Counterpoint

On domestic issues US presidential hopeful John McCain is far from being a man of firm purpose. Is he actually a policy flip-flopper ?

However, on foreign policy the Republican contender is consistent, steady and ready to boost spending on the military. Matt Welch offers this assessment of John McCain.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Michael Duffy: Our first guest is Matt Welch. Matt is editor-in-chief at the libertarian magazine Reason and he's author of the book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. Matt, welcome to Counterpoint.

Matt Welch: Thank you very much for having me.

Michael Duffy: John McCain is widely regarded as a Republican rebel, at least in general circles, a man who is prepared to buck his own party and follow his heart. But you've got doubts about that, don't you.

Matt Welch: He has been rebellious on occasion. Whether that is as widespread and marvellous as is being portrayed this week as opposed to last week and the week before is another question entirely. McCain comes to politics from the military. Most people realise that he was a POW in Vietnam, but also his father and grandfather were four-star admirals in the navy, the first ever father and son combination to do so. Like a lot of military men who get into politics he has expressed periodic distain for strict partisan partly-line type of politics. You could say the same thing about Dwight Eisenhower and to some degree Jim Webb who was a big Democrat and fellow Vietnam vet. So that, plus the fact that he, until about ten years ago, never really had anything that you could describe as an ideology about the proper use of government, what the government should do with foreign policy and other things...so he reacted to events much like, let's say, a newspaper editorial board would, which is to say not with any real organised sense, but, 'There's a problem. Fix the problem,' Kind of the Cookie Monster school of politics.

Michael Duffy: Yes, but he has written all these books. He's written quite a number of books and I understand they've done fairly well, so he has put something of his own thoughts on the record.

Matt Welch: Yes, and in fact my book is, if anything at all, a close reading of his five books, two of which I can recommend heartily to anyone who's interested which are his first two. The first is a Vietnam memoir Faith of my Fathers which is where he really introduced a new interpretation of his own POW experience which, up until that moment, for 25 years he hadn't really put on. Basically he took it as a redemption tale, a narrative that he was a guy...a ne'er-do-well Tom Cruise-like figure, bending the rules and all this kind of stuff, but ultimately an individualist, an egotist who in Vietnam discovered that there are limits to individualism. And that insight which, again, he didn't have for the first 25 years after he came back, he has since applied them to politics in interesting and, for my money, troubling ways, which he then further elucidates in his political memoir Worth the Fighting For. The other three of his books I wouldn't recommend, they're just basically profiles in courage type of little vignettes about Winston Churchill.

Michael Duffy: Sure. I want to go through some of the details of McCain's changing beliefs in a moment with you. But just sticking with the more general picture for the moment; what was the point at which you'd had enough, where you felt you really had to write a book subtitled The Myth of a Maverick?

Matt Welch: It's very funny because I went into John McCain as a fan. I took his first two books to the beach with me in Mexico on a rare vacation because I, like a lot of Americans, was drawn to his 2000 presidential campaign. Like most journalists, I love politicians who talk smack about their own party, especially if that party is the Republican Party, so I found him sort of charming. I took his two books and I was just alarmed at the hostility to the individual that his world view had. I didn't really realise until reading this what an expansive foreign policy idea that he had, how rooted it was in the Teddy Roosevelt style, unipower, unipolar, the US will keep the world safe for democracy. So these two things, just a close reading of his books, and the gap between the information contained therein and the way that he was portrayed glowingly in the media for ever, until very recently, was enough to make me think, hey, I can add some value about what he thinks about the proper role of government, which is basically limitless.

Michael Duffy: So on the one hand he's being portrayed as a maverick who's got serious doubts about the Republican Party but in other areas, particularly the military, he is, if anything, to the right or certainly more aggressive than George W Bush.

Matt Welch: Oh it's not even close. I mean, it's a strange thing to remind people because they don't really realise it but in 1999 and 2000 when it was basically him against Bush, the Republican nomination, McCain was the one who ran as a neo-conservative. He was hanging out with the guys from the Project for the New American Century, he literarily was trading staff, emails, books and whatever with The Weekly Standard magazine which is the leading neoconservative journal here. They, in many ways, supply the ideology of his campaign.

His campaign managers have described it as something like an a-ha moment when the chief editor of The Weekly Standard wrote this essay in 1997 for The Wall Street Journal about national greatness, conservatism, which was an explicit repudiation of a kind of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan limited government idea, which McCain thought was a dogma. And as part of this, in 1999, back when everyone was loving him and calling him a maverick and all this kind of stuff, he unveiled a doctrine which he called Rogue State Rollback. He named a half a dozen countries—Burma, North Korea, Iran, Iraq—where US policy should be to topple dictators, to support insurgents wherever they may be, and if the insurgents get cracked down upon by the authoritarian in charge then back them up with the full use of US force. Any time you even bluff or use any kind of threatening language, you better be ready to back it up, not just with force but with ground troops.

Michael Duffy: Where would a president McCain get the people to do this? What are his views on military service?

Matt Welch: He thinks that we should increase the size of the military by 150,000 troops. He told me in a direct question that America should be spending at least half of the world's total money on defence, he thinks that's proper and normal. He thinks that defence spending should be fixed at at least 4% of gross domestic product. Right now it's probably more like 2.7% or 3%, largely because GDP keeps growing because in the private sector things actually grow in a way that they don't in the government sector. And he wants to launch a new OSS, the Office of Strategic Service, from WWII which was the precursor to the CIA which, in case no one has noticed, still exists. He wants to also put civilians on much more of a war footing and get involved in the effort. He basically wants to use government as an engine to have us all put our shoulder to the wheel for this great collective project of American national greatness.

Michael Duffy: The person you've just been describing does sound a bit like a maverick, although maybe not in the way he would like it.

Matt Welch: You know, he has definitely...especially in the period from around 1998 to 2003, he certainly was making his living by bucking his own party as often as possible. What's very little known is that his 'national greatness' strain, this neoconservative strain was in the ideological wilderness after Bush beat McCain in 2000. There were a series of articles in the summer of 2001, as weird as this is going to sound, in which they were talking about, like, 'Well, that's the last you'll ever hear about neoconservatives. What are they going to do now?' And there was a lot of talk about 'them', like Bill Kristol from The Weekly Standard and John McCain and some of these figures are leaving the Republican Party because they were all getting involved in things like campaign finance reform.

They were talking like Teddy Roosevelt about going after malefactors of great wealth, which is not really a traditionally Republican thing. And all the way up until September 11th they were the biggest prime candidates for leaving the Republican Party, perhaps joining the Democrats or becoming independent. Then September 11th happened and, boom, George W Bush has a new practical foreign policy ideology ready to go. Since that moment McCain has been much more in the fold of the Republican Party.

Michael Duffy: Yes, and of course he was a great supporter of the surge. Let's move away now from the military and that sort of foreign policy to more domestic issues. Is it possible to say what his polices are there? And has he been as consistent as, for example, Sarah Palin assured us he had been last week?

Matt Welch: He hasn't been consistent at all. McCain...you can always tell the difference between stuff that he cares about and stuff that he doesn't. And the stuff that he doesn't is the stuff that he'll change, he'll flip-flop constantly. He's famously was against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and it wasn't just for reasons of fiscal sobriety in a year that the deficit was going crazy, he also put it in basically class warfare terms. He was, like, 'I don't want the rich to get richer when the poor are getting poorer, this is wrong, we're in a time or war, we've never done this in a time of war.'

Well, boom, he changes his mind on that, and then insists that he didn't really change his mind. And what's perfectly McCain-like about all of this is that when he explained himself to The Wall Street Journal around 2006 about what was with this flip-flop, he said, 'Hey, you know, I don't really know that much about economics, but the more I learn the more I realise that is important to stimulate growth,' blah, blah, blah.

Michael Duffy: That's very open of him.

Matt Welch: The exact same thing happened in 2001 in the opposite direction, to The New Republic. They were, like, 'Why are you against these tax cuts?' 'Well, I don't know much about economics but the more I learn the more I realise that it's bad,' blah, blah, blah. That's classic McCain; self-effacing at the same time that he's being disingenuous about explaining his flip-flops. This goes across of tons of things, especially social conservative...

Michael Duffy: What's his relationship with the religious right and his attitude on things such as condoms, gay rights?

Matt Welch: He used to famously say, 'You know the old joke about the religious right? They're neither.' That was McCain in 2000 when he was running as this sort of rebel insurgent, and he famously described Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who are huge totemic figures of the religious right as 'agents of intolerance' back in 2000 in February. So he had to go a great distance to suck up to those people. He basically recalibrated his approach.

When he knew that he was running in 2008 once more he said, 'Okay, I've got to kiss and make up with these people, I can't run as an insurgent in a primary campaign, that way lies madness,' which it does, frankly. And so he started doing a series of things. One, he re-embraced Falwell; he went up to him, apologised, spoke at his university, and promised that if a few conditions happened that maybe he would support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which is something that McCain himself describes as the most un-Republican thing that he could ever imagine.

So he's been throwing out these little bones here and there. I should say that it was only until the nomination of Sarah Palin that I think he's really gotten the Christian conservatives back in his fold. There are still people who will never forgive him for any variety of things; insults, campaign finance reform especially hurt anti-abortion groups, it limited their ability to wage advertising campaigns, and just people who have crossed McCain on issues over the years. He can act like a real jerk and people have long memories.

Michael Duffy: You talked about Sarah Palin, what are we to make of his selection of her? What was he trying to do there?

Matt Welch: He was trying to win an election. The grand irony in McCain and the tragedy is that he's someone who's really haunted by ambition. In his five books he's constantly talking about how political ambition got the better of his judgement and steered him away from the path of the truth. And the exact same thing has happened. He's a guy who portrays himself as a straight maverick, 'I always tell you the truth', and the theme of the convention last week was 'Country First'. Imagine that this is a guy who's running explicitly on a campaign to fight the transcendent challenge of the 21st century which is the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, he says that at every speech.

Okay, well, if we want to take him as being a serious commander in chief, and that is the value proposition of his candidacy in a year that Republicans are getting smacked around and deservedly so in Washington, then how is it putting 'country first' to nominate someone who has zero expressed interest one way or the other in foreign policy, let alone experience? It's not, it's a pretty craven attempt, and an ingenious one I might add, to go after Hilary Clinton's supporters and independents and white women. It, so far, has worked spectacularly well. So it's a canny political move and it's a way to shore up his credentials among the Christian right, and that totally worked, as it did with reaching out to independents.

Michael Duffy: So it's been widely noted that he's only ever spoken to Sarah Palin once or twice and it's possible that he won't speak to her very much later should he win the election.

Matt Welch: I'm sure he'll...she's got to be his favourite person. They recalibrated that convention after the hysterically enthusiastic response to it. The next day a lot of people were, like, 'Well, I was here to give a speech about John McCain but let's talk about Sarah Palin,' they realised that they really struck gold.

Michael Duffy: For Australian listeners, where would you place McCain at this point on the American political spectrum? Does he fit in anywhere? Is he at least in this sense a maverick? Is he his own man?

Matt Welch: At this point probably the most important thing for a foreign audience is that he has the most deeply felt interventionist agenda of any major party American candidate in maybe 100 years. He believes that America was ordained from above or below or from wherever to lead the world in its affairs and that it needs to be aggressive and complete and total in what it does. That has wide-ranging implications, I think ultimately negative ones. Other people, including a lot of Americans, clearly disagree with me on that. On other issues he is a deeply felt social conservative but he's never cared about that stuff, and in his personal life in fact he has any number of transgressions, especially in his younger career, but not only that, of when he certainly wasn't living the Christian conservative life.

He's a guy who has lived most of the last 60 years in and around Washington DC, he's a complete creature of the beltway establishment that he's trying to run against, which is kind of peculiar. But at the same time, because of a maverick tendency and history and the fact that this is a Democratic year not a Republican year, even if he wins, you're going to see him appoint Democrats and independents in his cabinet. He will reach out to Democrats, especially on issues like global warming and immigration and economic regulation. He is not a principled small government conservative by any stretch of the imagination, it's closer to the opposite. He is an interventionist in every sense of the word.

Michael Duffy: Matt Welch there. He's editor-in-chief at Reason magazine, and he's author of the book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Guests

Matt Welch
Editor in Chief: Reason

Publications

Title: McCain : Myth of a Maverick
Author: Matt Welch
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillian
URL: http://www.reason.com/staff/show/134.html

Presenter

Michael Duffy

Producer

Ian Coombe

Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites.