New Patriotic Challenger
SIMI VALLEY, Calif.--On the plane from Washington to a
breakfast speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., this morning, John McCain got a brief
briefing on local conditions. John Weaver, his national political director,
alerted him that the audience waiting inside the aircraft hangar might include
Betsy DeVos, the chairman of the state party, who happens to be married to the
head of the Amway Corp., and who also happens to be a committed foe of campaign
finance reform. "Then I'll just have to emphasize campaign finance reform,"
McCain replied, grinning mischievously. He then recalled a previous meeting
when he brought his signature issue up in Michigan, doing an impression of
DeVos' reaction in a small meeting. McCain clenched his teeth, screwed up his
face, and snarled, "GRRRRRRR."
McCain didn't spot Ms. DeVos at the breakfast, but he
dwelt on campaign finance reform anyhow--he always does. Running on this issue
as a Republican may be the most contrarian notion in his delightfully
contrarian campaign. It's not clear that many voters outside of reform-minded
states like Minnesota have ever made up their minds about whom to vote for on
the basis of this issue. What is certain--or at least was until his
campaign--is that Republicans, who continue to enjoy a substantial advantage in
raising money under the current system, see little appeal in McCain's ideas
about how to reform it.
McCain thinks he can elevate the issue--and his
presidential candidacy--by broadening the issue beyond its numbing
technicalities. He hopes to link it to the apathy young people feel about
politics and to a larger sense of national purpose. McCain thinks the fact that
special interest money dominates the electoral system is a big part of the
reason that a majority of 18-to-26-year-olds don't register and don't vote. He
sees political corruption not just as an Augean stable to be cleansed, but as a
positive issue that can serve to re-engage the disaffected electorate.
"Restoring honesty to our political system is the gateway through which all
other political reforms must pass," he said here in a speech at the Reagan
Library, to sustained applause and a loud cry of "Amen" from a man in a skirt
and sneakers who later identified himself as the leader of "Evangelical
Christian Democrats for McCain."
The historical role model cited by George W. Bush's
adviser Karl Rove is Mark Hanna. Hanna elected William McKinley president in
1896 by marshalling the wealth of the robber barons on his behalf. The exemplar
for McCain is Teddy Roosevelt, the reformer who became president after McKinley
was assassinated in 1901. When asked by a high-school student in Grand Rapids
who he thought of as the greatest American, living or dead, McCain (who was
stopping in Michigan en route to the Reagan Library) cited Reagan as his living
example and TR, along with Lincoln, as the dead one.
McCain mentions Teddy Roosevelt frequently. He told me
on the plane--a plush Citation borrowed from Rupert Murdoch--that he has been
reading TR's speeches and finding them relevant to his campaign in a number of
ways. One way is as a guide to political reform. Teddy Roosevelt, he says,
understood that in reform, the perfect was the enemy of the good. McCain, who
recently agreed to drop everything but a ban on soft money from his eponymous
campaign reform bill, which is supposed to come up for another Senate vote
soon, agrees. He says that after a decade, shrewd operators will find the
loopholes in any finance reform bill. Cleaning up the system thus has to be a
periodic, and inevitably incomplete, process. He hopes that McCain-Feingold
will reduce the power of special interest money in politics, not eliminate it,
because eliminating it is impossible. He has focused on soft money--unregulated
large contributions to the parties--because he thinks that they are the single
biggest problem, just as corporate contributions were when Roosevelt got them
banned in 1907.
McCain sees other points of commonality with TR as
well. He frequently points out Roosevelt's status as the Republican father of
conservation--a topic he plans to emphasize at an appearance in Seattle
tomorrow morning. This should be a fruitful theme for McCain, because there is
really no other claimant to Roosevelt's environmental legacy in the GOP. Though
George W. Bush fits the moderate Republican profile in other respects, Bush's
anti-regulatory, pro-business views steer him clear of the Sierra Club.
The most important link to Teddy Roosevelt, however,
isn't any single issue. It's the way McCain aspires to draw political reform,
environmentalism, an internationalist foreign policy, and more together in a
call for renewed civic engagement. Roosevelt's vision was summed up in the
phrase "The New Nationalism." McCain's somewhat ungainly slogan, "The New
Patriotic Challenge," owes a debt to this. Sometimes McCain defines his
patriotic challenge in terms of political reform, as he did here at the Reagan
Library, where he called it "a fight against the pervasive cynicism that is
debilitating our democracy, that cheapens our public debates, that threatens
our public institutions, our culture and, ultimately, our private happiness."
Other times, he casts it as an "ask not" call to public service. In Grand
Rapids, McCain says he wrote his new book in the hope that "young people might
pick it up and read it and realize the great virtue in committing themselves to
America's cause." In his view, this includes all kinds of public service. "It
doesn't have to be military," he says. "It can be in a mental hospital or the
National Forest Service or the Peace Corps."
McCain has not yet managed to communicate his charisma
in public, or to the young, in anything like the way John F. Kennedy once did.
But his "new patriotic challenge" seems to strike a chord nonetheless. When
McCain calls upon the rest of us to serve, he asks from a position of utter
credibility, based on what he sacrificed in serving. This is something that is
not true for any of the other candidates.
