It sounds as if John McCain is making a calculated risk that he’s willing to lose some voters who supported him because he was an unpredicatable independent-thinking Republican and replace them with GOP primary voters and social conservatives who want more predictable positions:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to improve his standing with the party’s conservative voters, said Sunday the court decision that legalized abortion should be overturned.
This is about as definitive a break as he can make. MORE:
“I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned,” the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.
Usually candidates have danced around directly calling for it being overturned. McCain is making it clear there will be a choice in 2008 (on both sides) if he runs.
McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who “strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench.”
In past posts, I argued that McCain was walking a perilous political tightrope. But now it sounds as if he has decided to quickly leap off the rope to get to one side. How will independent voters react to it? It isn’t so much him suggesting he doesn’t like it, it’s that he is now taking the strong position that he wants to over turn it. There is a difference — and McCain is now coming across as just one more political panderer, just like you see in either party. He is becoming highly predictable.
The Straight Talk Express seems to have been replaced by The Lockstep Shuttle.
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.