Opinion > Columnists > Davis Merritt

  Davis Merritt  

Which version of McCain is running?

John McCain was much more interesting as a potential president in 2000, when he was in full maverick mode. The 2008 version of the Straight Talk Express is, well, eight years older -- and at our ages, eight years matter.

The latest model, encumbered by the conservative orthodoxy required by today's political atmosphere, doesn't leave him much space to move around.

Eight years ago, McCain had the space and the will, but he didn't have the money to make a successful run. That's a pity, because the country and the world would have avoided much grief with either McCain or Al Gore in the White House.

But we've absorbed eight years of the George Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove brand of deliberate, mindlessly disciplined polarization, and now that McCain has the money does he retain the will?

He's trying to sustain the Straight Talk brand that implies independence of mind and spirit, but he's staffed his campaign with the standard Republican array of business lobbyists and counts among his foreign affairs advisers, including his primary one, neoconservatives from the group that gulled us into the Iraq disaster.

In the past, McCain resisted the neoconservative impulse to project American military power on every problem. He opposed intervention in Lebanon in 1983 and spoke against the 1990s incursions in Somalia and Haiti. It's unlikely that in 2000 it occurred to him that Iraq needed bashing, though it turns out that was in the Bush-Cheney playbook well before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provided (false) cover.

McCain must continue to endorse Bush's war because he cannot recant his vote for it, so he's trying to have it both ways by saying it was a good idea but poorly executed. Either way, we're stuck with it indefinitely in his view.

His balancing act is inviting a wrestling match between neoconservatives and realists such as Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger for McCain's foreign affairs soul. It might not be in his short-term political interest to resolve it now, but it is very much in the interests of the American people for him to do so before we vote.

Voters face the same problem on some domestic issues. McCain has only lately acknowledged the home-foreclosure problem. He declared a month ago that "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers." Last week, in unveiling a modest plan to refinance some home mortgages, it was, "I am committed to using all the resources of this government and great nation to... make sure that every deserving American... can achieve their American dream."

Again, he is tugged at by radically opposed sides of the Republican spectrum. Which will we be voting for?

The nation is also beginning to suffer the consequences -- most immediately in aviation, food and drugs, and the environment -- of Ronald Reagan-inspired undermining of necessary and reasonable government regulation. Conservative organizations such as the Club for Growth count McCain as a leftist because he believes global warming is a real problem and sees a regulatory role for government in addressing it.

He's going to be the Republican nominee. We need to know by November whether he will be the year-2000 maverick or a 2008 amalgam of conflicting ideas.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.