McCain as Schweiker

This week has featured some interesting debate about John McCain's apparent repositioning himself in his run for President. Monday's Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz captured prevailing sentiment among most liberals--ie, McCain was basically a conservative all along, and the press and liberal blogosphere exaggerated the few differences he had with Bush to make him out as something he wasn't. In yesterday's Slate, Jacob Weisberg countered that"McCain looks like the same unconventional character who emerged during the Clinton years: a social progressive, a fiscal conservative, and a military hawk. Should he triumph in the primaries, we can expect this more appealing John McCain to come roaring back."

I'd like to suggest a third explanation--McCain as a latter-day Richard Schweiker, the two-term former Pennsylvania senator. In a week when former Alaska senator Mike Gravel (whose two terms in the upper chamber coincided with Schweiker's) became the first Democrat to officially declare his bid for the 2008 nomination, going back to the 1970s seems particularly apt.

Schweiker was a conservative congressman who in 1968 obtained the Republican nomination to run against incumbent Democrat Joe Clark. Clark was extremely vulnerable: he had alienated much of his base due to his opposition to the war and his support for gun control, and he almost lost the Democratic primary to a candidate who stopped campaigning a month before the election. Even so, Schweiker prevailed only narrowly—51%-46%. Almost immediately after his election, the new senator shifted dramatically to the left; between 1969 and 1976, he compiled a record indistinguishable from liberal Democrats on domestic and many foreign policy issues. Then, in the run-up to the 1976 GOP convention, Ronald Reagan surprisingly announced that if he received the nomination, he would designate Schweiker as his running-mate. The move seemed designed to appeal to centrists; instead, it alienated conservatives, since Schweiker and Reagan disagreed on virtually every issue. The affair, however, seems to have stoked the senator’s national ambitions, and in 1977, his voting record shifted dramatically to the right, where it stayed for his remaining four years in office. The move did him no good: he declined to stand for a third term and wage what would have been a very risky re-election campaign, and Reagan did not seriously consider him for the v-p nod in 1980. Schweiker served a couple of undistinguished years in Reagan’s cabinet before leaving public life.

Politicians “evolve” all the time, of course. But Schweiker distinguished himself with the suddenness and sharpness of his “evolution,” and in twice going through an “evolutionary” phase for reasons that seemed to coincide with his political ambitions. The same could be said of McCain. For his two House terms and first two Senate terms (1982-1998), he was a strongly conservative Republican, with the exception of his identification with campaign finance reform after the mid-1990s. But, contrary to the Kurtz thesis, his voting record changed noticeably after the 2000 campaign. In 1999, he received a typically low vote rating (5%) from the Americans for Democratic Action, in line with his then-lifetime average of 9%. But his ADA ratings during Bush’s first term soared: 40% (2001); 20% (2002); 35% (2003); 35% (2004). Apart from Republican-in-name-only Lincoln Chafee, only Maine’s Olympia Snowe received consistently higher ADA ratings among the Senate GOP caucus from 2001-4. On economic issues, McCain’s centrism was even more pronounced: in its analysis of 2004 votes, National Journal rated McCain as more conservative than only 48% of the Senate—more liberal than every Senate Republican except for Chafee. Moreover, as we all know, McCain used his considerable political capital to focus on issues where he opposed Bush—ranging from the tax cut to campaign finance reform to lobbying reform.

But if the Kurtz conventional wisdom of McCain as always conservative is unsustainable, I’m also dubious about Weisberg’s explanation. As with Schweiker’s 1976 offering from Reagan, there does seem to be a turning point here—Kerry’s attempt to persuade McCain to sign on as his running mate in 2004. Whatever consideration McCain gave to this scheme, thereafter he decided his future was in the GOP: he campaigned aggressively for Bush, and in 2005, shifted his voting record accordingly. His ADA rating for the year plunged to pre-2000 levels (10%), designating him as more conservative than such leftist Senate barons as Idaho’s Larry Craig, Missouri’s James Talent, Texas’ Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and even Majority Leader Frist (15%). This is more than a rhetorical change to obscure what Weisberg calls the “closet McCain”—it seems to be a return to the McCain of the 1980s and most of the 1990s.

Will McCain’s Schweiker-esque “evolution” serve him better than the originator of the tactic? It’s obviously too early to tell, but my guess is no.