With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

John McCain: With Friends like These Who Needs Enemies?

As of the Texas primary, Senator John McCain was able to claim publicly that he had sewn up the Republican nomination. As one who is rightly proud of having made it to this stage in his political career by sticking to his convictions, it seemed more than a little odd for McCain immediately to make a pilgrimage to the White House to obtain the political endorsement and blessing of the very man whose campaign used very ugly tactics to knock him out of a bitterly contested primary race in the South Carolina primary of 2000.

President Bush demonstrated just how strange this meeting of two former foes really was when he observed in his inimitable prose: "If my showing up and endorsing him helps him, or if I'm against him and it helps him -- either way, I want him to win,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/03/20080305-4.html, March 5, 2008). Well, at least Bush has made it clear that he doesn't want to blamed for being the single greatest reason that Republicans are at their most vulnerable in a presidential election since Nixon's resignation in 1974.

McCain, for his part, was very gracious to his former rival: "I'm honored and humbled to have the opportunity to receive the endorsement of the President of the United States," he said and went on to declare his "respect and affection" for George W. Bush.

Yet McCain was also quick to state that he would welcome President Bush's help in his campaign by noting that the President could help him “as it fits into his busy schedule,” a caveat he repeated at least three times as if to signal his intention to distance himself from the White House as soon as this endorsement ritual was over.

McCain faces a difficult balancing act in the next few months before the Republican convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul. As the man many social conservatives love to hate, McCain is going to be tap-dancing away from positions he strongly espoused in his 2000 campaign and as recently as last year, namely: voting against the first two Bush tax cuts; supporting campaign finance reform; acknowledging that climate change really exists; and offering undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. Add to this that he has been a fierce critic of the administration's abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, and you have a man whom social conservatives find hard to stomach, even if he shares their convictions on abortion, the Iraq War, and increased military spending.

One reason that McCain has a problem with social conservatives is that he is not a fundamentalist Christian like Governor Huckabee, nor one to wear his religion on his sleeve like Governor Mitt Romney. In February 2000, McCain referred to leaders of the Christian Right as “agents of intolerance,” (Republican Says Bush Panders To the 'Agents of Intolerance' : McCain Takes Aim At Religious Right, International Herald Tribune, February 29, 2000).

In February 2008 McCain seems both desperate and slightly inept as he seeks the endorsement of a controversial televangelist like John Hagee, a man who refers to the Pope as “the anti-Christ” and who avows that Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution for a planned gay pride parade in New Orleans, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee). McCain's courting of social conservatives thus far has yielded mixed results as pundits like CNN's Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others have strongly rejected him, and many of them are not yet ready to forgive and forget, even in the fact of an acknowledged Republican front-runner, (“McCain’s Critics on Right Look Again,” The New York Times, February 1, 2008).

A second challenge for McCain arises from the support of independents, particularly independent male voters, who often claim to have as much interest in Barack Obama as they do in John McCain, and who are less likely to moved by McCain's shift to the right on social issues. Similarly, McCain's remark that he could envision having American troops in Iraq for 100 years is not likely to win him support among the many Americans who want to hear concrete proposals from candidates about how they plan to bring U.S. soldiers home as quickly as possible, (“McCain defends '100 years in Iraq' statement,” CNNPolitics.com, February 15, 2008).

So John McCain has a delicate balancing act ahead of him in the months leading up to his party's convention. How can he rally the Republican base without alienating independents, much less the majority of the country who favors an end to the Iraq War and who are more concerned about their own individual economic woes than moral issues like abortion or gay marriage? And if social conservatives stay home next November, or even if they favor McCain with an anemic turnout, will he be able to muster enough support among independents and cross-over voters to overcome the loss of at least part of the Republican base?

Finally, in trying to steer a middle course between social conservatives and independents who find McCain's “straight” talking attractive, does he risk undermining that very reputation for independence and integrity if he runs too far and too fast from positions he has held for the past four years?

Certainly McCain is currently trying to distance himself from at least some of his positions on taxes, immigration, climate change, and the use of torture against alleged terrorists etc. But if he changes his views too radically, he opens himself up to the same charges of “flip-flopping” that proved so devastating to John Kerry, another presidential candidate with a sterling military record. And if he hews too closely to the current administration policies in order to court the socially conservative wing of his party, he also risks being labeled John “McSame as Bush” as one independent anti-McCain advertisement has already charged, using images of Bush and McCain embracing as well as slow-motion Photo Shop exchanges of the two men's head shots to reinforce their assertion that McCain's famed independence is a myth, (“Anti-McCain: McSame As Bush,” YouTube.com).

So John McCain finds himself placed between the rock of political realties—voters are concerned about "the economy, stupid," and they also want out of Iraq now—and the hard place of social conservatives who don't trust him and who want complete capitulation on their core issues before they embrace him with anything more than a lukewarm endorsement.

McCain might well be asking himself: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”