Tag Archives: John McCain

Catching Up With The Convention

I finally was able to watch some of the Democratic National Convention last night, and I was impressed with the speeches offered by Bill Clinton and John Kerry. (Evan Bayh, on the other hand, did a good job of highlighting why shouldn’t have even been in the running for the Vice Presidential candidate).

I particularly liked the way Kerry reversed the flip-flop meme that targeted him to settle it on McCain instead (transcript from Crooks and Liars).

I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years, but every day now I learn something new about Candidate McCain. To those who still believe in the myth of a maverick instead of the reality of a politician, I say let’s compare Senator McCain to Candidate McCain.

Candidate McCain now supports the very wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once called irresponsible. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain’s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote.

Are you kidding me, folks?

(Laughter, cheers, applause.)

Talk about being for it before you’re against it!

(Cheers, applause.)

Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself.

McCain has reversed himself on nearly all of the issues that created his supposed “maverick” status. I think pointing out his inconsistencies, along with highlighting his general lockstep agreement with Bush, is the best way to persuade voters not to choose four more years of the same.

McCain Is Not a Centrist

Among the nonsense that’s sure to be bandied about in the election ahead is the absurd notion that John McCain is some sort of centrist. I’ve blogged about the emptiness of this claim before, but I wanted to highlight Paul Krugman’s take on the subject.

There are ways to assess politicians’ position on the left-right scale. Ignore the National Journal, which has a somewhat subjective method, and always manages to find that the current Democratic candidate is an ultra-liberal. Instead, we can turn to the Poole-Rosenthal-McCarty analysis, which is based on a systematic, no fiddling technique using rollcall votes.

And they tell us that, based on his voting record, McCain is the eighth most conservative member of the current Senate. That’s right: he’s been voting on the right wing of the Republican party.

But has he just moved right to curry favor with the GOP base? No: he was the second most conservative member of the previous Senate.

Add: Barack Obama, by contrast, while more liberal than the average Democrat, is considerably closer to the center than McCain.