The real Bush McCain Connection

The Obama campaign's main theme has been to try to link up McCain to Bush, and convince people that a vote for McCain will be a vote for a third Bush term. This theme has run its course, largely because McCain has successfully branded himself as a maverick and co-opted Obama's theme of change. This is not a slam at McCain; it is good campaigning, and any semi-intelligent politician runs on a change platform, at almost any time, because people always want something new. McCain does take on the party orthodoxy occasionally, and has worked with Democrats in the past; his message of change is not merely cynical - as opposed to the rest of his campaign.

The problem with McCain is that he is using his maverick image and honorable personal story to lay a coat of varnish on a political party that is dysfunctional and dishonest. I am for a Republican Party that is for state's rights, individual freedom, and limited government; that would be an honest contrast to a more activist Democratic party that is more comfortable with progressive taxation, government solutions to societal problems, and social liberalism. This kind of healthy debate would result in compromises and would be roughly complementary to the system of checks and balances created by the authors of the constitution.

Unfortunately, today's Republican Party is dedicated to the centralization of conservative social policy. Gay rights, abortion rights, and gun owner's rights are not seen as state's issues, or as a matter of civil libertarianism, but instead as grist for conservative federal policy. McCain has espoused federalism on gay rights, not so much on gun owner's rights and abortion rights, and in any event would take the mantle of a party that wants to deprive states from honoring gay marriages, or amplifying abortion rights, or enacting gun bans.

Furthermore, the Republican Party is not for limited government, at least not honestly. Anybody who has studied the federal budget knows that all programs that are designed to help the poor (with the exception of Medicaid), or are the most provincial earmarks, or fund federal programs, could be cut in their entirety, and they would not balance the budget. The budget for defense spending, health care spending, veteran's spending, Social Security, and financing the federal debt are big enough to shove all other programs enacted by either party to the margins. Yet, since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have raised their rights fists and railed against government spending, while cutting more checks and piling up deficit spending with their left hands.

This is the party that John McCain represents. Even if you credit every word of John McCain's clarion calls for change and reform, he is still going to be working with all of the Republicans that have been in Washington for decades. Bush has hired thousands of Republicans to work in his administration and his presidency has ushered in an increased Republican presence, if not dominance, in K Street lobbying firms. If McCain were elected, does anybody really think that all those hirees and lobbyists would be replaced? McCain might believe in reforming the Republican party, but he would be a one man campaign against most of the people who worked for him; he'd be the CEO of Coke who decided that his company really should embrace purified tap water.

Nowhere is the dichotomy between a man who represents honor and a devalued party that represents incompetence more on display than the McCain campaign. While his increasingly limited positive campaigning revolves around his iconoclastic persona and a call for reform, his rampant and deceitful negative campaigning, and his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, hearken back to the two biggest problems with the Bush Presidency and the current Republican Party - dishonesty, and cronyism.

First, dishonesty. President Bush, or rather, the neoconservatives who had the largest voices in his first term, lied to the American people to lead us into war in Iraq. The conflation of Al Qaida and Iraq, the dog and pony show at the United Nations, and the selective trumpeting of intelligence, were all lies that led us into war. The neoconservative belief that the U.S. should pro-actively use its military might to enforce democracy, and thereby make the world a better and safer place, is not a bad agenda, it's just one that a majority of Americans didn't (and still don't) believe in. So the Iraq war had to be disguised as a jingoistic response to September 11, 2001, and a search for weapons of mass destruction that likely never existed. If thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians are going to die for a cause, it should be for one that is forthrightly put on the table, not one that is grudgingly admitted after the media belatedly ferreted out the lies. The Republican brand has become synonymous with deceit, and McCain has embraced that in his campaign:

Barack Obama voted for teaching kindergartners to be wary of strangers who want to touch them inappropriately. McCain accuses him of wanting to teach 6 year olds about sex before the alphabet. That is not spin or "contrast," it is a lie.

Barack Obama voted against an immigration bill, as did John McCain. Putting out a Spanish language commercial slamming Obama for not voting for the bill is so misleading that it is a lie. Here is another example of this, with a defense spending bill.

Barack Obama is proposing a more expansive and progressive tax cut than John McCain; McCain is claiming that the reverse is true, in specific enough ways to make it dishonest. McCain is claiming that Barack Obama wants to have government bureaucrats deny you health care - a line that might have been appropriate for Hillary Clinton...in 1994, when she was helping her husband come up with a health plan. Against Obama, the line is just a lie.

All politicians spin and distort during campaigns; I'm not naive. But McCain is not only doing so worse than any candidate not named Bush in recent memory,but he is also doing so while simultaneously running as a cult of personality candidate based on honor. If this is how he campaigns, how is he going to govern?

Second, cronyism. The Palin pick has been hailed and derided as many things - an appeal to disaffected Clinton voters, an attempt to energize the Republican base, a disaster, a Mcbrilliant masterstroke, etc. Ultimately, whatever one thinks of Palin's politics or her personal story, I think that McCain did "one heck of a job" when he picked Palin.

Let me explain the reference and the comparison. Michael Brown was selected to head FEMA because of personal and political considerations despite an evident lack of qualification. This proved disastrous after Hurricane Katrina, yet Bush, to cover up the fiasco, praised Brown, publicly stating that he was doing a "heck of a job." The same process is true for the selection of Sara Palin. Yes, the coverage of her has been sensationalistic and at some times sexist, although there is delicious irony in the Republicans suddenly becoming strident feminists. Yes, her reputation as a "Barracuda," her possible neglect of her home life, and her quest for earmarks and subsequent denunciation of them make her no different than most politicians, male or female.

But these criticisms are mere distractions to the real problem with her selection - she is not qualified for the office. It doesn't matter that she has executive experience; what matters is her knowledge and mastery of national and international policy. She has been the governor of a state so unlike the rest of the United States - it is vast yet has a tiny population, it is geographically isolated from other states, it is awash in money because of federal subsidies and because of, not despite, high oil prices - that her executive experience will simply not translate to Washington DC. Governor Reagan was governor of a state with a larger economy than most countries. Governor Clinton led a small state - but a small state whose problems mirrored the nation's - racial strife, educational difficulties, transitioning to a post-industrial economy. Unlike either men, she has no articulated vision of the place of the United States in the world. Her only public statements about foreign policy have either aped John McCain's or been false bravado (although the difference between the two has been diminishing) in stating that she would be prepared to declare war on Russia. If Palin had more than a boilerplate vision of the proper role of government, or a theory of the United States' place in the world, don't you think the Republicans would have put it out there, instead of more jokes -- and feigned shock -- about animals that wear lipstick?

But what's worse than Palin's inexperience is the Republican's frantic declamations to the contrary. Hopefully, you've seen Jon Stewart's dissection of Republican hypocrisy, showing Karl Rove slamming the potential selection of Tim Kaine because of his merely being the mayor of a small town and then the governor of a state for a short while, and then extolling Sara Palin for the exact same qualifications. She falsely claimed to have been to Iraq, and now quietly admitted that she has not. And John McCain now blathers that she knows more about energy policy than anyone else in the US, despite the bald ridiculousness of that statement. Finally, Republicans are now claiming that energy policy is really about national security. It reminds me of Bush in 2004, responding to questions about job training with discussions of his education policy. "Energy policy is really about national security" is this year's "No Child Left Behind is really a jobs program." Sure the two topics are somewhat related, but they both confuse part with whole. (Alleged) Knowledge of energy policy is a necessary component of, not a substitute for, mastery of foreign policy. Instead of admitting that they hired someone based on political expedience, the Republicans - with McCain as the head cheerleader - are defending her selection with indefensible reasoning.

If McCain is so in thrall to the right wing of his party, who will he choose as his Attorney General? For federal judicial appointments? I don't know how he can be trusted in this regard anymore. He could have made a politically efficacious pick along the same lines by picking Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is as conservative as Palin but much more experienced, or Olympia Snowe, or Christine Todd Whitman, who are more moderate and more experienced.

SO, please don't vote for McCain. The two things he has control over as a presidential candidate - the tenor of his campaign, and the selection of a running mate (or as he has freakily called her, a running soulmate) - are contrary to his claims to be a political maverick, and are nasty echos of the Republican politics of the last 8 years. McCain is not running for third Bush term, even if he has given Bush big bear hugs. But he is running for a third term of deceit and cronyism.