Arizona Senator John McCain is continuing his tightrope walk aimed at the 2008 Republican presidential nomination — a walk made difficult since he has to maintain his independent-thinker image and embrace the GOP establishment at the same time.
This process began in earnest during the 2004 campaign (with a counterpoint provided by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has quietly been doing the same thing) when McCain figuratively and literally embraced President George Bush.
Now, this time, McCain has cautiously buried the political hatchet with the Rev. Jerry Falwell as Falwell has begun to articulate one reason why GOPers may opt for McCain if he convinces them he is not a “RINO”: fear of a certain Senator from New York state getting into the White House. And that Senator’s initials aren’t C.S.
The LA Times:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), offering an olive branch to Christian conservatives who could impede his presidential ambitions, Saturday called for more civility in politics — even as he stood next to an evangelical leader he once denounced as an “agent of intolerance.”
“Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another,” he said in a commencement address at Liberty University, a fundamentalist Baptist institution here, where he shared the stage with its founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. “We deserve each others respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views.”
It was a rare joint appearance between two GOP powerhouses — and one time antagonists — who are positioned to play central roles in the fight for party leadership in the post-Bush era.
Considered a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, McCain did not directly refer to or apologize for his attack on Falwell in his first, unsuccessful presidential bid in 2000. But in urging the graduating students to “be respectful of the goodness in each other,” McCain said, “I have not always heeded this injunction myself, and I regret it very much.”
That’s pretty close to a mea culpa.
In political terms, the reality is that McCain needs to patch up differences with other parts of his party if he wants the nomination. Political history has many such examples. The candidate who wins a party’s nomination (and the election) is not usually the one who is on the warpath with a segment of his/her own party.
And this is where McCain’s political tightrope is so shaky. When he embraces Evangelicals and parts of the party he criticized before, he’s on shaky ground with Democrats (who considered him an independent thinking Republican) and independents (who polls show are now breaking largely towards the Democrats and are highly critical of both Bush and the GOP Congress and overall Republican job performance).
Will McCain’s fence-mending effort done as he is poised on a tightrope embracing pouting members of his own party work?
The Christian Science Monitor reports that McCain seems to be making some headway. On the other hand, the ending of its piece doesn’t bode well for McCain, if it represents a broader view:
Even if McCain made some headway in explaining himself to an audience that represents a core element of the Republican electorate, it is still too soon to say how the Arizona senator might fare once the race for the GOP nomination begins in earnest. Much depends on who runs. When asked whom they would like to see run in ’08, Sarah Smith and Bryan Northup did not hesitate: Sen. George Allen (R) of Virginia. “Jeb Bush would be good, too,” adds Smith, referring to the president’s brother. “President Bush himself said so the other day.”
But that attitude should explain one factor in McCain’s prospects: he needs if not the overt endorsement of George Bush, the covert endorsement — or a hands-off interfering in the primary process. He NEEDS to be supported by the establishment to get the nomination.
And if he gets it? The question mark is whether he’ll run a bit more to the center or run as a conservative. And if he gets in? Will he be Bush Lite or an independent thinker closer to his own hero, Theodore Roosevelt?
And how did he fare in front of Falwell’s university? Reviews from political reporters and pundits were mixed, but much depended on how they viewed McCain originally.
But The Washington Post‘s Dan Balz noted that despite some of the characterizations of his speech as being a total “sell out” to Falwell, in fact, McCain focused on common ground and didn’t demonize anyone:
The Arizona senator’s speech was shorn of religious references and avoided controversial social issues. Instead, he focused on constitutional principles while touching on themes of humility, patriotism, respect for political opponents and forgiveness that may be relevant to his preparations to seek the Republican presidential nomination again.
The former Vietnam prisoner of war warned of dire consequences if the U.S. mission in Iraq fails. “Should we lose this war, our defeat will further destabilize an already volatile and dangerous region, strengthen the threat of terrorism and unleash the furies that will assail us for a very long time,” he said.
McCain added that it is the “right and obligation” of those who oppose the war to speak out against it. “Americans should argue about this war,” he said. “It has cost the lives of nearly 2,500 of the best of us. It has taken innocent life. It has imposed an enormous financial burden on our economy. At a minimum, it has complicated our ability to respond to other looming threats.”
That doesn’t quite sound like the comments usually made by Vice President Dick Cheney, President George Bush, the (politically) late Tom DeLay, or conservative talk show hosts who echo the official line.
Balz also details the political groundwork that went into McCain and Falwell deciding to bury the political hatchet somewhere else than inside of each others’ respective heads:
McCain’s appearance came eight months after the founder of the Moral Majority visited him at his Senate office in what both men said was an effort to put their contentious past behind them. This weekend, Falwell rolled out the red carpet for his old adversary, assembling about 150 church leaders from around the country for a Friday night reception and later hosting a small, private dinner for the senator.
At Saturday’s commencement ceremonies, McCain and Falwell marched side by side onto the stage in the university’s basketball arena. After a sometimes raucous faculty processional, in which students and faculty members doused one another with aerosol cans of string, Falwell warmly praised his guest, saying, “The ilk of John McCain is very scarce, very small.”
Neither McCain nor Falwell made even an oblique reference to past differences. After his loss to George W. Bush in the South Carolina primary in 2000, an angry McCain went to Virginia Beach to challenge the power of Christian conservative leaders in the Republican Party and singled out Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson by name. Unexpectedly, he set fire to his own campaign.
The New York Times had this:
Though the two men shared a stage here on Saturday, greeting each other warmly and drawing applause from the festive audience, Mr. McCain made only a brief mention of Mr. Falwell in his 28-minute speech. And Mr. McCain, who is normally eager to talk to reporters, left immediately after finishing his speech and before Mr. Falwell offered his greeting to graduates. Mr. McCain’s aides said that he had to catch a plane for a speech later Saturday to the Utah Republican Party.
Nearly 50 reporters came here to cover Mr. McCain’s remarks, a showing that university officials described as huge for a commencement address in this remote central Virginia town.
Mr. McCain is also the scheduled speaker at the graduation on Friday at the New School in New York. He intends to deliver the same remarks, his aides said, with the expectation that they may draw a less-than-enthusiastic reaction there, given that school’s liberal nature. His planned appearance has caused an uproar among students and faculty because of his conservative positions on issues like Iraq.
So McCain is going to attempt to use this speech to lay down an innovative idea (in theory) in American politics: that you can aggressively differ on policy matters without demonizing the other side. If the Times piece is accurate, though, he may be demonized as he tries to argue against demonization.
How did his speech go over? The Boston Globe reports:
John Green, a professor of politics and religion at the University of Akron, called McCain’s speech ”very clever.” The speech, he said, would resonate with religious voters eying McCain for 2008, but would avoid alienating other audiences because its apologetic overtones were subtle.
”There was a powerful subtext in the speech — if people can be reconciled over the Vietnam War, then certainly we conservative Republicans can also be reconciled,” Green said. ”But it wasn’t heavy-handed. It was very deftly done. This is a speech that the leaders of the Christian right will pore over, and they are likely to be impressed.”
Newsweek has an analysis that underscores the fact that McCain is not trusted among many Republicans, and for good reason: he is not a lock-step GOPer (such as Majority Leader Bill Frist) even though he is disliked by many who want him to break more with the Bush/GOP line:
Some conservatives may be appeased by the sight of McCain at an evangelical institution. But it’s going to take more than a patriotic speech to convert many of McCain’s enemies. Conservative activists are drawing up litmus tests for McCain, as they hope to extract concessions on the road to the primaries.
They have reason to worry. McCain continues to work closely with Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, on immigration reform. His signature issue, campaign-finance reform, continues to enrage libertarians and other critics of restricting the flow of cash into campaigns. Some pro-business groups hate his embrace of Kyoto-style efforts to slow global warming.
And social conservatives grumble that he’s been AWOL in their war over judges, and compromised too much with Democrats over Senate rules. “Essentially, McCain is a progressive. He’s a modern version of Teddy Roosevelt,” says Fred Smith, who runs the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “You can forgive TR, because we hadn’t tried it before. But we have now … He’s a candidate of the past running for the future.”
Newsweek then notes that McCain’s people insist that isn’t true and cite his conservative credentials — more of the tightrope walking, again…a walk where the rope can be angrily shaken by people on the right or the left as foes see he’s making progress towards his goal.
McCain’s task will be triply difficult because a key reason why some voters embraced him in 2004 was because they felt he was truly independent. Writes Steven Leser:
In a way, you cannot blame McCain for selling out to Falwell. The televangelist made him an offer he could not refuse. “Kowtow to me, or kiss any chance of winning the nomination goodbye�. But isn’t McCain the guy who was supposed to be a maverick? Who marched to the beat of a different drummer? I mean, we as the American electorate have been here before. We have been told by prospective GOP candidates that they were open minded and “compassionate� only to find out they are only slightly less right than Attila the Hun and completely disinterested in reaching out to anyone other than their conservative base. To quote/paraphrase George Bush, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…well, we don’t want to get fooled again.� Nor should we.
But the bottom line is indeed this:
Americans will never know what kind of President McCain could be if he doesn’t get the nomination. And he won’t with a segment of his party (or its current leader) working against him. That’s Poli-Sci 101. And if you look at it in those terms — expanding an electoral coalition, or at least neutralizing potential enemies to try and get the nomination — McCain is making headway, with some bumps along the way.
LBJ had an old saying and a foe: “It’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”
And it sounds like Jerry Falwell is nearly inside the tent — because he’s afraid of a creature named Hillary who may be lurking outside:
If yesterday’s teaming up of Sen. John McCain and the Rev. Jerry Falwell seems like a marriage of political convenience, Falwell is quick to say who drove him toward McCain.
Who else? Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Clinton seems to be the political matchmaker for all kinds of conservatives and McCain, who didn’t win any friends six years ago when he blasted Falwell as an agent of intolerance.
Now a lot of people are letting bygones be bygones for a simple reason: They think McCain looks like a Hillary-stopper.
“He’s consistently beat Hillary in every poll,” Falwell said last week. “Others could beat her. But I think McCain, barring health problems or a Howard Dean [style] explosion, is going to beat Hillary.”
And that’s part of the reason Falwell sounds a lot like a McCain supporter, even though he’s officially uncommitted now. He said that while Bill Clinton was a populist, Hillary is “an ideologue. I think Hillary would be the worst thing that would ever happen to America.”
If Republicans see Hillary way out there in the polls as the Democrats’ likely 2008 Presidential candidate, they may (as Falwell notes and Newsweek also suggests) decide it might be smart to get a candidate in place fairly soon in the process who seems to have good name recognition and strong polling appeal. And, right now, shaky tightrope and all, that seems to be the Senator from Arizona. Unless he falls from the tightrope.
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.