Wednesday, June 24, 1998

Sen. McCain takes leave of his senses

By WILLIAM A. RUSHER / Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

A lot of Republicans are beginning to wonder what has happened to Sen. John McCain.

The Arizona Republican has long been one of the party's real stars in the U.S. Senate. For one thing, he is an authentic hero of the Vietnam War. A Navy pilot (his father and grandfather were both admirals), he was shot down over Vietnam and spent five years in Communist prison camps, repeatedly undergoing torture. Yet when offered early release because of his father's rank, he refused to leave ahead of those who had been in prison longer.

What's more, in his two terms in the House (1983-1987) and as a senator ever since, he has been a remarkably dependable conservative. In 1995 the American Conservative Union's cumulative rating for him (for his votes across the years) was 87 out of a possible 100; in 1996 alone it reached 95. Under the corresponding rating system of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, his 1996 score was zero. Small wonder he has long been on everybody's list as a possible Republican presidential nominee in 2000.

And yet in recent months, McCain has begun behaving in ways that have made Republicans, or at any rate conservative Republicans, wonder if he has taken leave of his mind.

Take campaign finance reform. Since the Supreme Court has ruled that any limit on what an individual can spend to express his or her own opinion is unconstitutional, but limits on what can be contributed to someone else are permissible, both parties have used a loophole called "soft money" -- i.e., they have encouraged donors to contribute funds to them, ostensibly just to "build up the party," rather than give it to specific candidates.

Any idea that this loophole is used exclusively by Republicans must cope (for example) with the fact that the widow of the founder of the McDonald's chain contributed a cool million in "soft money" to the Democratic National Committee a few years ago. But Republicans count on it more, because the Democrats get the benefit of the scores of millions of dollars poured into every national election campaign by the labor unions.

Failing to recognize that "soft money" contributions to the GOP by business are simply a necessary response to this union subsidy of the Democrats, McCain joined a liberal Democrat, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, in sponsoring a bill to eliminate "soft money" contributions altogether -- while leaving union expenditures (made with the dues of union members who may not even be Democrats) untouched.

Naturally, liberals hailed McCain as a selfless hero. And no one was more enthusiastic than the New York Times and the Washington Post, whose liberal owners stood to be among the very few wealthy Americans who could still spend large sums on political campaigns if the McCain-Feingold bill became law. Luckily the vast majority of Senate Republicans stood fast, and it didn't.

But the adulation of the liberals may have gotten to McCain, because within weeks he was back in the headlines as the chief sponsor of a bill that, in the name of discouraging the 2 percent of smokers who are teen-agers, would have raised the price of a pack of cigarettes by $1.10. This would have amounted to a savagely regressive tax on the other 98 percent of smokers, most of whom are in the lower-income categories, and would have extracted from them well over $500 billion. It was this, of course, that excited Clinton and his fellow Democrats beyond endurance, and once again we have the Senate Republicans to thank for the measure's defeat.

No doubt John McCain sincerely believed in both bills, and stuck by them as a matter of principle. But if so, his political judgment is deeply flawed, and his qualifications as a Republican presidential nominee are open to serious question.

William A. Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.