Paul Krugman's new Op-Ed deals with John McCain and his political positions. Looking at his role-call votes, Krugman concludes that he is a candidate of the far right,and that his political differences with George Bush have been exaggerated. Unsurprisingly, Krugman doesn't seem to like him.
Paul Krugman wrote:Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.
When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.
The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits abortions even for victims of rape or incest.
The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the hard right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting record, available at
www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative member.
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I think Krugman is probably too harsh on McCain as a person. Unlike Bush, he seems largely unaffected by the culture of corruption that pervades the Republicans' current leadership. If that's true, McCain remains a viable candidate for any swing voter whose main problem with the Bush administration is cronyism. But for those who mostly object to the conservative principles it claims to enact (but doesn't), there is little reason to vote for John McCain. Krugman deserves credit for pointing that out. (I was a little taken aback myself when I saw McCain's profile on issues2000.org. I had known that he wasn't quite as moderate as his reputation, but I didn't know he was that much more conservative socially.)
PS: I think McCain is another proof that you can't trust the press on the portrait it paints of any candidate's politics. We can get much superior information from research that polls and measures those things, such as
Voteview and
Issues 2000.
