Not the Real McCoy

What you see isn't always what you get. As a follow up to this recent post, The Company You Keep, this month's Nation has an article on John McCain, aptly titled The Real McCain.

Speaking of the misimpression McCain has promoted on both the right and the left, author Ari Berman says that "the senator they saw projected a far more conciliatory image than the trash-talking maverick portrayed in the national media. Before the event he had endorsed teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution in public schools, and he had expressed support for a rigid state ban on gay marriage that denies government benefits to any unmarried couple. . . . McCain [addressed a conservative right wing group], referring to Reagan as "my hero," invoking the support of other conservatives on issues such as stem-cell research and immigration, and strenuously defending President Bush's Iraq policy."

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"In fact, McCain has always been far more conservative than either his supporters or detractors acknowledge. In 2004 he earned a perfect 100 percent rating from Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and a 0 percent from NARAL. Citizens Against Government Waste dubs him a "taxpayer hero." He has opposed extension of the assault-weapons ban, federal hate crimes legislation and the International Criminal Court. He has supported school vouchers, a missile defense shield and private accounts for Social Security. Well before 9/11 McCain advocated a new Reagan Doctrine of "rogue-state rollback."

""He's a foreign policy hawk, a social conservative and a fiscal conservative who believes in tax cuts but not at the expense of the deficit,' says Marshall Wittmann, a former McCain staffer and conservative activist who now works at the Democratic Leadership Council. McCain's ideology resembles an exotic cocktail of Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan--a conservative before conservatism was bankrupted by fundamentalism and corporatism. His centrist reputation simply proves how far right the center has shifted in Republican politics. 'The median stance for Senate Republicans in the early 1970s was significantly to the left of current GOP maverick John McCain,' write political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Off-Center. 'By the early 2000s, however, the median Senate Republican was essentially twice as conservative--just shy of the ultraconservative position of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.'"


It is truly breathtaking when you think of how far the Republican Party has shifted things in this county. Issues affected range from things such as how policy has become politics, dissent has been silenced and the media has become propaganda. The Republican Party has become entrenched in many areas of many states through extreme gerrymandering in various political districts. And the center has moved to the right in a significant way.

Even if the current crew in the White House and Congress gets indicted (and convicted) from one of the many criminal investigations currently underway or voted out due to voter backlash from an assortment of reasons, from the war, the economy, the lies and misrepresentations, the replacements aren't necessarily going to be a substantial improvement.

As Nathan Newman observed in a post on TPMCafe, The John McCain Scam, "One of the danger signs for Democrats that a Bush collapse doesn't necessarily mean much for progressive gains in policy are the polls showing that John McCain could step up and poll almost twenty points more than either Hillary Clinton or John Kerry in 2008."

And whenever you think McCain's not so bad, just remember that the Center for Republicans is not that far removed from Rick Santorum.