Cross posted from Liberal Voices:
The whole McCain persona is not moderate, and is truly not even maverick. The John McCain persona is most aptly described as right-wing with moderate warps and maverick feints.
The John McCain of today is not the John McCain of eight years ago. Simply put, his maverick bent is bent. He heroically withstood the tortures of the Viet Cong prison. But his thirst for the power of the presidency gives him an expeditious bow to Bush and an awkward allegiance to Republican dogma.
Thus, there is a dissonance to John McCain, his campaign and his speeches. It reminds you of the opening strains of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Warped video: discordant music, slow-motion distortion of form and meaning.
Just when his foreign policy speeches start to make sense, one suspects that neocon propaganda twists his reason toward rants: claiming that Democrats are selling out to al Qaeda dominance.
Neocons still own the Republican Party, and to be its candidate McCain must balance on the beam of Bush peace propaganda, fear-mongering, and the Bush war against terrorism. But McCain statements, especially 100 years of war, seem to lean even more toward militancy than even Bush. When denying the intent of his own words, McCain repeatedly evokes the long-term occupations of Korea, Japan, Germany or Kuwait.
My recent memory of McCain, Iraq, and Iran is this succession of scenes: his charge of Iran training Al Qaeda, an almost real-time correction by Joe Lieberman, then McCain substituting the word extremist for Al Qaeda, then McCain changing the word again to Al Qaeda. I must admit that I guessed engagement in an outright lie (in the Bush tradition), but then wondered about a senior moment.
A few days back Joe Klein gave McCain kudos regarding his March 26th foreign policy speech. In this speech, Joe said that McCain refrained from his foolish, inaccurate "Al-Qaeda-is-Gonna-Take-Over" rhetoric of the recent past, and gave a reasonable and balanced approach in Iraq.
Now, we all remember the media’s pardon of George W. Bush’s sophomoric speeches, lauding his achievement relative to his usual mediocre performances. The media also helped to paint Bush as moderate and bought his compassionate conservative tripe when most of us knew better. So Joe Klein’s kudos don’t impress me.
Then there is domestic policy, or the total absence of it. Currently it is a combination of neocon ideology, the Adam Smith market economy he has overheard from other neocons, and the need to cultivate Wall Street moguls. McCain is especially malleable here because, by his own admission, he knows little about economics.
Once upon a time he decried the Bush tax cuts. Now he votes 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. How will he balance the budget and maintain our $3 trillion war? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks, he stated, which are molehills next to the mountain of Bush debt. One wonders if he misleads or is ill-informed.
By his own admission, he has no clue about economics, but McCain does know moralizing. His stern message to homeowners under duress includes: “It is not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly.”
If you are among the 4 million homeowners who are tanking, hide your heads and emulate the 76 million who are “working a second job, skipping a vacation and managing their budgets.” McCain failed to directly chide Countrywide Financial or Bear Stearns.
But he did say that the federal government ought to do something about getting regulations off the back of the financial markets and concluded with a call to reduce the corporate tax rate (the worn-out Bush mantra).
Economists and objective analysts who have watched unregulated financial markets drag the world’s economy into the muck of their own greed-fest, must be getting whiplash trying to follow the seemingly uninformed illogic of McCain’s proposal to de-regulate more.
According to CNN reports, he is working on new solutions to our economic travail. Considering his lack of grasp of the subprime situation in particular and the economy in general, one hopes he has added new knowledge to his staff of economic advisors.
Our tanking economy shows that the invisible hand (free market in Adam Smith terms) that neocons tout seems to be held (constrained / broken / monopolized) by irresponsible people, financial markets and consumers alike. We should not hold our breath for his solutions.
On the same CNN program, Senator Dodd stated that we can’t wait for his new solutions to the subprime crisis.
Even on social issues the maverick vein is gone. McCain once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance." Late last year he met with Falwell and since then his positions seem friendlier to the religious right. A case in point is his support of an extremist anti-abortion law in South Dakota.
Like Bush, McCain is trying to appear moderate during his general election run, which he gets to start early due to the winner-take-all Republican primaries. And like Bush, the media permits him to play the pretend game of being a moderate.
If the media bothered to check his voting record it would find the truth. A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative member.
If due to the prolonged battle for the Democratic nomination, McCain manages to prevail, it would truly be a case of Bush III, somewhat of a Bush clone, just as plutocratic, just as warlike – maybe even more, and just as ignorant about the economy and economics.
Comments