POLITICS - McCain's Evolution
08-04-2001
POLITICS: McCain's Evolution
One might expect Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to get testy when quizzed
about his apparent shift in political philosophy. His short fuse, after
all, is legendary. And some of his confidants have said that he has been
angered by the recent potshots, aimed at him by right-wing groups and
Senate Republican colleagues, claiming that he has abandoned his
conservative ideological moorings by working closely with Democrats on
liberal legislation.
But as McCain responded to a barrage of such questions recently during a
lengthy interview in his office, he was far more introspective than he
appeared to be in the past. His words were more carefully chosen. He
seemed not quite so impulsive. More controlled.
"I haven't changed a lot in my time in Congress," McCain said.
"But one thing I have learned, at some cost, is do not show anger and
do not get personal. Obviously, I've failed from time to time, but I ...
don't think you could find anybody, since I returned from the presidential
campaign, that will tell you that I had a temper tantrum or an outburst.
Because I just don't do it. It's nonproductive, and it's harmful to the
furtherance of your causes."
As for the suggestions that he has undergone some ideological
transformation, McCain insisted that folks are seeing something that
simply is not there. "I am fundamentally, philosophically, the same
person that I have been," he maintained. "I don't think my
shifts have been that significant."
In fact, McCain has undergone a significant shift, but not really the kind
that his conservative critics accuse him of. Since returning to the Senate
in the aftermath of his presidential bid last year, McCain has displayed a
more measured demeanor and a more pragmatic approach to legislating. No
longer does he seem so interested in taking a purist stance. Instead of
drawing a line in the sand and daring his colleagues to cross it, he has
taken advantage of the fortuity of a closely divided Senate to build
coalitions and try to get things done.
As he prepares to turn 65 later this month, McCain is focused on enacting
a populist agenda that includes giving patients broad new powers to sue
their health plans and requiring purchasers of weapons at gun shows to
submit to background checks. In the process, he is more willing than ever
to make the compromises needed to win votes, as he did on campaign finance
reform legislation, a cause he has relentlessly pushed for years. Before
the Senate passed the bill in April, McCain and Sen. Russell Feingold,
D-Wis., scaled it back considerably to attract additional
supporters.
"He has become a real legislator, sort of a crafty, skillful,
controlled but potent legislator," said Thomas E. Mann, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution. "In past years, he would have
allowed his hyperbolic rhetoric to get in the way of doing the work needed
to build the support inside that he needed to build."
In his earlier days in Congress, the former naval aviator who was
acclaimed as a hero after enduring five and a half years as a prisoner of
war in Vietnam seemed to revel in standing alone. Time and again,
McCain-who was first elected to the House in 1982 and to the Senate in
1986-made painfully clear that he could not stomach the culture of
Washington.
Take his approach during the debate over the sweeping telecommunications
legislation that was enacted in 1996. He not only cast the sole Republican
vote against the final bill, he scolded those who negotiated compromises
to secure its passage. In McCain's view, then-Senate Majority Whip Trent
Lott, R-Miss., was so caught up in the wheeling and dealing that he
jettisoned core deregulatory principles. "This is a clear example of
what is wrong with the way we do business in Washington," McCain
snapped on the Senate floor. "In the face of principle, we now
compromise.... Let us have a bad deal, but it is better than no deal at
all."
That sort of behavior has smacked of self-righteousness to some of
McCain's congressional colleagues over the years. He himself frequently
jokes that he is not exactly viewed as "Miss Congeniality" in
the Senate. But until recently, Republican leaders could dismiss McCain's
maverick ways as-at most-an irritant.
After all, Congress overwhelmingly passed the telecommunications
legislation that he so vigorously attacked. And even though McCain has
consistently derided his colleagues' efforts to secure federal funds for
projects back home, he's had little success in actually curbing what he
sees as "pork." Similarly, his long crusade for campaign finance
reform seemed quixotic, as the legislation died time and again.
Now, McCain is suddenly a force that his fellow Republicans cannot ignore.
Not only did he engineer the Senate's passage of the campaign finance
reform bill in April, he played a key role in pushing patients' rights
legislation through the chamber in June. The congressional GOP hierarchy
and President Bush opposed both measures.
Ironically, the more success that McCain is enjoying as a legislator, the
more isolated he is becoming in the Senate Republican Conference. And
conservative interest groups now view him as having committed nothing
short of apostasy. The more he works with Democrats to find common ground
on legislation, the more his Republican critics label him a
turncoat.
But their critique simply does not wash when viewed against the totality
of McCain's voting record. Although various surveys of his voting patterns
since he joined Congress in 1983 show some fluctuations, he has remained
fairly consistently conservative. For instance, National Journal's vote
ratings show that he voted less conservatively on economic issues in 2000
than in any other year, but that his positions on social and foreign
policy issues have remained roughly the same. Other surveys also show no
dramatic turnabout.
Moreover, McCain's aides point to a raft of issues-from his support of
missile defense, free trade, reducing government spending, and partially
privatizing Social Security, as well as his votes to confirm all of Bush's
nominees-to show that the Arizona Senator's views are in step with those
of the Administration and most Republicans on Capitol Hill. And over the
past two weeks on the Senate floor, McCain and Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas,
worked strenuously to defend Bush's plan to allow Mexican trucks to drive
throughout the United States after January 1.
So what can explain why John McCain is who he is today? His detractors say
that he has been so driven by an overweening desire to be on center stage,
in front of a camera, that he has been willing to jettison his
conservative principles in order to attract the klieg lights.
Yet some of those close to McCain say that he has undergone a more
heartfelt, and less premeditated, evolution. They suggest that searing
personal events have greatly influenced him and have had a greater impact
on his approach to certain high-profile issues than has any commitment to
a rigid ideology.
To these allies, McCain's days in Vietnam are the key to understanding his
staunch advocacy of a strong military, as well as his chary approach to
the deployment of U.S. troops overseas. They argue that the 1990-91 Senate
investigation into allegations that he improperly tried to influence
federal regulators on behalf of Charles H. Keating Jr.-a crooked savings
and loan operator and campaign contributor-made him a zealot on campaign
finance reform. And they say that McCain's travels along the presidential
campaign trail last year heightened his sensitivity to such popular issues
as patients' rights because he listened to Americans' horror stories of
unresponsive health maintenance organizations.
Others still believe that McCain has willfully set out on a much broader
endeavor: "a thorough critique of the shortcomings of contemporary
conservatism," in the words of Will Marshall, who is president of the
Progressive Policy Institute and is working with McCain on national
service legislation that builds on the idea of AmeriCorps. McCain, said
Marshall, seems to be "groping toward a new synthesis, or a more
muscular conservatism, that is more than the sum of anti-government
reflexes and religious conservatism."
"There is obviously a strong antipathy to the whole money nexus, and
the Republican connection to Big Business and Big Money," Marshall
added. "McCain is saying, `Look, we have to all think about things
larger than ourselves and beyond our own gratification.' "
When McCain was pressed during the recent interview about his
co-sponsorship of so many bills that are high on the Democrats' wish
lists, he continued to insist that his philosophy has not changed
significantly. But then he elaborated: "In the interest of straight
talk, am I the same legislator I was in 1983 when I first came? I hope
not. I hope I have learned. I hope that my experience has broadened. I
hope that I have become a person of greater understanding and knowledge.
But are my fundamental, core philosophical beliefs the same? I believe
so."
Republican Rumblings
Notwithstanding McCain's protestations that he is maintaining an
essentially steady course, a firestorm of criticism has erupted from those
who believe that over the past two decades, he has done a 180-degree turn
on his principles. These critics point first to McCain's high-profile
co-sponsorship of campaign finance reform, sweeping patients' rights
legislation, and a bill to close the gun show loophole, the latter of
which has yet to see Senate action.
Other things that stick in the craw of some Republican hard-liners include
McCain's work to help the generic drug industry compete with brand-name
firms, and his decision to reverse himself and support embryonic stem-cell
research after hearing the pleas of those hit by diseases such as
Parkinson's, including family members of his old friend, the late Rep.
Morris Udall, D-Ariz. And McCain's critics note that his effort to promote
a broad national-service measure is an outgrowth of President Clinton's
AmeriCorps, which the Senator opposed when it was proposed in
1993.
This montage of causes suggests to some that the old reliable conservative
has abandoned his long-held ideological compass. The coup de grace came in
May, when McCain joined just one other Senate Republican-Lincoln D. Chafee
of Rhode Island-to oppose the final version of Bush's $1.35 trillion tax
cut. That move startled the party's true believers, who view the issue as
a virtual litmus test for loyalty. As much of a maverick as McCain may
have been before, never had he voted to kill a proposal to slash
taxes.
Some rabble-rousers in Arizona have been so angered by some of McCain's
actions that they have launched an extremely long-shot effort to recall
him. The fact that he remains an exceedingly popular figure back in cactus
country has not diminished the fervor with which Marcia Regan, the
chairwoman of the "Recall John McCain Committee" in Phoenix, is
pursuing her cause. "The last straw was when he voted against the tax
cut," Regan said in an interview. "We saw that as a definite
shift in what we thought a conservative Republican would do."
Randall Gnant, the Republican who is president of the Arizona Senate,
suggested that the recall group is on the fringes. He ticked off the names
of some of the establishments where the petitions to recall McCain are
available to sign: Slash K Guns, Pima Arms Co., Frontier Gun Shop, and
Lock-and-Load Arms Co. Regan acknowledged that the gun lobby is a big part
of the movement, but added: "I am not ashamed of that. It's in the
Constitution that you have the right to keep and bear arms."
Regan says she is riled that McCain has sided with Democrats on patients'
rights legislation and other issues. She noted that when he first ran for
the Senate in 1986, McCain pledged: "You will never know the
difference between me and [former Arizona Sen.] Barry Goldwater. You
replace him with me, and you have the same bedrock conservative."
Today, Regan scoffs at that promise, saying, "I don't see that
anymore."
Back in Washington, Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman Larry
Craig, R-Idaho, reportedly has referred to his Arizona colleague as
"a pariah." (When advised of this, a McCain campaign aide called
Craig a "buffoon.") Other ideological purists are just as put
off.
"Every time I turn around, he's on some god-awful bill,"
complained Stephen Moore, president of the conservative Club for Growth, a
political action committee and interest group. "He used to be a
really pretty reliable fiscal conservative. Clearly there has been a full
metamorphosis.... His rationale [for opposing the tax-cut bill] looked
like it was written by [Senate Democratic Leader] Tom Daschle, with all of
its talk of class warfare."
And Moore, expressing what some other critics will say only off the
record, added: "I really believe that this is driven by motives of
selfishness and self-promotion. He'll do anything to get a TV
camera."
Some of McCain's Senate Republican colleagues have watched in horror as he
has repeatedly teamed with liberal Democrats-and sometimes a handful of
moderate Republicans as well-to help pass bills. McCain has allied with
Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and John Edwards, D-N.C, on patients'
rights; with Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., on closing the gun show
loophole; with Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., on the generic drug
legislation; and with Feingold on campaign finance reform.
Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, who has had testy exchanges with McCain over
campaign finance reform and over the federal government's role in the
upcoming Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, noted: "John McCain can
attack the Olympics. He can get excited about appropriations bills
generally. He can rail on pork barrel spending and complain that defense
is not getting enough. John has been doing that his whole political
career. So there is no reason to really pull out your sword just because
John is doing what John has always done."
But Bennett added that when McCain goes "beyond" his
"historic pattern, as some Senators seem to feel that he is,"
then he may be "beginning to damage his relationship with his fellow
Republicans."
Has McCain already come to such a point? "The joining with Kennedy on
the patients' bill of rights is perceived as being outside the traditional
John McCain maverick activity," Bennett noted. "The Kennedy
thing bothered me. I won't pretend that it didn't. The patients' bill of
rights thing bothered me because we had worked so hard as a [Senate
Republican] Conference to try to find a patients' bill of rights that
everybody could support."
McCain, when pressed in the interview about his work with Kennedy,
responded by pointing out that Bush had worked closely with Kennedy on the
education bill the Senate passed in June. And McCain said his decision to
vote against the tax cut was absolutely consistent with the concerns he
had raised throughout his presidential campaign. A huge cut, he said then,
would drain resources from the country's other needs, especially
rebuilding the military, which he believes the Clinton Administration
neglected. "Anybody who watched my campaign should not have been
astounded that I voted against the tax cut," McCain said.
Seeking Senate Coalitions
On a blazing hot July day, as the House prepared to take up campaign
finance reform, McCain, a handful of other lawmakers, and members of
various interest groups held a press conference outside the Capitol to
make one last pitch to rally the troops. While various reform proponents
made their way to the microphone, one tourist after another approached
McCain. The tourists were obviously excited at being so close to a famous
person. Cameras popped, and pens and papers were presented for his
autograph.
Everywhere McCain goes, the reception is the same. He clearly has the
largest national constituency of any member of Congress, with the possible
exception of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. And McCain sees this
popularity as providing an additional weapon in pressing his agenda.
"Paradoxically, my presidential campaign enhanced my ability to have
influence on the legislative process," he said in the
interview.
The 2000 campaign changed McCain in several ways. After only four of his
Senate Republican colleagues supported his presidential bid, he recognized
that in order to advance the issues he was promoting, he would "have
to build coalitions," said Mark Salter, McCain's longtime
administrative assistant. That meant reaching across the aisle.
McCain also readily acknowledges that his priorities shifted as a result
of his encounters with the public along the campaign trail. It is
something that has not gone unnoticed by those close to him. "The
relationship that he developed with millions of people in this country, by
the town hall meetings and listening and learning, had probably more of a
profound effect on him than any one dynamic of his political career-maybe
his life," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who has developed a strong
friendship with McCain.
Take the issue of patients' rights. Former Sen. Warren B. Rudman, R-N.H.,
a longtime ally and a confidant during the campaign, said that McCain
"was visibly moved by the number of times he heard people talk about
their dissatisfaction with the health care delivery system ... and the
abuse that they are taking." Rudman, who traveled with McCain to many
town hall meetings, said that people would describe in quite a personal
way not only the heartache of a serious illness in their families, but
also "the additional, exponential anguish they went through when they
dealt with their health care delivery." Rudman added: "That
changed John on that issue. If it didn't change him, something was wrong
with him."
In the interview, McCain recounted an especially moving story that a young
woman told about her dealings with an HMO. She rose in front of hundreds
of people during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, not long before
primary day, to forthrightly describe how she had sought treatment for a
gynecological problem. Complications arose, and ultimately, she had to
undergo a massive hysterectomy. McCain recalled that she said, "My
life was ruined, and I have no redress."
"Half the people in that room were crying," he recalled, and he
said he told her, "I promise that I will do everything that I can to
see that other Americans don't relive your experience."
After returning to the Senate, McCain made the passage of patients' rights
legislation, which he had always supported, a higher priority. And because
the Senate is so closely divided this year, McCain's Senate Republican
critics are finding it difficult to turn back his efforts to push his
brand of progressive Republicanism. The Senate passed the patients' rights
bill, 59-36, on June 29 with the support of nine Republicans-even as GOP
leaders denounced the legislation as a gift to trial lawyers and as Bush
threatened a veto.
"The only way to get things done is right in the political
center" in the Senate, said Marshall Wittmann, who backed McCain in
2000, still advises him on policy issues, and runs the Hudson Institute's
Project for Conservative Reform. "McCain is there, and the moment is
right. In many ways, that independent impulse-that says the way to get
things done is to bring people together in the center and make things
happen-grew out of the campaign."
Because McCain and a handful of other independent-minded Senators have
been forming shifting alliances to carry the day on various issues, the
role of the Senate's party leaders has been diminished. Democratic
defections have already caused Daschle to lose his battles against Bush's
tax cut and against the rollback of Clinton-era ergonomic regulations.
Similarly, Lott's efforts to defeat McCain's versions of patients' rights
and campaign reform legislation failed because of GOP defections.
"Party identification is somewhat irrelevant at the moment" in
the Senate, Wittmann said. "It's not so much whether you have an `R'
or a `D' by your name, but where you are on the issue."
That same sort of coalition-building in the closely divided Senate helped
McCain and Feingold to finally prevail on campaign finance reform. Their
59-41 Senate victory on April 2 came with the help of a dozen Republicans,
despite the steadfast efforts of Lott and other GOP leaders to derail the
bill. And again, Rudman sees McCain's fervor in pushing the legislation as
an outgrowth of his personal experience-in this case, the wrenching ordeal
of enduring an ethics investigation.
From 1990-91, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics investigated McCain
and four other Senators who had received contributions from S&L
operator Keating, allegedly for interceding on his behalf with federal
regulators. Ultimately, McCain was cleared with a slap on the wrist for
exercising poor judgment in meeting with regulators. But Rudman believes
the experience forever changed McCain.
The former New Hampshire Senator, who served on the ethics panel, recalled
in a 1997 interview with National Journal just how excruciating the ordeal
was for McCain. "He told me that from his standpoint, it was worse
than being in Vietnam and being in prison," Rudman said. "He
said to me once on the floor while it was dragging, `Warren, please, if
you want to line us up against the wall and shoot us, do it. But please do
something. This is agony.' "
Rudman maintains that Senate Democrats made McCain a "political
hostage" by rejecting the committee counsel's advice that he be
dropped from the investigation. Democrats did not want to cut loose the
only Republican in the group, Rudman charged in his 1996 book, Combat: 12
Years in the U.S. Senate.
Fast-forward to 1998 as McCain began developing a game plan for his
presidential race. Over breakfast in the Senate dining room, he and Rudman
discussed McCain's plans, and the conversation turned to the Keating
matter. "We talked about the life-altering experience of the Keating
hearing, which of course I could understand because I was sitting across
from him," Rudman said. "It made a helluva difference to him,
and he was absolutely convinced that this system needed changing. And
that's what did it. I daresay had that not happened to John McCain, this
never would have evolved as the principal issue that he has devoted his
time to in the last several years. I absolutely believe
that."
But McCain's tactics in pushing campaign finance reform have further
isolated him from some of his fellow Senate Republicans. In May, when
McCain learned that Lott had not sent the Senate-passed McCain-Feingold
bill to the House, he reacted swiftly. After complaining publicly that
Lott was being "arbitrary and unfair," McCain won the Senate's
61-36 approval of a nonbinding resolution reprimanding the leader for
stalling the bill and urging him to forward it to the House. Lott later
told reporters that the move was "uncalled-for" and that he and
McCain "could have worked it out without doing this, but John had the
bit in his mouth."
Hagel-whose promotion of a narrower campaign reform measure backed by Bush
did not harm his close relationship with McCain-also disagreed with
McCain's move. "Those kinds of things do undercut your effectiveness,
because this business is based on relationships," Hagel said in an
interview. "I think there were some other ways to do it, and I told
him that. We all do have to have some loyalty to the institution and
organization that we are affiliated with." Hagel added: "I don't
think it is in his long-term best interests to be doing things like that,
or it's not in the long-term best interests of your party to be rebuking
your own leader."
Even so, McCain is in an unusual position. He holds a powerful hand. Just
ask Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth. "It would be devastating
for Republicans if McCain leaves the party, because he has a huge
following," Moore said. "If you're Trent Lott, you have to treat
him like a live hand grenade that you're trying to defuse."
The Road Ahead
At the beginning of the year, congressional Republicans gnashed their
teeth when they thought McCain was trying to upstage their new President
by pushing his own agenda, irrespective of the White House's priorities.
Gramm vowed in a January interview with National Journal: "I don't
intend to be supportive in any way of letting him set the agenda for the
new Congress with the new Administration."
Despite such declarations, McCain's success in the Senate this year has
stolen some of Bush's thunder. And the White House has had to deal with
journalists and pundits who insist on casting McCain's every move as part
of some continuing psychodrama between the two former campaign
rivals.
Then, in early June-only days after Senate Republicans learned they were
losing their majority because Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont was
becoming an independent-media reports surfaced that McCain was considering
bolting the GOP and mounting a third-party challenge to Bush in 2004. The
reports suggested that McCain's aides were not-so-secretly mapping a
strategy for him to launch a campaign akin to Theodore Roosevelt's crusade
of nearly a century ago. Roosevelt abandoned the GOP and ran for President
as a reformer on the Bull Moose Party label.
McCain counts Roosevelt as a hero, but beyond that, he brushes off talk of
such a political switch. He dismisses the stories as simply reflecting the
media's fascination with a possible showdown between him and Bush.
"Neither by word nor deed have I indicated in any way that I would
have any intention or cause, as I have said, to not only leave the party
but to run for President," said McCain, who has articulated the same
mantra so frequently, it's as if he's on autopilot.
Feingold sees little real prospect that McCain will switch parties.
"He loves the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt," Feingold
said. "It is genuine. It is real. It is moving to him. Just as my
feeling about the Kennedys and Robert Kennedy is for me. I believe that it
is a painful thought for him to even consider something like
that."
So, if his aggressive push on hot-button issues at odds with the White
House is not part of an effort to launch a future presidential campaign or
bolt the party, what is McCain's game plan? Wes Gullett, McCain's former
state director in Arizona and a longtime confidant, suggested that the
Senator simply wants to continue to promote a reform agenda. "He ran
for President to reform the government, and he believed in 1994 that we
[Republicans] won [control of Congress] because we had a reform agenda but
that we didn't follow through on it," Gullett said.
By emphasizing reform, McCain seems to strike a chord with the growing
number of independent voters throughout the country. Part of his apparent
fascination with this free-floating group of voters can be traced to his
campaign, which enjoyed significant backing from independents. And, at the
same time, he became more and more disenchanted during the campaign with
the conservative base of the GOP. McCain clearly cannot forget that
right-wing groups brutally attacked him and spread rumors about his family
during the Republican primary campaign in South Carolina.
"For a guy who had been a down-the-line conservative on almost all
the important issues, he was both stunned and wounded by the ferocity and
the viciousness of the attacks on him by the Right during the
campaign," said Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. That experience,
Ornstein added, led McCain "into believing that the Republican Party
should be a Teddy Roosevelt party and not a right-wing
party."
Will McCain take this reform agenda and run again for his Senate seat when
it is up in 2004? He's as energetic as ever, even after having beaten back
cancer last year, when doctors removed two malignant melanomas. Tests have
shown the cancer hasn't spread.
"I am very happy with what I am doing," McCain responded,
"but I think you also have to figure out where that usefulness ends.
One of the things we have all seen around here is people who stay too
long. I don't want that to happen."
But McCain seems at ease these days, and not at all troubled by the
sharp-edged criticisms aimed at him by some of his Republican colleagues
and by conservative groups. His pride in his fiercely independent streak,
even when it leads to a collision with party leaders, is nothing
new.
In fact, when asked what he is proudest of since coming to Washington,
McCain cited his rather astonishing decision in 1983, as a newly elected
lawmaker, to go to the House floor and take exception to President
Reagan's decision to deploy U.S. troops in Lebanon. To part company with
the commander in chief on such a major issue was a rather unorthodox way
to start a congressional career. But McCain's objections were sadly
vindicated when a terrorist attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut
resulted in the loss of 241 lives.
"It demonstrated to me," said McCain, "that you really have
to do, at the end of the day, what you fundamentally know is
right."
Kirk Victor
National Journal
|
