On Signature Issues, McCain Has Shown Some Inconsistencies in the Senate
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/us/politics/03mccain....wanted=1&_r=1&ref=us
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: March 3, 2008
WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain likes to present himself as the candidate of the “Straight Talk Express” who does not pander to voters or change his positions with the political breeze. But the fine print of his record in the Senate indicates that he has been a lot less consistent on some of his signature issues than he has presented himself to be so far in his presidential campaign.
Mr. McCain, who derided his onetime Republican competitor Mitt Romney for his political mutability, has himself meandered over the years from position to position on some topics, particularly as he has tried to court the conservatives who have long distrusted him. His most striking turnaround has been on the Bush tax cuts, which he voted against twice but now wants to make permanent. Mr. McCain has also expressed varying positions on immigration, torture, abortion and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary.
Mr. McCain’s advisers say that he has evolved rather than switched positions in his 25-year career in the House and Senate and that he has been remarkably consistent on his support for the war in Iraq and the American troop escalation there.
“But he also believes in getting things done, which requires legislative compromise sometimes and putting aside some goals to address more urgent goals,” Charles Black, one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers, said Sunday in a telephone interview from Mr. McCain’s Arizona ranch.
Mr. McCain’s varying positions speak to the balancing act he is trying to do as he heads into the general election as his party’s likely nominee. To the degree that he is shifting to the right, he is shoring up his standing among conservatives. Yet he is also trying to retain his ability to defy neat ideological labels and hang onto the streak of unpredictability that has fueled his appeal to the moderates and independents he might need in November.
The risk, Republicans acknowledge, is that Mr. McCain may no longer be seen as above pandering and will be increasingly vulnerable to criticism from both sides.
“There will be potshots,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, a former chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. “But it’s not anything he can’t withstand.”
In May 2001, Mr. McCain was one of only two Republicans — the other was Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island — to vote against President Bush’s $1.35 trillion 10-year tax cut. On the Senate floor, Mr. McCain said, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.”
Two years later, Mr. McCain was one of three Republicans to vote against additional Bush tax cuts — he and Mr. Chafee were joined by Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine — because, he said then, the costs of the Iraq war were not yet known. Specifically, he said he was open to the idea of tax cuts in the future, “but not until Congress and the administration have a better understanding of the costs of war and peace.”
Later, he said he also opposed the 2003 tax cut because it, too, disproportionately benefited the rich. “I just thought it was too tilted to the wealthy, and I still do,” Mr. McCain told Stephen Moore, a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, in an interview published on Nov. 26, 2005.
These days, Mr. McCain says at almost every campaign stop that he wants to make those tax cuts permanent rather than have them expire, as the law stipulates, because getting rid of them would have the effect of a tax hike. He rarely mentions that he originally opposed them or that he did so in large part because he thought they were too tilted to the rich — an objection that conservatives consider heresy.
When pressed, Mr. McCain now says he voted against the tax cuts because they were not accompanied by sufficient spending cuts, an explanation somewhat more palatable to the right. Asked last week on his campaign plane if he thought the tax cuts were too tilted to the rich, Mr. McCain sidestepped the question and replied that he preferred his own tax proposal at the time, which he said was “more tilted towards the middle class.”
Mr. McCain has also moved from his original position on immigration. In 2005, he joined forces with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to co-sponsor an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws. Although the legislation included toughening border security, its center was a provision that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for many of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
Conservatives immediately branded the bill as amnesty and fired steadily at Mr. McCain. After seeing his campaign and his fund-raising efforts derail last summer — which his advisers attributed in large part to his position on immigration — Mr. McCain now says that he got the message from voters. These days he speaks almost exclusively about border security, although he does say that it is not possible to deport 12 million illegal immigrants and that he would never deport the mother of a soldier serving in Iraq.
Even so, Mr. McCain went so far at a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in January to say that if his original proposal came to a vote on the Senate floor, he would not vote for it.
Last week, Mr. McCain was pressed by a participant at a town-hall-style meeting in Houston if he still believed that an immigration overhaul was possible. “I do believe it’s possible, but as you noticed, and I noticed, we failed,” Mr. McCain told his questioner at the Baker Institute at Rice University. “We failed, and the lesson is that Americans want the border secured first.”
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