Straight Talk (The Hidden Krugman)

I started reading the NYTimes' Sunday magazine story on potential Democratic 2008 presidential hopeful/spoiler Mark Warner, which notes that Hillary seems to be fairly unstoppable in her path to the nomination thanks to bags of money and lots of folks not wanting to seem to be obstructionist to the annointed one. (I'll be finishing the article later today and will have a few more thoughts on it then.)

Mrs. F and I started talking about who might be viable on the Dem side other than Hillary (based on name recognition and star power alone, only Barack Obama seemed to be exciting enough for either of us). We then moved over to the right side of the political sphere, and McCain was the only one at this stage who seemed to us to be viable (Frist is too much of a namby-pamby lap dog to BushCo, Brownback would scare the be-Jesus out of the moderates).

Which brings us to this morning's Paul Krugman column, The Right's Man (full column accessible to Times Select subscribers), which debunks some of the mavric, straight-talking aura of McCain--especially as he cozies up to the BushCo administration and its allies.

Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us."

But now — at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger — Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback," anticipating the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits abortions even for victims of rape or incest.

[...]

So here's what you need to know about John McCain.

He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way around that legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.

He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party.

And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.

I admit that I've had some admiration for McCain over the years, but I've become far more wary of him ever since his campaign appearances with President Bush back in 2004, where he seemed too cozy with the policies of this administration.

[UPDATE 9:50am PST] = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Back to the Democratic side of '08 speculation comes this editorial by former Clinton advisor Dick Morris (via Raw Story, which brings it in from the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio) trumpeting an alternative to Hillary that I'd plain forgotten--Al Gore!

The former vice president's slashing attacks on the administration and his stalwart, if misguided, opposition to the Iraq war leave him without the complications and complexes that will devil Clinton as she seeks to appeal to the unforgiving left of the Democratic Party.

And Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book "Earth in the Balance." He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug - Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.

[...]

Could Al beat Hillary? If Mrs. Clinton persists in her support of the Iraq war, he could. But never count on Hillary losing an election over a principle. It's a bad bet. If she moves to the left on the war, as she already shows signs of doing, she would preempt Gore and Kerry and use her tremendous lead in fundraising and ex-officio delegates to cruise to the nomination.

Al also has a history of shooting himself as he nears the finish line. In both 1988 and 2000, he repeated the fundamental mistake of not talking about his signature issue: the environment. By backing off global warming and climate change as core issues, he seemed like just another Democrat scaring people about Social Security.

[...]

But Gore has three things going for him: A perception that he was robbed of the White House and Hillary's possible stubbornness in continuing to back the war.

The third thing? The weather. As the evidence of global climate change impresses everyone who doesn't work at the White House, Gore looks more and more like a man whose time may have come.

Gore is on the record, at this time, as not running for office in 2008. But if he were to change his mind, I'd be a big backer of his candidacy.