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McCain may well have taken a
page from his opponent’s father, whose own moderate tendencies were
hijacked during the 1992 campaign.
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MCCAIN’S TIRADE against the GOP faithful may have appealed to his
motley coalition of Democrats, independents and insubordinate Republicans,
but it also prompted a question: What sort of strange disease did he have
that would make him say such foolhardy things?
What ails McCain is common among presidential candidates: the curse
of the moderate. It befalls level-headed hopefuls who might fare very well
during a presidential general election, and it can be deadly during the
primary season. Remember Paul Tsongas? Even George Bush the elder got
swamped when he tried to run as a moderate alternative to Ronald Reagan 20
years ago.
In one sense, primaries give
Democrats and Republicans ample opportunity to conduct a process of almost
Darwinian natural selection. As old-time wisdom had it, the candidate who
survived a nominating battle intact presumably was the strongest.
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But this logic has often failed. A candidate who is especially
strong within one party (George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole) can
be equally unpalatable to voters in the other party — or to independents.
Similarly, a maverick like McCain, who has broad general appeal but who
has alienated his own party, will find it pretty darned tough to get
cooperation from local politicians and party officials.
In the upside-down world of modern presidential politics, in
which it’s crucial to lure either party’s faithful across to the other
side of the ballot, too much support outside your party can be deadly in
the primaries, and too much support within your own party can be the kiss
of death in November.
ABORTION AS MORAL
WEATHERVANE
Nowhere is this flaw
more visible than in the GOP’s abortion plank: Americans are about evenly
split on the issue of legal abortion (56 percent of Americans feel some
sort of abortion should be considered legal, according to one Gallup
poll), but a large segment of the GOP faithful remain opposed.
Abortion is rarely a decisive
voting issue — only 10 percent of Americans are most concerned with
candidate promises on abortion, according to a January NBC/Wall Street
Journal poll. But it serves as a sort of litmus test, an issue on which a
candidate can test out his moral backbone.
Although the abortion issue resonated for Bush in South Carolina,
the deciding moment in this year’s abortion debate occurred Jan. 20, when
Bush told a group of Iowans that “Roe vs. Wade was a reach.” It was a
defining moment for Bush, a chance to affirm his solid-right credentials
and stake a claim to the conservative mantle.
It was all McCain needed. He took the initiative and exploited the
newly minted system of open primaries in many states, especially New
Hampshire, to turn the battle for the Republican core on its head. For
McCain, it may have been a chance to bring new people — voters sympathetic
to his own disgruntlement with his party — into the Republican
fold.
“If anyone’s sensible about broadening
the party … McCain’s the man,” said Martin Wattenberg, a political
scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “The
Decline of American Political Parties.”
But
McCain’s appeal to those outside his party is balanced by his frequent
alienation of his own party members. As Wattenberg points out: “The
problem is that he’s not presidential in the eyes of the people who know
him,” including his Senate colleagues, only four of whom have endorsed him
— and none of them are on the Commerce Committee, of which he is chairman.
TRAPPED BETWEEN OLD AND NEW
McCain’s coalition building was a brilliant feat, except that he
ended up trapped between the traditional primary system of years past and
a new, untested system that varies so much from state to state that it
barely seems like the same series of political events. His strength came
from his ability to exploit the new, but his defeats have come from an
inability to vanquish the old, and he acknowledged his need to reach out
to his own party’s faithful. |
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“I have to convince and tell our Republican Party establishment:
It’s great over here. Come on in. Join us,” he told a group of Rotary Club
members in Washington state — before the state’s Republican core rejected
him in the Feb. 29 primary.
To the extent
that McCain had support within his party, much of it came from other GOP
mavericks and those who objected to what they saw as strong-arm tactics by
the national Republican Party and the Bush campaign to endorse Bush as the
party’s ordained choice.
“It was a test of
party loyalty,” said Guy Molinari, the longtime borough president of
Staten Island and McCain’s campaign chairman in New York state. “That’s
nonsense. That’s not what politics is about.”
LESSONS LEARNED
FROM 1992
Indeed, McCain may well
have taken a page from his opponent’s father, whose own moderate
tendencies were hijacked during the 1992 campaign as Bill Clinton took
over the middle of the political spectrum. |
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That year, Bush’s own party may have scrambled his chances during
their national convention in Houston: It was a raucous, unruly affair;
demonstrations by hard-core conservative activists outside the Astrodome
remained a strong symbol that the far right was in control of the party.
This was, after all, the convention during which Pat Buchanan depicted a
“religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.”
The strident tone may have been an ego boost for the
hard right, but it struck a severe blow to the Bush campaign because it
allowed Bill Clinton to reframe the campaign’s terms, with Bush cast to
the ideological fringe.
McCain now faces
the opposite problem. His appeal is clearly bipartisan, and his success in
attracting crossover Democrats and independents could prove valuable to
the Republicans in the fall campaign.
RIGHT TO MOVE
RIGHT?
Yet that appeal is
precisely what makes McCain so unpalatable to party faithful.
George W. Bush has the opposite problem: By placing
himself firmly to the right of McCain, he gained momentum on the right but
hurt his chances against a Democratic opponent. He has chosen some
emblematic opportunities that seemed politically inastute — first and
foremost his trip to Bob Jones University, which almost derailed him and
forced him to apologize for his behavior. |
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Lest anyone think McCain's
cross-party appeal is revolutionary, the 1992 Clinton campaign crowed
about crossover Republican support, even printing up buttons for renegade
GOP voters to wear.
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“I think they’ve done some other things that weren’t that
bright,” said Lyn Nofziger, a lifelong Republican activist and President
Ronald Reagan’s communications director. “I think what George W. Bush has
to do is get out there and tell people what he stands for. ... He is
hurting himself.”
Indeed, this year’s GOP
scuffle has become so raucous that no less an eminence grise than
Bob Dole stepped in before the Virginia primary and told the two hopefuls
to cool the rhetoric.
ANOINTING THE
INDEPENDENTS
Were it not enough
that McCain and Bush are tearing each other asunder, they also must
contend with a primary system — once a stronghold of partisanship — that
has been pried open like a can of cheap sardines.
For example, of all the coming primaries between Tuesday 7 and March
20, including the two Super Tuesdays, only seven primaries — those in
Connecticut, Maine, New York, Wyoming, Florida, Louisiana and Oklahoma —
are closed. The remaining 14 allow some form of cross-party voting.
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Such a muddle makes the independent voter, whose influence seems to
grow with each passing day, ever more important. McCain’s success this
year is based not only on independents but also on his appeal to other
practitioners of political polygamy: the much-coveted Reagan Democrats,
for example, and other party-crossing voting blocs, including the
Republicans for Clinton-Gore who were used to much effect in 1992. All
this cross-pollination may help an outsider like McCain, but it also
drives more traditional pols batty.
LIMITED-TIME
OFFER?
Given the risks, it’s
uncertain whether Democrats and Republicans will allow the open-primary
phenomenon to continue. An open system makes it more difficult for the
parties to activate well-orchestrated local party machines, but it also
offers both parties the chance to open their doors to those who felt
previously unwelcome.
“The Republican
leadership in a lot of states thinks it’s a good thing because it brings
people into your party,” Molinari said. “You may hold on to these people,
and that enriches the Republican Party in the future.”
However, the parties seem aware that the emerging open system
is nothing short of revolutionary, as significant as the last set of
primary reforms in the early 1970s that helped pry power from the clenched
fists of back-room dealmakers. That may not sit well with them.
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McCain, for example, proved effective this season in cracking open
the byzantine New York primary system, but state GOP leaders may bolster
their defenses against any similar attack four years from now.
The future will be decided when Republican National
Committee members sit down at this year’s convention in Philadelphia and
evaluate guidelines for the 2004 primaries. They’ll need to decide whether
open primaries bring in new voters or weaken the party.
“That’s a debate that cuts both ways,” said Tom Yu, a
spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “The national party is
not prepared to come down on either side of that.”
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