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Taking McCain's Pulse
by Josh Gerstein
Tue, 17 Jul 2007 at 2:09 AM
updated Tue, 17 Jul 2007 at 3:21 AM
Attending Senator McCain's campaign event in Silicon Valley yesterday, I felt a bit like a doctor approaching a sick patient. I wondered: is it just a bad cold, or a terminal illness?
I walked away feeling the patient is a bit sicker than he's letting on, but it's probably a bit premature to be calling in Dr. Quincy. (Apologies to twentysomething readers for the dated reference, but CSI would have been too trite.)
Today's Sun includes my news story on the senator's appearance and a column from my colleague, Seth Gitell, on the state of the senator's campaign in New Hampshire. I'll share a few more musings below.
Mr. McCain rolled out the usual defense of staff shake-ups: voters don't care about them and reporters seem to obsess about them. Agreed.
What the renowned straight talker didn't deal squarely with was that his transition from presumed frontrunner to potential dropout was not primarily the product of a bloated campaign or tactical errors by his advisers. Rather, his stance on immigration and, to a lesser extent, his views on the Iraq War and even issues like campaign finance reform, are hurting him in the current environment.
The closest he came to acknowledging this yesterday was during in response to a question about whether one of the failings of his current bid was that he had gone too far to court the GOP's conservative base. "If being pro-immigration-reform is appealing to the base, I'd be surprised. If being in favor of stem cell research is appealing to the base, I'd be surprised," Mr. McCain said. "I just do what I think is right."
Mr. McCain's most impassioned rhetoric of the day came as he warned about the consequences of precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. "Setting a date for withdrawal will be mean genocide and catastrophe," he said. "We are supposed to withdraw to enclaves outside of Baghdad and watch it happen? We regret to this day that we didn't stop the genocide in Rwanda. We regret to this day that we didn't stop the genocide in Cambodia. We regret to this day that we didn't do anything about the Holocaust, but we're going to watch that kind of thing happen?"
(For the record, a quick Google search discloses that Mr. McCain told CNN in 1999 that America could not have helped in Rwanda. "And I know of no one who believes we could," he said on "Crossfire.")
In any event, the anti-genocide message, which is similar to one Senator Biden of Delaware delivers to Democratic audiences, seemed to be well received even by more liberal members of the audience. One problem with that rhetoric is that Mr. McCain paints the consequence of failure in Iraq in such grim terms that he seems intent on oppose an American retreat even if the situation becomes unsalvagable.
A member of the audience tried to ask him about that and the senator responded with an answer that even he acknowledged was not very good. When I pressed the issue later, Mr. McCain seemed to accept that America might have to withdraw without achieving its goals for a democratic or even stable Iraq, "I can't give you an exact date as to when I think 'enough is enough,'" the senator said. He said General Petraeus should be given at least until September to assess the surge.
One of the funnier lines Mr. McCain got off yesterday mocked President Bush for his statement in 2001 that he had looked into the eyes of President Putin of Russia and gotten "a sense of his soul."
"The president thought he could develope this close personal relationship with Putin," Mr. McCain said. "Putin is not acting as a Jeffersonian democrat. When I looked into Putin's eyes, I saw three letters, a 'K,' a 'G,' and a 'B."
Related Topics: GOP Primary
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