When Will McCain Bolt the GOP? On a Slow News Day

When Will McCain Bolt The GOP? On a Slow News Day

Will John McCain abandon the Republican Party?perhaps in the next week?and run as an independent candidate for president in 2004?

I don't know and, as of June 4, 2001, couldn't care less. The pro-McCain media machine, which cuts across partisan lines, is certainly setting up shop?lovingly stroking the Arizona Senator?for a rematch with Bush. It beats learning about the philosophy behind the administration's plan for missile defense or writing yet another thumb-sucker about how European leaders can't stand the President. McCain's Sedona barbecue last weekend with incoming Majority Leader Tom Daschle gave reporters license to speculate anew about the egotistical Senator's intentions in the days ahead. Right, that's days; the Beltway's self-anointed aristocrats don't have the attention span to think beyond the latest chapter in Washington's continual spasm of political gossip. And McCain, cheesed off that James Jeffords (soon to be relegated to James Who? status) temporarily replaced him as DC's resident "maverick," was delighted to provide a story line.

McCain, who spoke to Bush over the weekend, issued a statement that said: "I have not instructed nor encouraged any of my advisers to begin planning for a presidential run in 2004. I have not discussed running for president with anyone. As I have said repeatedly, I have no intention of running for president, nor do I have any intention or cause to leave the Republican Party. I hope this will put an end to further speculation on this subject."

Had a politician like Sen. Russell Feingold or Sen. Richard Lugar made the same definitive remarks, you'd believe him. But McCain, whose pillows are fluffed by acolytes as diverse as The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, the Hudson Institute's Marshall Wittmann (the two conservatives whom New York Times and Washington Post reporters quote to represent "balance" in their coverage of the Bush presidency) and the usual assortment of hacks like the Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant, the staffs of Newsweek and Time, has no veracity.

Writing on June 3 about McCain's vote against the tax package, Oliphant was silly: "What this means is that McCain's party is leaving him, as it did on campaign finance reform. What he does in response is less important than the fact that he will keep on fighting for his positions." Oliphant omits the significant fact that campaign finance reform is in doubt in no small part because of Democratic opposition, most vocally from black legislators.

Grover Norquist, a tax-cut champion in DC, summed up the futility of predicting McCain's actions in a comment to the Post's Thomas Edsall and Dana Milbank in a June 2 article: "[McCain's] not drifting right. He is not drifting left. He is drifting in front of the television cameras. He will do whatever gets him the most attention, and two weeks from now I don't have a clue where he will be."

Mickey Kaus, in a June 2 blurb on his website kausfiles.com, was more jocular, writing, "I like many things about John McCain and may one day happily vote for him for President, but isn't it pretty clear he's become [become?] a hopeless publicity junkie..." Kaus praises the Post article for "sketch[ing] out an ideological rationale for a McCain candidacy that's pretty powerful," but then suggests his reservations. "McCain is a captive of his base, the press. And it's unclear to me whether the press is populist-centrist these days or simply left-of-centrist. By the time he runs as an independent, McCain may be to the left of the Democratic nominee? The love-love relationship between McCain and the media is unhealthy for any politician, whatever his or her ideology. It means that President McCain won't want to do anything that makes Tim Russert angry."

Time to Kneecap Arafat Granted, the first five months of Bush's presidency have seemed like a dozen, in sharp contrast to those who speculated that after Bill Clinton the political intrigue in DC would be as scintillating as reading the collected columns of Times op-ed geriatric Anthony Lewis. Consider the events since Election Day: the Florida recount; Clinton's scandalous pardons and five-finger pilfering of the White House; the Democratic jihad against John Ashcroft; the deterioration of U.S.-China relations; the absurd controversy over arsenic levels in water; Bush's tax-cut victory and his emasculated education bill; McCain's temporary triumph on campaign finance "reform"; Jeffords' epiphany that, despite accepting GOP money for his campaigns in New York-infested Vermont, he had to act on his conscience, switch parties and give Senate control to the Democrats; and Al Gore's merciful (and, to be fair, tasteful) absence from the political scene. Bush's alleged honeymoon with the media may seem to have ended?he's now a "bully" instead of "charmer" and his staff's discipline is now considered a repeat of Clintonian disarray?but the midterm elections, the first real referendum on his presidency, are still 18 months away. So while the Washington-Boston Palm Pilot crew of wired pundits, pols and editorialists concentrates solely on a given week's ups and downs, Bush?if he's not distracted by the blather?can continue to build on an already decent record of accomplishment.

One specific example of leadership would be his direct intervention in the Mideast stalemate. I don't think Colin Powell is up to it, but Bush and Dick Cheney ought to encourage Ariel Sharon to strike back against the coddled Arafat and his band of terrorists with unprecedented force. After the heinous disco bombing in Tel Aviv last weekend, Sharon occupies the moral high ground: the time has come to assert Israel's right to defend its citizens. Bush, as a principled advocate of democracy, should travel abroad and meet with Sharon, showing the world?especially the feckless European heads of state?that the United States won't stand for the violence inflicted on one of its most cherished allies. The second-guessing will begin immediately, especially from those who propose another 10 years of meaningless Rose Garden "peace summits," but that shouldn't deter Bush from following his gut instincts, despite whatever political fallout he may incur.

Totalitarian kooks like Arafat don't want peace, and they only understand greater military strength, which Israel has yet to demonstrate. Contrary to the opinion of liberal hand-wringers in America, including a large contingent of Jews, despots like Arafat don't play by the same rules as civilized nations. Put it this way: if Mexican militants were lobbing shells across the border and sent suicide bombers to discos in Los Angeles, the U.S. would immediately act.

In Monday's Times, William Safire cut through Arafat's phoniness with a devastating column, one I assume Bush will pay attention to, despite his disdain for the left-wing daily. Safire wrote: "Because the human missile that massacred Tel Aviv teenagers so satisfied the lust for casualties, and because the incredible restraint of Ariel Sharon was about to snap, Arafat 'condemned' this attack and told a visiting German diplomat he would join Sharon's self-imposed cease-fire 'unconditionally.' That means only that Arafat will not insist on the latest reward for violence recommended by the Mitchell commission, Bill Clinton's final vehicle for appeasement: cessation of construction in and around already-existing settlements... With doves turned to realists and pressure from Bibi Netanyahu to defend the nation, and with Israelis unwilling to further expose their children to lives of terror, Sharon will let Sharon be Sharon."

Bash Bush, But Leave the Twins Alone President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer clearly needs a long weekend in Bermuda. How else to explain his shameless suck-up to the White House media last Thursday afternoon? Matt Drudge was quick to post Fleischer's imitation of Clinton lackey Joe Lockhart?by far the most disreputable spokesman of the past administration?when, on Friday, he noted a question asked by CNN's Major Garrett about Jenna Bush's underage drinking citation in Austin last week. Fleischer said: "Major, I am not going to deem to tell the press at this juncture what the press should or shouldn't do. I think that's why you're here. You're here to make those judgments and you're the White House press corps, and I think you're set apart from most press corps in America in terms of exercising that judgment. You're not the Internet."

If Fleischer doesn't know by now that the mainstream media is no friend of his boss, and that gratuitous slurs on non-Beltway news-gatherers are counterproductive, he ought to go work for Terry McAuliffe. Ari, here's the secret: Of course there's a double-standard in the media regarding the private lives of the president and vice president. Get used to it. The Democrats and their journalistic sycophants are using Bush's family to get at him, since apparently he won't provide the philandering fodder (to be charitable) of Bill Clinton. The recent smear on Gov. Jeb Bush is one example; the excessive coverage of Jenna and Barbara Bush's underage drinking is another.

I'm glad that Jenna's fake ID dust-up in Austin?and it was dumb of the University of Texas student to think she could get away with such a ruse in a liberal town where not only is she well-known, but there are countless people who'd like to create bad publicity for her father?was blown out of proportion by all of the media, regardless of ideology. When the New York Post has a cover headline "Jenna and Tonic" and Drudge runs an item about UT students possessing a videotape that shows Jenna "feeling no pain," there can be no spin about how the conservative media is covering up for the Bush clan.

Last year, Al Gore's kids got a better break from the press. His son and namesake got off easy when he was arrested in North Carolina for a speeding violation (not to mention for other unreported misdeeds that aren't a secret to any Washington insider). I'm aware of a much bigger story than the Bush twins' margarita-sipping?hard evidence?about a Gore child that was blacked out during the presidential campaign. You know it was serious, otherwise Gore would've exploited it to his advantage, just like Tipper's well-timed confession of depression, an episode that was hailed as a larger-than-herself moment meant solely to help other Americans with the same problem.

Linda Stasi, writing in last Sunday's New York Post, stands out for her juvenile finger-wagging at the Bush family. She wrote: "Now the White House has the nerve to be unnerved that the media is covering their 'private life.' Sorry, but a private life stops being private when there are more pictures of your kids with numbers under their chins than there are yearbook photos of them. You don't have to be Dr. Spock to figure out that the twins are carrying out their parents' worst nightmares. Mom was involved in a fatal car accident when she was 17, and Dad was a hard-drinking party boy. Time for a serious smackdown for these two college brats?and I don't mean another trip to the WWF."

But leave it to MSNBC's Eric Alterman to equate President Bush's ill-advised concealment of his DUI arrest a generation ago?which, when revealed under shady circumstances in the last week of the campaign, cost him a lot of votes?with Clinton's admitted perjury. Alterman downgrades Clinton's behavior to mere adultery, ignoring the fact that he lied repeatedly to the country about the Lewinsky affair and was impeached for obstruction of justice. Alterman claims in his May 31 column that Bush's arrest in the 70s is somehow as damning as Clinton's actions while president. Bush has nothing to be proud of in that incident, but the comparison is a red herring, except as an example of bad political judgment. Clinton was president when his law-breaking occurred, and his concealment of the truth not only humiliated his family but put his aides in hock to lawyers while they defended him.

Time columnist Margaret Carlson was more rational, telling The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz for his June 1 column: "It's much easier for me to write about George Bush despoiling the environment than George Bush as a parent who's got a problem. The instinct of all of us who are parents is, if we can let this pass, let it pass."

Newsweek's Evan Thomas and Martha Brant, in a piece dated June 11, went down into the gutter in their take on the Bush family's private matters. This excerpt is particularly dignified: "While charming and ebullient, Jenna is a little 'spacey,' say her friends, and prone to pratfalls. At the Inaugural ball, her strapless dress slipped down while she was dancing with her father." Nice touch, Evan: going from a well-received biography of Robert F. Kennedy to reporting on a first daughter's strapless dress.

Kurtz, who's clearly in need of a year-long sabbatical, given his nonstop typing-without-thinking, misrepresented the Boston Herald's Margery Eagan's take on Jenna-slake in the following snippet of her May 31 column. Kurtz: "'Certainly our DWI president has set a very, very bad example for his impressionable girls... The apples have not fallen from the tree.'"

In fact, Eagan was being sarcastic, as her conclusion proves: "Maybe some courageous grownup could even say: You know what? Barbara and Jenna Bush are 19 years old, living on their own. They should be able to drink at home or in bars or restaurants. Tens of millions of 19-year-olds have done it for years, with fake IDs, too, including those of us from the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll generation who've somehow turned into hysterical, hypocritical Cotton Mathers. But none of that will happen. We'll do what we always do: wring our hands and decry the evils of demon rum, while kids just roll their eyes and reach for another cold one."

Gary Johnson's Common Sense While George W. Bush is an infinite improvement over Bill Clinton as chief executive?and has the opportunity, with the right combination of shrewdness, honesty and luck, to become a first-tier president?he's got a number of blind spots. His opposition to abortion?unlike his father, he's a true pro-lifer?is one of them, as is his devotion to the fruitless, and costly, "war on drugs." Politics, of course, enters into the calculation, but it's pretty clear that Bush has so nailed down the conservative element of his party?where are they going to go??that he could open his mind to some instances where less government interference is a better course of action. Appearing on Capital Gang last Saturday night, two-term New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson spoke eloquently about the common sense of legalizing marijuana. Johnson, 48, is no Woodstock throwback: he's a successful construction entrepreneur, is against price caps on electricity and doesn't drink, smoke or use drugs. But his controversial views on the marijuana issue have made him a pariah in right-wing circles, testament that conservatives can be as clueless as liberals like Teddy Kennedy and Dick Gephardt are on issues like tax-cutting and tort reform.

Capital Gang panelist Al Hunt interviewed Johnson and asked the Governor if his belief that marijuana ought to be treated the same as alcohol wasn't "a surrender to the drug culture."

Johnson: "Absolutely not? Again, fundamentally: Don't do drugs. But fundamentally, do you belong in jail for smoking marijuana in the confines of your own home, doing no harm to anybody, arguably, other than yourself? I say no. We cannot continue to arrest and incarcerate this country. We're arresting 1.6 million people a year in this country on drug-related crime. We need to arrest people that do drugs and do harm to other individuals... So let's draw a line. You know, smoke marijuana, get in a car, drive the car; you know what, you probably just crossed over the line to unacceptable behavior, similar to drinking. Drinking is okay as long as you don't have too many drinks and get in a car or have too many drinks and go do harm to somebody else. That's what should be criminal."

June 4 Send comments to [MUG1988@aol.com](mailto:MUG1988@aol.com) or fax to 244-9864.