McCain and Chaffee To Become Democrats?

[Sam_Stone]

Where has anyone in the press called him a ‘big government liberal’?

I think this fascination with McCain from the left is pretty baffling. It’d be like conservative deciding they love Ted Kennedy just because he’s occasionally a thorn in the side of his party.

[UrbanChic]

I’m with Bricker here all the way. McCain will remain a Republican and Bush will (unfortunatley) be reelected in 2004. To go along with Bricker’s bottle of single malt scotch, I’ll offer one Fuente Opus Opus X cigar. I’m down to three so one third of my stock of favorite cigar is a big deal to me.

[december]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
**I think this fascination with McCain from the left is pretty baffling. **

It may have started during the 2000 Presidential campaign, when the (mostly liberal) media just doted on McCain. You can read lots of interesting coverage in the 1999 and 2000 archives of www.dailyhowler.com. E.g.,
http://www.dailyhowler.com/h121699_1.shtml
http://www.dailyhowler.com/h121599_1.shtml
http://www.dailyhowler.com/h121499_1.shtml

[SuaSponte]

*Originally posted by k2dave *
**I find it very interesting that the Dem’s accused Bush as being illigitimate when he won the EC and even won it after numbrous recounts (some where dems did the counting and Rep’s couldn’t even watch) and S. Dashel took the senet majority leader position throught a back door deal and thinks he has a mandate to block Bush. Now that the people have spoken clearly that the dem’s are out they are still looking for a way to illigitimatly take back power. **

1. “the Dems” do not consider Bush as being illegitimate. Some Democrats do.
2. “the people” have indeed spoken clearly: they cast votes for individuals running for the Senate in their respective states.
   In the American system, people do not vote for parties; they vote for individuals. Arizonans voted to be represented by McCain; Rhode Islanders voted to be represented by Chaffee. Whether McCain and Chaffee decide to become Democrats, Greens, or Tories, their voters’ will has been respected. So, there is nothing illegitimate about it.

'Course, it’s never gonna happen.

Sua

[ElvisL1ves]

Perhaps Chaffee and Miller have a tacit understanding that neither will force the issue, and force the other to respond. There would be only a downside for each one.

McCain made it clear after the Jeffords incident that he would not consider changing. He might change his mind, but there’s no solid reason to expect it.

McCain’s appeal is baffling only to those who see every single aspect of political life in partisan terms. There was a lot of fawning over him, yes, but little of it was on a policy basis. Rather, he came across (and still does) as refreshingly genuine, not poll-based and calculated and unprincipled, with a compelling personal background. The fawning increased when it looked like he could be the nominee - the political media are careful about making enemies and friends.

[Kimstu]

Folks, just because Rhode Island is a small state doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to spell our Senator’s name correctly. It’s “Chafee”—one “f”. Thank you.

[BF]

Uh-oh, could the worm be turning again?

[Apos]

—But two weeks ago, voters returned the Senate to GOP control in the fifth consecutive cycle — a clear, if overlooked, rebuke to Mr. Jeffords’ unilateral action.—

eh? When did newspaper reporters start reading minds? How exactly would voters voting in other states than Jeffords, for completely different people running their own campaigns, in an election based on very different issues, be rebuking him in any direct way that newspaper editors could devine?

[Sofa_King]

McCain is clearly fed up with the whole train-wreck that was the 107th Congress. He was the only Republican Senator to vote along with the Democrats in yesterday’s failed attempt to strip seven highly partisan riders from the Homeland Security bill. His comment on the riders, according to CQ, was priceless:

“I am too old to vote for this crap.”

But ominously, McCain’s dissent was cancelled out in part by Zell Miller, and the attempt to de-ride the bill failed. McCain’s annoyance is all well and good I suppose, but you’ll notice that last night he along with virually everyone else voted for the damned bill anyway.

[RTFirefly]

The Homeland Security bill riders were far from the only time recently that McCain has sided with the Dems against his own party. In fact, he routinely cosponsors legislation with Democrats that his entire party votes against.

In last May’s issue, the Washington Monthly had an article entitled, “The Big Switch: Why Democrats should draft John McCain in 2004 – and why he should let them.” Some excerpts:

As a war hero who’s hawkish on foreign policy, he more than matches Bush on the military front. As a reform-minded foe of corporate welfare, Big Tobacco, and the Republican right, he is peerless. McCain is Bush’s most vociferous critic, voted against the president’s tax cut, forced his hand on campaign finance reform, and federalized airport security in the face of White House opposition. He has co-sponsored numerous bills with Democrats – many of them in the presidential-aspirant class – requiring background checks at gun shows (Lieberman), a patients’ bill of rights (Edwards), better fuel-efficiency standards in cars and SUVs (Kerry), and expanded national service programs (Bayh). He is even drafting a bill with Lieberman to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate global warming.

McCain has said that he won’t leave his party sufficiently often that one feels compelled to take him at his word. But his rationale–that he’s a Teddy Roosevelt Republican–has remained fixed, even while he’s gravitated toward moderate Democratic beliefs. His protestations are beginning to ring hollow. He is keenly aware that the GOP is no longer the party of Roosevelt. That an unfailingly pro-business president embodies the party’s moderate wing only underscores the GOP’s drift to the right; there is no room in its ranks for a maverick like McCain. At the same time, McCain has made a dramatic shift leftward. As his vote against the Bush tax cut showed, he is no longer in any meaningful sense a contemporary Republican.

McCain has a mixed-but-improving record with labor. Though he voted against Bush’s tax cut, his general economic conservatism all but disqualifies him from earning official union support. But as important to a Democratic candidate as the AFL-CIO’s endorsement is, not all union members follow their leaders. “We were scared by McCain in 2000, frankly, when we heard that union members in some states were rushing to hange their registration to vote [for McCain] in the Republican primary,” says a senior union official. These workers “were moved by the image being projected of the freewheeling, tell-it-like-it-is, Straight Talk Express John McCain, and didn’t know a thing about where he stood on critical issues.” Coming from Arizona, McCain’s pro-immigration views mesh with those of union leaders, who consider immigrants potential new members. Likewise, so do his endorsements of whistleblower protection and a patients’ bill of rights, as well as his staunch resistance to a provision limiting unions’ ability to donate to political campaigns (so-called “paycheck protection”) in the campaign finance reform bill. “As a Republican, he’s much better than you’d expect; as a Democrat, he has some work to do,” says Skip Roberts, chief lobbyist for the Service Employees International Union.

McCain’s presidential run required him to delve into policy areas he’d previously ignored, such as healthcare, education, and the environment. More often than not, this consideration led him to adopt positions on the political center or center-left. “On the campaign trail and in the Senate, McCain was one of the few Republicans to make a forceful, centrist case for saving social security and cutting taxes to help the middle class, not just the wealthy,” says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

Since the campaign, McCain has adopted a similarly moderate-left stance on the patients’ bill of rights. He is also as good as any mainstream Democrat on issues like gun control and fighting tobacco, and better than most at battling corporate excess, which would even appeal to liberals and Naderites.

This last is why I’m a McCain Democrat. He’s adamantly against a world where corporate money calls the tune. It isn’t just a matter of campaign finance reform, either - he’s also concerned about corporate control of the airwaves and similar wonkish but (IMHO) fundamentally important issues. And here, he’s to the left of practically every big-name Democrat.

But in important ways, he’s to the right of the Democratic mainstream. He’s for a strong military - and it’s about time the Democrats were, too: it’s a dangerous world out there, and the U.S.A. is the only remaining superpower. The Dems have to start from the position that at times, it’s going to have to act like one. McCain can get them there.

What’s clear is that McCain’s ideological connections with the GOP as it is now are very tenuous. He loathes the religious right, and the feeling is mutual. He’s pro-life, but it’s hardly a signature issue for him, which is just as well, because he’s not going to score with the Pat Robertson Brigade anyway. While he’s hardly for big government, he’s totally abandoned any connection with the GOP’s tax-cut religion. And he’s for government regulation when he believes it will benefit the citizens as individuals, or the country as a whole. So if you take the three pillars of contemporary Republicanism - cut taxes, cut regulations, support the Pat Robertson moral vision - McCain’s 0-for-3, or maybe 0-for-2 with a no-decision on the regs.

I believe McCain could run for President as a Democrat, and win, and it would be a good thing for the party. He’d need to move soon, though, to pre-empt Gore in the primaries. But if he wins the Democratic nomination in 2004, then Bush’s first order of business on January 21, 2005 will be finding a publisher for his memoirs.

[Chance_the_Gardener]

But if he wins the Democratic nomination in 2004, then Bush’s first order of business on January 21, 2005 will be finding a publisher for his memoirs.

And a ghost writer!

[RTFirefly]

Bricker - as far as your bet goes, wanting something and thinking it’s an excellent idea are different things from thinking it’ll happen. And I’ve already used up my good-luck quotient in that department for a few years, in Rowan Williams’ becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. (Never thought that would happen. Was amazed enough that he got on the short list. :))

I’d say the odds are somewhere around 3-1 to 4-1 against McCain jumping.

[elucidator]

Can’t say its likely. Would love it, pure-D love it, would give a weeks salary to see the look on Trent Lott’s face when he heard the news.

Also, have some reservations. As partisan as I am, and I am, I still recognize the need for a legitimate, principled right wing in our public discourse. Not pustules like Tom DeLay, but men like McCain. What could be better than a right made of McCains and a left of Wellstones?

But a move to an Independent status…I think that’s plausible.

I would approve. Oh, yeah.

[istara]

This thread title is really doing my fucking head in. I keep reading it and thinking of fast food. McDonalds and Coffee, or McCain crispy pizza or microwave chips or whatever the hell they make.

Sorry. Proceed.

[astorian]

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. If I thought there was any chance at all the John McCain who scored 90+ in annual American Conservative Union ratings (and who ranked at the bottom of Common Cause and ADA lists, who was steadily anti-abortion, who was proud to call himself a Reaganite, yadda yadda yadda), I’d have voted for him in 2000 and would vote for him tomorrow for almost any office he cared to run for.

Unfortunately, he’s done everything imaginable to lose my respect and that of most conservatives. He’s demonstrated that he has no conservative principles he isn’t willing to abandon to curry favor with fawning media members.

It’s sinteresting how a man who makes so much of his integrity never seems to get around to doing the “principled” thing until it’s convenient. Examples?

1. Left-wingers frequently hail McCain for his “principled” stand on campaign finance reform. But he never showed the slightest interest in campaign finance reform until he was caught in the Keating scandal. Only AFTER that, when he was terrified of appearing crooked, did he start to pose as a champion of reform.

2. The Left applauds him for “standing up” to the religious right. But interestingly, he began attacking the religious right only AFTER Pat Robertson helped George W. Bush win South Carolina. In other words, McCain didn’t attack the religious right on principle- on the contrary, he was merely sniping at people who were actively supporting his opponent. Hey, I understand that, sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend… but John McCain was not some sort of courageous maverick with the cojones to stand up to Pat Robertson- until his defeat in South Carolina, he’d never expressed any animosity to the religious right. Indeed, he’d regularly sough their support in his Senate campaigns.

3. Columnist Richard Cohen was one of the few media liberals (Anna Quindlen was another) who ever stopped to wonder if McCain was REALLY worthy of adulation from the left. He wrote, for instance, that McCain’s pro-life record bothered him… but that McCain’s spokespersons were constantly reassuring the media- privately and off the record, of course!- that McCain was “really” on their side.

And that’s typical McCain. Look, I can’t read the man’s mind, so I don’t know what he REALLY thinks about abortion. I do know that making a principled stand on EITHER side of the issue can be risky, and can cost you votes. If McCain came out boldly and said he was 100% pro-life, that would take some guts (it would cost him the support of many who now profess to support him). If he came out as pro-choice (which I suspect, in his heart, he is), that would take some guts, too (he could kiss most conservative voters good-bye).

Instead, what McCain does is didge the issue. When he addresses Republicans, he points to his voting record (usually solidly anti-abortion). But simultaneously, he lets his aides tell liberal reporters “Oh, that’s just boilerplate for the religious nuts- we all know he doesn’t really mean it.”

THAT, friends, is neither principled nor courageous. It’s weaselly, cowardly, and dishonest. It’s the way a typical political hack behaves.

I once saw John McCain as a very attractive candidate. I now regard him as a self-seeking egomaniac with no core principles. None that he’s not willing to abandon in 30 seconds flat, at any rate.

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by elucidator *
Can’t say its likely. Would love it, pure-D love it, would give a weeks salary to see the look on Trent Lott’s face when he heard the news.

Me, too.

As partisan as I am, and I am, I still recognize the need for a legitimate, principled right wing in our public discourse. Not pustules like Tom DeLay, but men like McCain. What could be better than a right made of McCains and a left of Wellstones?

With all due respect, that would produce a ‘right’ well to the left of where the GOP is now.

For better or for worse, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott are the GOP, in that they represent its ideological center of gravity. Either one of them would be happy to share a stage with Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh; neither would say a bad word about Ann Coulter without getting backed into a corner with no other reasonable escape. That’s the GOP of today.

But a move to an Independent status…I think that’s plausible.

It would probably be much easier for him to convince himself to become an independent than to become a Democrat. But he can win the Presidency as a Dem, while his chances of winning as an independent are very slim. And even if he won as an independent, he wouldn’t have either party with a vested interest in passing his legislative agenda.

That’s what might really get him to sign on as a Democrat: the opportunity to take on Bush, with a party behind him, and win this time. Plus the opportunity to substantially remake a party in his own image - which is not possible for him to do with the GOP. This would be his opportunity to go down with Reagan and FDR as people who reshaped the American political landscape.

[december]

BTW Susie Terrell is leading Mary Landrieu in the polls. If Terrell wins, then a switch of two Senators still wouldn’t give control to the Dems. http://www.wbrz.com/stories/112002/new_suzielead.shtml

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by astorian *
It’s sinteresting how a man who makes so much of his integrity never seems to get around to doing the “principled” thing until it’s convenient. Examples?

1. Left-wingers frequently hail McCain for his “principled” stand on campaign finance reform. But he never showed the slightest interest in campaign finance reform until he was caught in the Keating scandal. Only AFTER that, when he was terrified of appearing crooked, did he start to pose as a champion of reform.

The Keating Five scandal broke, when, back in the 1980s?

If it’s a ‘pose’, he’s been striking that pose for quite a long time, much longer than necessitated by the Keating S&L scandal. And since he’s taken complementary stands on less visible issues having to do with the influence of corporate money, after awhile you have to say it’s the real McCain.

2. The Left applauds him for “standing up” to the religious right. But interestingly, he began attacking the religious right only AFTER Pat Robertson helped George W. Bush win South Carolina. In other words, McCain didn’t attack the religious right on principle- on the contrary, he was merely sniping at people who were actively supporting his opponent. Hey, I understand that, sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend… but John McCain was not some sort of courageous maverick with the cojones to stand up to Pat Robertson- until his defeat in South Carolina, he’d never expressed any animosity to the religious right. Indeed, he’d regularly sough their support in his Senate campaigns.

Yeah, but he could have sniped at Marse Pat for taking sides, in ways that didn’t burn his bridges with the Religious Right. But he has, indeed, burnt those bridges beyond forseeable repair. He’s made a public stand that he isn’t about to go back on.

3. Columnist Richard Cohen was one of the few media liberals (Anna Quindlen was another) who ever stopped to wonder if McCain was REALLY worthy of adulation from the left. He wrote, for instance, that McCain’s pro-life record bothered him… but that McCain’s spokespersons were constantly reassuring the media- privately and off the record, of course!- that McCain was “really” on their side.

You’ve got to know when to hold, know when to fold. You’ve got to know which issues you want to make into your ‘signature’ issues, and which ones you aren’t willing to put a lot of fight into, on whatever side you might be on. Guess what - McCain’s made it clear that the abortion issue is in that second tier - it isn’t one he’s going to go to the mat on.

No matter how principled you are, you have to have some core of things that are worth fighting for. But if the whole world’s in that core, then you’re useless. I think there’s a certain philosophical core running through McCain’s record. Abortion doesn’t have a lot to do with that core, one way or the other, so inconsistency there isn’t troubling.

But if he decided to become a wishy-washy Democrat on military matters, or become a “business dollars should dominate our politics” Republican, then that would be an abandonment of a strongly-held position, and would demonstrate his lack of principle.

I’ll bet a bottle of Scotch of the sort that Bricker specified on the proposition that neither of those outcomes will happen in the next decade. Any takers?

[ElJeffe]

elucidator:

What could be better than a right made of McCains and a left of Wellstones?

So a right made of left-wing Pubbies, and a left made of super-hyper-left-wing-Championship-Edition Dems? Yes, I’m sure many liberal-minded folks would love for the government to take a massive leftward swing.

As far as McCain diving for the Democratic party (or the Independent party), I can’t see it. And if it was likely, I like to think that McCain would take the principled (read: non-Jeffords) approach and wait until after his term has expired, and then re-run as whatever party he chooses. Running as one party and then switching to another is not much different than, say, running on a tax-cut platform and then sponsoring legislation for a massive tax hike.
Jeff

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by ElJeffe *
elucidator:

What could be better than a right made of McCains and a left of Wellstones?

So a right made of left-wing Pubbies, and a left made of super-hyper-left-wing-Championship-Edition Dems?

Well, we know not to take your interpretation of the political spectrum seriously.

I like to think that McCain would take the principled (read: non-Jeffords) approach and wait until after his term has expired, and then re-run as whatever party he chooses.

You mean, like Sens. Richard Shelby and Ben Nighthorse Campbell?

I think the GOP was too busy gloating when they switched, to tell them to stay Democrats until the next time they were up for election. (According to CNN, Shelby switched to the GOP in 1994, and Campbell in 1995, though neither would face the voters until 1998.)

All of a sudden, when Jeffords switched last year, the GOP had a religious conversion on this issue, claiming that to run as a member of Party A and serve out most of one’s term caucusing with Party B was somehow immoral.

In the words of the Church Lady, how con-veen-yent.