McCain's Makeover

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times describes the role of naming Sarah Palin as his running mate in completing John McCain's conversion.

With his choice of Sarah Palin — the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe mankind is playing any role in climate change — for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.

Given the fact that Senator McCain deliberately avoided voting on all eight attempts to pass a bill extending the vital tax credits and production subsidies to expand our wind and solar industries, and given his support for lowering the gasoline tax in a reckless giveaway that would only promote more gasoline consumption and intensify our addiction to oil, and given his desire to make more oil-drilling, not innovation around renewable energy, the centerpiece of his energy policy — in an effort to mislead voters that support for drilling today would translate into lower prices at the pump today — McCain has forfeited any claim to be a green candidate.

Jonathan Cohn makes a similar observation in The New Republic and points out Joe Lieberman's attempt to hide this fact in his speech to the GOP convention.

It was not a terribly accurate description, at least based on recent history. McCain has completely reversed his positions on everything from abortion to tax cuts in order to win his party's presidential nomination. Nobody should be more aware of this than Lieberman, who, according to numerous reports, would have been McCain's running mate if the party's base weren't so opposed to putting a pro-choice candidate on the ticket.

But, for just a moment, put that aside. Lieberman's speech, like Thompson's, was all about who McCain is rather than what McCain would actually do in office. And I suspect that's largely because McCain's agenda just isn't very popular. Remember, this is a candidate that has committed himself to an economic policy that would tilt the tax code more to the rich, a health care policy that would expose the sick to larger medical bills, a cultural policy that would make abortion illegal, and a foreign policy that sees the Iraq War as fundmentally correct. Polls have consistently shown that most voters disagree with these positions.

McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis summed this up nicely.

This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.

--Ballard Burgher