Dismantling the Myth of McCain-How the Republican senator’s maverick image is a sham

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Dismantling the Myth of McCain
How the Republican senator’s maverick image is a sham
By David Moberg
John McCain

When McCain could have used his moral weight as a torture victim to stand up to Bush's policies, he did so only rhetorically, eventually agreeing to legislation that still permitted waterboarding.


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So, who is “the real McCain”? (Incidentally, the title of a new book by journalist Cliff Schechter.) The record shows McCain to be a strongly pro-business, anti-government, hawkish neoconservative who has increasingly supported many right-wing evangelical causes (such as teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution).

Yet at times he has alienated parts of the Republican Right, mainly on issues in which McCain’s position safely reflected strong majorities of public opinion, as journalists David Brock and Paul Waldman argue in Free Ride: John McCain and the Media.

McCain won his reformer credentials by co-sponsoring legislation with progressive Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) that, in 2002, banned soft money contributions to political parties. The long fight for the bill won McCain adulation in the press. But ultimately, it didn’t keep soft money out of politics, and some conservatives believed it was more likely to hurt Democrats than Republicans.

By 2006, as Schechter reports, McCain was backing away from legislation for federal election public financing that he had once supported.

By then, McCain had won the image he needed as a clean-politics reformer to expunge the effects of his having been named in 1991 as one of the “Keating Five” — senators who had received financial favors from, and then tried to help, fraudulent savings and loan operator Charles Keating.

Yet his image as a clean politician above the political swamp of Washington politics is most belied by his long and deep connections with corporate lobbyists.

According to the anti-McCain website Progressive Media USA, McCain had at least 118 lobbyists running his campaign, including campaign manager Rick Davis — who lobbied for major telecommunications companies (for whom McCain has often intervened legislatively) — and senior adviser Charles Black — who was registered as a lobbyist for right-wing guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi of Angola and such dictators as Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3748/dismantling_the_myth_of_mccain/