Re: She May Change Parties. -
by
Arkady
05/09/2008, 10:51 AM #
True. But he sure has minimized the gap between them in recent years. For example, McCain once opposed Bush's upper-class tax cuts, due to his genuine fiscal conservatism. Now he's a fiscal radical, like Bush, who wants to make those cuts permanent. Plus, as the Iraq story has grown in importance, to crowd out other issues, their similarities on that issue make them look more and more similar overall. And even where McCain has serious differences with Bush, like on campaign financing, he has largely quieted himself on those issues, while playing to the hard-core Republican base.
I assume that he's just going with what works. After Bush kicked his ass mercilessly in 2000, he realized that to win the nomination he had to pass himself off as a Bush clone. Hell, he even "pulled a Bush" on religion, by abandoning the faith of his fathers and getting "born again" in a more politically convenient form of charismatic protestantism. My guess is that, once in office, his differences with Bush-style GOP orthodoxy will start to reemerge. But on foreign policy he seems every bit as foolish as Bush was and seems quite eager to start some shit with Iran.
If I'm right about McCain, it'll be similar to GHW Bush. The elder Bush got his ass kicked by Reagan, and so when he ran for office in '88, he disguised himself as a Reagan clone, right up to the point of embracing what he himself had eviscerated as "voodoo economics." He even promised in the starkest of terms that there'd be no new taxes. But once he'd lied his way into office, he reverted to his truer self when it came to fiscal policy, and signed a big tax hike to address the deficit disaster left by Reagan. I wouldn't be surprised to watch McCain follow a similar course.