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McCain Bucks Ties To Bush

AP photo

Republican presidential candidate John McCain tours the Everglades with his wife, Cindy, daughter Meghan and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.

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By WILLIAM MARCH

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 11, 2008

Updated: 06/11/2008 12:13 am

TAMPA - John McCain can read polls as well as anyone, and what he reads might make him nervous.

Voter job approval ratings for President Bush are around 28 percent; in a recent Gallup poll, 69 percent called his presidency "a failure."

Bush is the president of McCain's party, the man McCain endorsed for president twice, and the president whose decisions to go to war in Iraq, seek partial privatization of Social Security and cut taxes for upper-income people McCain has supported.

But he is not the man McCain wants to come to voters' minds when they think about McCain for president.

So he is doing his best, as he showed during a tour of Florida last week, to distance himself from Bush, even to the point of harshly criticizing the president.

•In appearances before newspaper editors Thursday in Orlando and Friday in the Everglades, he emphasized two areas where he says he differs: his interest in environmental issues and his openness to being questioned by the public and the media.

•In New Orleans, the site of what is perceived as one of the administration's greatest failures, McCain referred to the response to Hurricane Katrina as a "disgraceful failure" that "exposed the incompetence of government at all levels to meet even its most basic responsibilities."

•And even though his economic policies emphasize tax cuts that would benefit the wealthy, as Bush's did, McCain sharply rejects the suggestion that he's a follower of Bush.

He has also sharply criticized Bush for failing to control federal spending.

Last week, rejecting a comparison with Bush, McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said they share only "the understanding of a good tax policy," and added, "Sadly, it seems that's all President Bush understood on the economy."

University of South Florida political scientist Darryl Paulson said McCain "wants to do everything possible to separate himself from Bush. ... I don't anticipate they'll be campaigning side by side. I can't imagine the Republicans would want to showcase a president whose popularity is in the 20s."

Still, his presidential opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is putting McCain on the defensive by asserting that McCain is running for "a third Bush term" and "four more years of George Bush."

And despite having become the leader of his party, McCain is trying to emphasize his reputation as a maverick, willing to go against the grain of the party and take principled stands that hurt him politically.

At the same time, he still needs Bush to help him raise money, and Bush's popularity with religious conservatives. "The base are political conservatives who still like Bush," Paulson noted.

McCain held a fundraiser with Bush on May 27 in Phoenix, but held it in a private home, closed to the media, and allowed only a brief photo op with Bush at the airport.

Is McCain still the same maverick he was in 2000?

On some issues - climate change and immigration are the most obvious - he has charted an independent course from Bush and some in the Republican Party, but in others, he has toed the party line. Some examples:

Courting The Base

Part of McCain's maverick reputation was based on his conflict with the religious right during his 2000 presidential race. McCain famously called the Revs. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," comparing them to Louis Farrakhan and the Rev. Al Sharpton as "the outer reaches of American politics."

McCain said he was angry about attacks on him by some religious conservatives, who supported Bush against McCain in the Republican presidential primary. Soon after losing the primary, however, McCain endorsed Bush.

McCain has worked to patch up the relationship, hiring religious right political operatives for his campaign and delivering a commencement speech at Falwell's Liberty University in 2006.

He brought John Hagee, the pastor of a Texas megachurch, into his campaign, a move that led to a controversy and eventually a split-up over Hagee's allegedly anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic comments.

This year, McCain's campaign has designed an extensive outreach program to court evangelicals. He has publicly emphasized his anti-abortion record; delivered a speech on judicial appointments aimed at pleasing religious conservatives; and blasted the California Supreme Court for overturning a state ban on same-sex marriage.

However, McCain remains opposed to a U.S. constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, which stokes religious right opposition.

The War

In various recent polls, majorities of 60-plus percent of voters say the Iraq war was a mistake; even more disapprove of Bush's handling of the war. But McCain has long favored it.

"I understand the frustration caused by our mistakes in this war. I sympathize with the fatigue of the American people," he said in a speech at Virginia Military Institute in April 2007. "But ... it is the right road. It is necessary and just."

However, he cites it as an example of his independence, because he has differed with Bush on the initial strategy, saying it was "badly misconceived." He says troop levels were inadequate to the task prior to the 2007 surge.

McCain didn't take that stance, however, until after a visit to Iraq in late 2003. Prior to that, he was one of the war's main proponents, and a co-sponsor of the resolution authorizing the war.

In early 2003, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki said planned troop levels for the coming war were inadequate. Many thought he was fired for his outspokenness. McCain didn't back him or other military leaders who voiced similar questions.

Instead, he denounced war critics, and on June 11, 2003 - shortly after Bush appeared on an aircraft carrier under a "Mission Accomplished" banner - McCain agreed on Fox News, saying "The major conflict is over. ... The regime change is accomplished." He predicted weapons of mass destruction would soon be found.

Asked about that in a Tampa Tribune interview recently, McCain said, "I supported the war because like every intelligence agency in the world I believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"But the point is ... I saw early on that we were going to fail unless we got more troops over with a different strategy."

Hurricane Katrina

Although he denounced the Hurricane Katrina response as a failure by "government at all levels," McCain voted against amendments to launch investigations in 2005 and again in 2006, joining other Republicans in party-line votes.

According to an analysis by FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, the amendments to set up bipartisan investigative commissions were sponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., in the wake of accusations that the administration was withholding documents about the response.

Lieberman, an independent who now backs McCain, chastised the Bush administration at the time for a "near-total lack of cooperation."

Nonetheless, McCain asserted during his recent New Orleans visit that he has "supported every investigation and ways of finding out what caused the tragedy."

Climate Change

On global warming, McCain is widely acknowledged to have charted a course independent of Bush.

Immediately after the 2004 election, in which he stumped for Bush's re-election, he sharply distanced himself from Bush on climate change, calling the administration's stance "terribly disappointing."

McCain had co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Joe Lieberman to curb greenhouse gases in 2003. Bush had opposed any such move, citing possible harm to the economy and doubts over global warming.

Immigration

McCain's immigration reform bill, supported by Florida GOP Sen. Mel Martinez and Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, was so unpopular with the Republican Party base it almost killed his political career. But Bush backed it.

More than any other single cause, except possibly financial mismanagement of his campaign, it was responsible for what appeared to be the death of his campaign in 2007. He resurrected it with a convincing win in the New Hampshire primary.

The bill would have offered a "path to citizenship" for illegal migrants already in the country who learned English, worked steadily and had clean records, an approach opponents derided as "amnesty."

Campaign Finance Reform

The famous McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, besides limiting spending of unregulated "soft money" contributions to campaigns, also sought to control the activities of independent political committees.

One provision restricted election-related activities of independent groups within 60 days before an election, hindering common practices of groups including the Christian Coalition and National Right to Life.

Many of those groups, in response, called the bill an attack on free speech; the bill became the chief cause of hostility between McCain and the religious right.

Tax Cuts

In his 2000 campaign, McCain criticized Bush's proposals for the tax cuts, and early in Bush's first term, he opposed them.

McCain now says he did so because they weren't accompanied by spending cuts. At the time, however, he was also quoted as saying, like Democrats, that too much of the benefit went to the wealthy and too little to the middle class.

In a May 2001 news release, he said he voted against the tax cuts because, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle class Americans who most need tax relief."

Today, McCain is solidly behind making the tax cut permanent and enacting more.

Reporter William March can be reached at wmarch@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7761.

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