President George Bush has always talked about his “political capital” but exaggerated it. Arizona Senator John McCain, in terms of imagery and press coverage, is the one who’s had it plus that something called “charisma.”
And, now, you can see his political capital based on charisma and the kind of often unpredictable views he held in the past, seemingly ebb away. He’s in danger of becoming someone who will win the political battle and lose the political war.
The reason: McCain’s overtures to Jerry Falwell, the religious right in general, and his move to repeatedly defend President George Bush at a time when Bush’s poll numbers are headed towards Costa Rica, are likely to lose him the support from many independent voters who supported him in the past. His support was based on him being an independent politician who bluntly called the shots and seemed a non-politician politician.
It’s no secret that in the GOP you have to “run right” in the primaries than (the old conventional wisdom, not followed by Bush) run more center in the elections. Each week there’s a new news story that suggests McCain is trying to hard to solidify his support within the GOP so that by the time the primaries take place he may have have obliterated his previous “maverick” image.
The “Straight Talk Express” is increasingly looking like the “The White House Talking Points Spin Commute.”
The AP contains the latest evidence that McCain is morphing into just one more GOP primary candidate:
Potential presidential candidate John McCain says he [no] longer considers evangelist Jerry Falwell to be one of the “agents of intolerance” that he criticized during a previous White House run.
The Republican senator from Arizona will be the commencement speaker in May at Liberty University, the Lynchburg, Va., institution that Falwell founded in 1971.
“We agreed to disagree on certain issues, and we agreed to move forward,” McCain said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
To be sure, McCain has to pull off a tough balancing act to ease himself into the White House. He has to run the gauntlet of other ambitious politicians, has to battle covert and overt distrust of him among GOPers that he really isn’t a team player — and then there is that other unusual GOP potential candidate, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, insisting he isn’t running but traveling in ways that seems as if he is.
A report a few months ago noted how Giuliani was mending fences with the religious right. Perhaps that also explains McCain’s latest which is in stark contrast to his stance in the past:
In 2000, as he sought the Republican nomination that eventually went to George W. Bush, McCain said: “Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”
On Sunday, McCain said that Christian conservatives have a major role to play in the Republican Party, but added, “I don’t have to agree with everything they stand for.”
That’s logical. The problem for McCain is: if he cozies up too much to Falwell & Co there are many voters who yearn for a government less closely linked to the religious right. And, as he continues to try to win over his party’s base and establishment, McCain could find that some GOPers in those segments won’t support him, anyway — and his efforts to win their support have lost him the support of independent voters in the process.
See video of McCain interview here.
UPDATE: Here’s another view from Taylor Marsh. And Americablog. And GOP Bloggers’ Mark Noonan.
http://haloscan.com/tb/taylormarsh/2166 –>
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.