Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons
The Huffington Post has a fascinating post about how Arizona Sen. John McCain seems now to be returning to his maverick roots. If you’ve been on Mars the past 15 years here’s a quick primer: McCain once upon a time seemed a true “maverick,” an independent thinker who’d veer towards both parties and be extremely critical of his own. He wasn’t beloved by other GOPers when he tried to run as Mr. Maverick in 2000 and got beaten by George W. Bush.
McCain gradually returned to a (largely) predictable Republican partisan, culminating in his (in)famous re-election bid when he veered right and seemingly jettisoned his own position on immigration to win over conservative voters. He won –and now some see him inching back to the Maverick of old.
Even so, in his current incarnation the question now is whether McCain, like the Republican establishment, is rapidly losing the battle for dominance in his party as grassroots Republicans adored by talk show hosts, Tea Partiers and libertarians begin to take tighter control of the party — by folks who aren’t fond of neocons and many aspects of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Here’s the quote that’s getting the most buzz:
While McCain has been a fierce critic of the Obama administration, he has also tangled with members of his own party, particularly the new crop of lawmakers including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), darlings of the conservative grassroots.
When I asked him if “these guys” — having just mentioned Amash, Cruz and Paul by name — are a “positive force” in the GOP, McCain paused for a full six seconds.
“They were elected, nobody believes that there was a corrupt election, anything else,” McCain said. “But I also think that when, you know, it’s always the wacko birds on right and left that get the media megaphone.”
This comment is enraging many conservatives, not pleasing some on the left. And is drawing nods of approval (hey, if David Gregory can talk for all of America with apparent ESP powers to know what everyone is thinking or cares about, so can I) from many independents and moderates who’ve long complained that the louder and more extreme someone is on the left or right, the more coverage and adoration from partisans they get.
“I think it can be harmful if there is a belief among the American people that those people are reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans. They’re not,” he continued.
Once again: many independents and moderates would agree with that.
I asked McCain to clarify who, specifically, he was talking about.
“Rand Paul, Cruz, Amash, whoever,” McCain said.
See my last paragraph, italics above.
When asked about Amash’s recent accusation that a joke McCain made on Twitter about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was “racist,” McCain had a long belly laugh.
“Yeah he defended, he defended Ahmadinejad,” McCain said, barely getting his words out. “I thought, ‘Wow, wow! That’s interesting.’ I thought it was a pretty funny line, and all of a sudden this Amash, or whatever his name is, is defending me making a joke about Ahmadinejad.”
McCain also criticized Cruz over his suggestion during Hagel’s confirmation hearing that Hagel had accepted money from terrorist groups. “He was making a presentation that said that Chuck Hagel might have taken money from Palestinian organizations, people connected with all that,” McCain said. “Look, you can’t, without any basis in fact — you just don’t go around saying that kind of stuff.”
A Cruz spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the Texas senator “has great respect for Sen. McCain and is honored to work with him in the U.S. Senate.”
McCain’s relationship with Paul appears to be warmer than the one he has with Cruz and Amash. While he and Paul have clashed publicly on numerous occasions, they have also worked together on legislation, and according to a Paul adviser, they have a “decent relationship.”
“On some issues [McCain] sees him as a fellow maverick, but on some issues I think that pisses [McCain] off, having a maverick against John McCain,” said the Paul adviser, who asked to speak frankly in exchange that he not be identified. “I think he thinks Rand wants his way too much, like on [National Defense Authorization Act] … but I don’t think he thinks he’s doing it just to do it.”
McCain does have anger…issues.
But the big issue here is the inexorable waning of the neocons’ influence and control within the Republican Party. They may not have lost control yet, but their clout ain’t what it used to be.
And in future months it’s likely to be ain’t what it used to be even more.
SOME OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
–The Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin:
It is one thing for McCain to revive the personal animosity many conservatives have felt toward the senator so enamored of garnering media elite opinion and so dismissive of the First Amendment (e.g. campaign finance reform). But he did something worse. Like the social conservatives who backed Todd Akin, he hurt the cause he has fought for.
The complaint against many GOP hawks is that they have been rash and too enamored of executive authority. They’ve been too Pollyannaish about the Arab Spring, say their critics. And while defense needs defending, they haven’t been very effective or creative in gaining savings that don’t impair national security. And there in his post-filibuster rant was McCain, with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in tow, reaffirming all those perceptions.
It is ironic because McCain has been ineffectively trying to extract all sorts of information from the Obama team on national security since 2009. You would think he’d see the larger picture here and recognize that the benefit of challenging Obama on drones might help him in his fight for information he deems important. But no. That’s not McCain’s style.
McCain has always been more gracious and forgiving toward Democrats than his own party. Some attribute this to his zeal for mainstream media approval. Others point to his pugnacious personality and Groucho Marx-like aversion to any club (or party) that will have him as a member.
Whatever the reason, he is making a serious error of the type that recently has plagued many conservatives in a variety of policy arenas. A policy with no limits is not sustainable. And an approach to foreign or domestic policy that shuns prudence, balance and recent experience isn’t conservative.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) are getting the attention of John McCain, and you know what they say: Any attention is good attention, even if it’s negative attention. So his three conservative colleagues must be thrilled.
Or not.
But seriously: If there’s a genuine GOP split coming on issues like the government’s use of force, which Republican Party will the Beltway be wired for? We know that Beltway journalists believe Republican thinking defines the center, while Democratic thinking is dangerously to the left of the American consensus. But if Rand Paul is talking about restraints on government power, with the GOP base’s enthusiastic support, while media darlings John McCain and Lindsey Graham are still talking about carrying a big stick, who’s going to be embraced by This Week and Meet the Press and Face the Nation?
Or will they just be asked to tag-team the president and Democrats for the foreseeable future, as a sort of bad cop/different kind of bad cop team? Will they peacefully coexist, as long as they unite on the goal of marginalizing Democratic ideas?
Referring to the fact McCain was one of the GOP senators who dined with President Barack Obama earlier this week as part of Obama’s outreach campaign, Amash tweeted: “Sen McCain called @SenRandPaul @SenTedCruz & me “wacko birds.” Bravo, Senator. You got us. Did you come up with that at #DinnerWithBarack?”
Paul fired back at McCain and Graham during an appearance on Fox News, saying they “think the whole world is a battlefield, including America.” Arguing that the Bill of Rights still applies, he said, “That’s not my understanding of the way America works.”
In the afternoon, Paul received what he deemed a satisfactory answer to his question from the Obama administration on the parameters of its drone powers, and said that as a result, he would let Brennan’s nomination move forward.
Just hours after Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) slammed Sen. Rand Paul on the Senate floor, conservatives are turning on the Republican Party’s “old bulls.”
In a floor speech this morning, McCain accused Paul of using the filibuster to “fire up impressionable libertarian kids.” Graham claimed Paul was ignoring national security threats, using a ludicrous chart to illustrate his point,
“It was embarrassing,” a senior Republican Senate aide told Business Insider. “It definitely looked like two guys whose time has passed. They are behind history, and they are the only people in the room who don’t know it yet.”
By Thursday afternoon, conservative grassroots group FreedomWorks was already asking supporters to sign a petition demanding McCain apologize to Paul…..
The Young Americans for Liberty, a conservative libertarian organization, created a hashtag, “#DieWithMcCain,” that played off the “#StandWithRand” moniker that took over Twitter on Wednesday.
“These ‘libertarian kids’ are the future. It’s just a matter of whether or not the GOP will stand with Rand and remain relevant; or turn their backs on the next generation and die with McCain,” executive director Jeff Frazee said.
Erick Erickson, the editor-in-chief of the conservative blog RedState, linked to a story of the duo’s criticism and suggested that Graham could face a primary challenge in South Carolina’s Senate race in 2014.
Last year, Ron Paul didn’t do very well in his effort to win the Republican nomination for the presidency, but his ground game was better than the candidate. A lot of delegates at the Republican National Convention were Paulistas. Ron Paul and his son Rand are clearly insane, but they are also implacable opponents of the neo-conservatives who are now represented most strongly in Washington by the John McCain-Lindsey Graham-Kelly Ayotte troika. McCain and Graham had dinner with Obama the night of Rand’s blabfest, and they went to the floor of the Senate the next morning to ridicule Rand and defend the president. The thing is, they don’t have as much company as you would think. After all, even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell briefly joined Rand Paul’s filibuster…
….Another sign that the militant wing of the Republican Party is in decline is that the Sequester has gone into effect despite the deep defense cuts it contains. If Obama miscalculated about anything, it was in not realizing how ascendent the Paulistas would be after the 2012 election. The Sequester was designed to be a fool-proof deterrent, but it didn’t turn out that way. It didn’t turn out that way because defense hawks like John McCain have gone from being the dominant force in American politics during the Bush years, to being lonely voices that are dismissed by Newt Gingrich as irrelevant relics of the past.
—TPM quotes McCain blasting the filibuster as endangering filibuster reform:
“What we saw yesterday is going to give ammunition to those critics who say that the rules of the Senate are being abused,” he said on the floor. “I hope that my colleagues on this side of the aisle will take that in information.”
McCain co-authored a scaled-back rules change that preserved the filibuster and became the basis for the bipartisan deal, defeating a more far-reaching reform proposal.
“We were able to put a side of the there was another effort just at the beginning of this Senate to do away with 60 votes and [go] back down to 51, which in my view would have destroyed the Senate,” he said Thursday. ‘A group of us worked very hard for a long time to come up with some compromises that would allow the Senate to move more rapidly … and efficiently, but at the same time preserve a 60-vote majority requirement on some pieces of legislation.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.