thing is you look at people's voting record," says McCain, "because sometimes rhetoric can be a little misleading." Over the course of his career, McCain has compiled a pretty conservative voting record. Neither Giuliani nor Romney, as McCain implied, has a record to match. An objective observer looking at Bush and McCain in 1999 would have had to conclude that, based on their histories, McCain was the more conservative of the two.
The senator's reputation changed during his exciting, disastrous 2000 presidential campaign. During the previous years, he had become a true believer in campaign-finance reform. His attack on monied special interests, and his bitterness at the Bush campaign's attacks on him, seemed to pull him left across the board: on tax cuts, on the environment, on health care. The effect was to enhance McCain's standing with independent voters and journalists while repelling conservatives. What further soured conservatives was that they were then starting, for the first time, to take a strongly negative view of campaign-finance reform, hardening into the conviction that it was an assault on free speech (and particularly on conservative organizations).
Independent voters and Democrats gave McCain some primary victories, but without Republicans he could not win the nomination. Still, he was America's most popular politician, and for the next few years he continued to play the "maverick" Republican - and to reap the rewards in his press clippings, which annoyed conservatives at least as much.
From 2004 onward, however, McCain has been moving rightward again, emphasizing his support for the Iraq War and the War on Terror. So far, this move appears to have cost him support among independent voters and reporters without buying him many friends on the right. Conservatives still have the impression of him they formed when he was tacking left. Besides, even in the last two years he has taken some stands to which a lot of conservatives object.
The good news for conservatives is that some of McCain's un-conservative positions concern trifling subjects, and some of them have little ongoing relevance. (Some of them are important, though, and I'll get to them later.) After 9/11, McCain shepherded a bill to federalize airport security through the Senate. That's not an issue that's going to come up again. The corporate-accounting scandals gave McCain an opportunity to rail against malefactors of great wealth, which he took. He zinged Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission for its inaction and urged more transparency in executive pay. But he gives no sign of itching to impose more regulations now. He supported a scheme of taxes and regulation to fight smoking. His bill didn't become law, but it is no longer an issue since most of its provisions were adopted by the states.
Even campaign-finance reform isn't the issue it once was. President Bush signed McCain's bill, and the senator says he doesn't want any more legislation. "I think that we need to give this law a chance to work." He doesn't think the Federal Election Commission needs any new powers, although, like most Republicans, he does want it to crack down on "527 groups" that fund political ads.
McCain supported a "patient's bill of rights" that would regulate HMOs. But that bill has gone nowhere, and even if it passed it would not be a large step toward socialized medicine. It was small change compared with the gargantuan Medicare prescription-drug entitlement of 2003. (President Bush, and many conservative congressmen, supported that bill; McCain voted against it.)
McCain wants to make people who buy guns at gun shows pass a background check, ending what he considers a loophole in current law. Gun-rights activists have strong objections to this proposal. But they will have to measure his offense against Giuliani's past, and never-repudiated, advocacy of licensing gun owners.
Some conservatives hold McCain's participation in the "Gang of 14" against him. In 2005, most Senate Republicans, frustrated by unprecedented Democratic filibusters against judicial nominees, wanted to change the rules to prevent such filibusters. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans reached an agreement: The Republicans would leave the rules alone so long as the Democrats used the filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances." There were good arguments for and against the deal, although there were no good arguments for the preening collective self-regard with which the 14 senators announced it. McCain notes that months after his intervention, the Senate confirmed both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He thinks it "would have been almost impossible" to confirm them in the aftermath of a bitter fight over a rules change. "That's why they called it the nuclear option, the Senate was about to blow up." Conservatives might disagree with that assessment, while still regarding it as the type of prudential calculation on which allies can disagree.
In 2005 and 2006, McCain differed with the Bush administration about how to interrogate suspected terrorists. The senator, having survived torture himself at the hands of the North Vietnamese, understandably wanted tough anti-torture language put into law. The administration worried that such language, particularly if susceptible to creative interpretation, might make it impossible to conduct coercive interrogations even if they fell short of torture. In the end, Republicans reached a deal that preserved tough interrogations while addressing McCain's concerns.
That leaves three substantial issues between McCain and conservatives. The first is global warming. McCain has been a believer throughout the Bush years. Most conservatives have associated the fight against global warming with environmental zealotry and overregulation. But McCain has tried to come up with a free-market solution, and he is now emphasizing nuclear power as a way to fuel this country without emitting greenhouse gases. "I don't often like to imitate the French," he says, but France is right to use nuclear power. His proposal, with Joe Lieberman, may not get the balance exactly correct, but right now it looks as though McCain was more prescient than most conservatives.
McCain was one of a few Republicans to vote against Bush's tax cuts. He said that the tax cuts were fiscally reckless and too skewed to the rich. But he now accepts those tax cuts as a done deal. Reversing them now, or allowing them to expire, would constitute a tax increase, and McCain has never voted for a general tax increase. When I ask him whether there were any circumstances in which he would accept a tax increase, for example to get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts, he says, "No. None. None." It seems pretty clear that a President McCain would seek spending cuts before tax cuts. But if you take him at his word - and he is a man who takes honor seriously - he won't raise taxes.
Finally, there is immigration. McCain sees eye to eye with Bush on this issue. He thinks a guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration, and that we should give illegal immigrants already here a path to citizenship since we aren't going to deport them all. A lot of conservatives want tougher border security, period. Nothing McCain can do now will please some of his critics. But if his bill passes this year, he may try to move on. Or he could try to mollify his reasonable critics by supporting an amendment. Last year, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia proposed that the bill's border-enforcement provisions go into effect first, and be shown to work, before illegal immigrants could start on their path to citizenship. McCain is open to the concept.
A SOCIAL CONSERVATIVE
McCain gets a bad rap from social conservatives. He opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment on the theory that states should set their own marriage policies. But he opposes same-sex marriage, too, and says that he would support a constitutional amendment if the federal courts ever tried to impose it on reluctant states. As a practical matter, it is hard to see how any president could get such an amendment enacted without that type of provocation.
The senator has been rock-solid on abortion. Unlike anyone else in the race, he has a pro-life record stretching back to the early 1980s. Like President Bush, he says that the Supreme Court made a mistake in Roe; he goes further than Bush when he adds that the Court should overturn it. He voted to confirm all of the sitting conservative justices, plus Robert Bork.
McCain muddied the waters with one foolish remark in 1999. He was trying to make the point that the country is not ready for abortion to be prohibited, but in the course of trying to say that he said that the country wasn't ready for Roe to go. He corrected himself quickly, but that lone remark has been used to portray him as a secret pro-choicer or a flip-flopper.
He really has broken ranks with pro-lifers twice. In the early 1990s, he voted to fund research using tissue from aborted fetuses, and he now supports federal funding for research on embryos taken from fertility clinics. But he draws the line at stem-cell research involving cloned human embryos. He says that he would prohibit that, even mistakenly claiming that he has co-sponsored legislation to that effect.
Social conservatives think that Republicans have repeatedly betrayed them. At the highest levels of national politics, that's not true. The reason that social conservatives haven't achieved many of their objectives even though they have helped to elect a lot of Republicans over the last generation is that those objectives are hard to achieve. It has been slow work to fight the pervasive liberalism of the elite legal culture. But when President Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy and the first President Bush appointed David Souter, they weren't trying to betray conservatives; they didn't know how those justices would turn out. McCain thinks that type of mistake can be avoided if presidents pick nominees who don't just say the right things, but have track records of judging soundly. He's right. Conservatives' reception of McCain shouldn't be colored by historical mythology.
For some conservatives, these discrete issues matter less than what they say about McCain's instincts. His friendly relations with journalists - one of his campaign aides was only half-joking in 2000 when he called the media McCain's "base" - often make conservatives suspicious. But McCain's steadfast support for the Iraq War, and his advocacy of the surge, belie the claim that he will do anything for good press.
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who has long clashed with McCain, says that the senator is worse than a flip-flopper: By voting right, tacking left, and then tacking right, he has shown himself to be devoid of principle. But as the foregoing review of his record suggests, most of McCain's zigzags have been matters of tone and emphasis, not changes of position. He hasn't switched his views as much as Romney or even Giuliani.
There are genuinely disconcerting elements to McCain's politics. He talks about cutting spending, but he rarely connects limited government to individual freedom. He is an inveterate moralist, which eludes many observers because he is concerned about honor rather than virtue. In many of the cases discussed earlier, his moralism slid very quickly into support for regulation: of campaign contributions, of tobacco, even of boxing. At times, his rhetoric about the need for individuals to subsume themselves in the life of the nation verges uncomfortably close to idolatry of the state.
But McCain's merits are considerable as well. He has been tough on spending, and been willing to ally with the most conservative members of the Senate to fight earmarks. He has been a stalwart free trader: "Since Phil Gramm left, there's no greater free-trader in the Senate than I am." (McCain supported Gramm's presidential campaign in 1996, and Gramm is supporting his now.) Curbing the growth of entitlements, he says, will be one of his top priorities as president. He has long supported personal accounts.
Leave all of that aside for a moment. For a lot of conservatives, the War on Terror is paramount. That's why some of them are willing to overlook Giuliani's faults. But if toughness on terrorism trumps everything else, with toughness defined as competent execution of the administration's basic strategy - and that's the way it has to be defined for this argument to work for Giuliani at all - then McCain is hands down the best candidate. He has better national-security credentials than Giuliani, having been involved in foreign policymaking for more than two decades while the latter has barely been involved at all. More than any other candidate, he has shown a commitment to winning in Iraq. He has supported it, indeed, more vigorously than Bush has waged it, and he has put his career on the line.
McCain has the moral authority to get a country that has grown tired of the war to listen to him, an authority President Bush has seen slip away. That isn't just because he is a former prisoner of war with one son serving in the Marines and another in the Naval Academy - although that helps. It is because he is not seen as playing politics with the war, as most Democrats and Republicans are, and he never will be.
Conservatives may need to reach some understandings with McCain before throwing their support to him: on the vice-presidential nominee, on immigration, maybe even on the number of terms McCain will serve as president. (He is 70.) But he can win both the nomination and the election. He is plenty conservative. And he deserves a long second look.
March 9, 2007
Thursday, March 08, 2007
The Issue of Immigration
John McCain: On immigration, Washington is failing the American people
By SEN. JOHN MCCAIN Tuesday, Mar. 6, 2007
AMONG THE federal government's most important obligations is to secure America's borders and enforce sensible immigration laws that will keep our nation strong and safe. For far too long, Washington has failed miserably in this vital responsibility. An estimated 12 million people live in the United States illegally -- a problem affecting every state in the union.
Coming from a border state, I have seen firsthand the effect that illegal immigration has on our communities and public services, the rampant exploitation of those who traffic in illegal aliens, and the tragic loss of life that so often attends this enduring problem. As a country devoted to the rule of law, fairness and opportunity, the status quo is simply unacceptable. We know that most illegal aliens are drawn to the United States in the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their families. Many of our own ancestors came for the very same reason. But we also know that others come to do America harm and will exploit any weakness or loophole to achieve their malignant objectives.
The truth is that our nation's porous borders and failed immigration policies are a national disgrace, adversely affecting both our economic prospects and national security. A comprehensive immigration control plan that works is long overdue.
To achieve our objectives, America needs the strong reform I've proposed that will:
Vastly improve our border surveillance and enforcement capabilities;
Increase the manpower, infrastructure and capabilities necessary to block, apprehend, detain and return those who try to enter the country illegally; Strengthen the laws and penalties against those who hire illegal aliens and violate immigration law; Achieve and maintain the integrity of official documents to stop fraud, verify immigration status and employment, and enforce immigration law; Encourage immigrants to come out of the shadows so we know who is in this country and develop a sensible guest worker program that will serve the nation's best economic and security interests.
We must devote the resources necessary to do the job right, and our efforts must be sustained. Imagine what we could achieve if we spent less money on pork barrel schemes such as "bridges to nowhere" and more on enforcing our immigration laws and other homeland security imperatives.
The need to bring illegal immigrants out of hiding and end the defacto amnesty that is the status quo is more important than ever in this post-9/11 era of terrorist threat. But this effort must never entail giving away citizenship to those who have broken our laws. Rather it should require those who voluntarily come forward to undertake the hard work of reparation and assimilation that we expect.
Legitimate status must be earned by paying stiff fines and back taxes, undergoing criminal and security checks, passing English and civics tests, remaining employed for six years before going to the back of the line to achieve legal permanent residence status, and adhering to other strict requirements.
Such a program is necessary if we are to protect our country from terrorism and crime by enabling the Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement to focus their resources more effectively where they are most needed, and that is on those who choose to remain hidden because they mean to do us harm.
Above all we must be honest and realistic if we are to achieve both the economic and national security we desire. The straight talk of the matter is that as long as there are jobs in the United States that would otherwise go unfilled, illegal immigrants will come, and the economy will eagerly absorb them, no matter what the obstacles. We are willfully abetting a system that is broken and invites the violation of our immigration laws, the manipulation of vulnerable populations and a degradation of national security.
Rather than tolerating the continued chaos promised by business as usual, we need an orderly system that matches jobs that would otherwise go wanting with a well managed guest worker program that ensures we know exactly who our guests are, why they are here, and for how long. Border security and immigration reform must go hand- in -hand. History has shown us that one will simply never succeed without the other.
I truly believe that Americans want and demand that our leaders work together to solve pressing problems rather than persist in empty rhetoric and petty political gamesmanship. By staying true to our principles, exercising common sense and American resolve, we are up to the job of controlling our borders, keeping our economy on the rise, and making the nation safe in an exceedingly dangerous world.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, is running for the Republican presidential nomination.
By SEN. JOHN MCCAIN Tuesday, Mar. 6, 2007
AMONG THE federal government's most important obligations is to secure America's borders and enforce sensible immigration laws that will keep our nation strong and safe. For far too long, Washington has failed miserably in this vital responsibility. An estimated 12 million people live in the United States illegally -- a problem affecting every state in the union.
Coming from a border state, I have seen firsthand the effect that illegal immigration has on our communities and public services, the rampant exploitation of those who traffic in illegal aliens, and the tragic loss of life that so often attends this enduring problem. As a country devoted to the rule of law, fairness and opportunity, the status quo is simply unacceptable. We know that most illegal aliens are drawn to the United States in the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their families. Many of our own ancestors came for the very same reason. But we also know that others come to do America harm and will exploit any weakness or loophole to achieve their malignant objectives.
The truth is that our nation's porous borders and failed immigration policies are a national disgrace, adversely affecting both our economic prospects and national security. A comprehensive immigration control plan that works is long overdue.
To achieve our objectives, America needs the strong reform I've proposed that will:
Vastly improve our border surveillance and enforcement capabilities;
Increase the manpower, infrastructure and capabilities necessary to block, apprehend, detain and return those who try to enter the country illegally; Strengthen the laws and penalties against those who hire illegal aliens and violate immigration law; Achieve and maintain the integrity of official documents to stop fraud, verify immigration status and employment, and enforce immigration law; Encourage immigrants to come out of the shadows so we know who is in this country and develop a sensible guest worker program that will serve the nation's best economic and security interests.
We must devote the resources necessary to do the job right, and our efforts must be sustained. Imagine what we could achieve if we spent less money on pork barrel schemes such as "bridges to nowhere" and more on enforcing our immigration laws and other homeland security imperatives.
The need to bring illegal immigrants out of hiding and end the defacto amnesty that is the status quo is more important than ever in this post-9/11 era of terrorist threat. But this effort must never entail giving away citizenship to those who have broken our laws. Rather it should require those who voluntarily come forward to undertake the hard work of reparation and assimilation that we expect.
Legitimate status must be earned by paying stiff fines and back taxes, undergoing criminal and security checks, passing English and civics tests, remaining employed for six years before going to the back of the line to achieve legal permanent residence status, and adhering to other strict requirements.
Such a program is necessary if we are to protect our country from terrorism and crime by enabling the Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement to focus their resources more effectively where they are most needed, and that is on those who choose to remain hidden because they mean to do us harm.
Above all we must be honest and realistic if we are to achieve both the economic and national security we desire. The straight talk of the matter is that as long as there are jobs in the United States that would otherwise go unfilled, illegal immigrants will come, and the economy will eagerly absorb them, no matter what the obstacles. We are willfully abetting a system that is broken and invites the violation of our immigration laws, the manipulation of vulnerable populations and a degradation of national security.
Rather than tolerating the continued chaos promised by business as usual, we need an orderly system that matches jobs that would otherwise go wanting with a well managed guest worker program that ensures we know exactly who our guests are, why they are here, and for how long. Border security and immigration reform must go hand- in -hand. History has shown us that one will simply never succeed without the other.
I truly believe that Americans want and demand that our leaders work together to solve pressing problems rather than persist in empty rhetoric and petty political gamesmanship. By staying true to our principles, exercising common sense and American resolve, we are up to the job of controlling our borders, keeping our economy on the rise, and making the nation safe in an exceedingly dangerous world.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, is running for the Republican presidential nomination.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Right on McCain: John McCain's Conservative Record is Excellent
By Senator Jon Kyl (from National Review Online)
I have had the distinct pleasure of serving with Senator John McCain for the last 12 years in the U.S. Senate. Yet just as important to me as our shared years of service is our common respect for the conservative principles that have guided us in representing our state. That is why the characterization of John McCain as something other than a common-sense conservative is disturbing to me. Senator McCain’s detractors overlook his actual voting record of supporting conservative values.
During my time in the Senate with John McCain, we have cast the same vote nearly nine times out of ten. Whether in our efforts against inefficiency and waste in the federal budget, confronting the threat we face from international terrorism, protecting the sanctity of human life, or some other issue, Senator McCain has been loyal to, and a leader for, conservative beliefs. Senator McCain is well known for his long history of protecting the interests of the American taxpayer. He is without question the best choice for voters opposed to wasteful Washington spending and bloated budgets. Last year, Senator McCain introduced the Pork-Barrel Reduction Act, a bill focused on transparency and fiscal restraint. In 2005, Senator McCain and I were two of the four senators to vote against the pork-laden highway bill. During the 109th Congress, Citizens Against Government Waste gave McCain a 91 percent rating, and Pork Busters, a collaboration of fiscal-watchdog groups, labeled him as an “Anti-Pork Hero” in 2006. Conservatives should be outraged about the wasteful spending in Washington, and they should be exacting in their demand for a culture of fiscal restraint. John McCain meets this demand.On the ever-important issue of life, Senator McCain has a record of voting for pro-life legislation: He has voted for bans on partial birth abortion; he has supported the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act” and parental notification for minors; and he has voted against using federal money to distribute morning-after contraception in schools. He has repeatedly co-sponsored the Child Custody Protection Act, which prohibits the transportation of minors across state lines in order to circumvent state laws, requiring instead the involvement of parents in abortion decisions. What do pro-abortion groups think of Senator McCain? NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have both given him zero percent, no-confidence ratings because he has stood up against them for decades. John McCain’s opposition to abortion has been consistent.
Senator McCain also strongly believes in the institution of marriage. He voted for and supported the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of gay marriage and same-sex partner benefits. Senator McCain endorsed and campaigned for an initiative to amend the Arizona constitution to define marriage as between one man and woman. The defining issue for any candidate who seeks the presidency next year will be that person’s vision for conducting the war against terrorists and our mission in Iraq; there is no one stronger on this issue, or with more credibility, than John McCain.
His support for a safe and secure Middle East is well documented. And Senator McCain’s belief in the relationship between our eventual success in that region and our safety at home is one that I share.Most conservatives believe in aggressive pursuit of terrorists and jihadists. But John McCain has been willing to put his political career on the line for the sake of his belief that these terrorists must be defeated. As the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain has long been an outspoken critic of the management of the war, and there is plenty to criticize on that score. But Senator McCain has also been stronger than all others in his belief in the absolute importance of victory and in his own principled dedication to seeking peace and security over the political expediency of defeatism. Conservatives who believe deeply in the responsibility to defend our country know that no leadership trait is more vital to our next president. More than any other reason, this is why conservatives should support John McCain. In matters of national security, he instinctively understands threats to the United States, and he knows what needs to be done about them.
Even in the face of political adversity, he is unwavering in his commitment to America’s security.
— Jon Kyl is a Republican senator from Arizona.
I have had the distinct pleasure of serving with Senator John McCain for the last 12 years in the U.S. Senate. Yet just as important to me as our shared years of service is our common respect for the conservative principles that have guided us in representing our state. That is why the characterization of John McCain as something other than a common-sense conservative is disturbing to me. Senator McCain’s detractors overlook his actual voting record of supporting conservative values.
During my time in the Senate with John McCain, we have cast the same vote nearly nine times out of ten. Whether in our efforts against inefficiency and waste in the federal budget, confronting the threat we face from international terrorism, protecting the sanctity of human life, or some other issue, Senator McCain has been loyal to, and a leader for, conservative beliefs. Senator McCain is well known for his long history of protecting the interests of the American taxpayer. He is without question the best choice for voters opposed to wasteful Washington spending and bloated budgets. Last year, Senator McCain introduced the Pork-Barrel Reduction Act, a bill focused on transparency and fiscal restraint. In 2005, Senator McCain and I were two of the four senators to vote against the pork-laden highway bill. During the 109th Congress, Citizens Against Government Waste gave McCain a 91 percent rating, and Pork Busters, a collaboration of fiscal-watchdog groups, labeled him as an “Anti-Pork Hero” in 2006. Conservatives should be outraged about the wasteful spending in Washington, and they should be exacting in their demand for a culture of fiscal restraint. John McCain meets this demand.On the ever-important issue of life, Senator McCain has a record of voting for pro-life legislation: He has voted for bans on partial birth abortion; he has supported the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act” and parental notification for minors; and he has voted against using federal money to distribute morning-after contraception in schools. He has repeatedly co-sponsored the Child Custody Protection Act, which prohibits the transportation of minors across state lines in order to circumvent state laws, requiring instead the involvement of parents in abortion decisions. What do pro-abortion groups think of Senator McCain? NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have both given him zero percent, no-confidence ratings because he has stood up against them for decades. John McCain’s opposition to abortion has been consistent.
Senator McCain also strongly believes in the institution of marriage. He voted for and supported the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of gay marriage and same-sex partner benefits. Senator McCain endorsed and campaigned for an initiative to amend the Arizona constitution to define marriage as between one man and woman. The defining issue for any candidate who seeks the presidency next year will be that person’s vision for conducting the war against terrorists and our mission in Iraq; there is no one stronger on this issue, or with more credibility, than John McCain.
His support for a safe and secure Middle East is well documented. And Senator McCain’s belief in the relationship between our eventual success in that region and our safety at home is one that I share.Most conservatives believe in aggressive pursuit of terrorists and jihadists. But John McCain has been willing to put his political career on the line for the sake of his belief that these terrorists must be defeated. As the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain has long been an outspoken critic of the management of the war, and there is plenty to criticize on that score. But Senator McCain has also been stronger than all others in his belief in the absolute importance of victory and in his own principled dedication to seeking peace and security over the political expediency of defeatism. Conservatives who believe deeply in the responsibility to defend our country know that no leadership trait is more vital to our next president. More than any other reason, this is why conservatives should support John McCain. In matters of national security, he instinctively understands threats to the United States, and he knows what needs to be done about them.
Even in the face of political adversity, he is unwavering in his commitment to America’s security.
— Jon Kyl is a Republican senator from Arizona.
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