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March 8, 2000
McCAIN'S CHOICE
Should John McCain stay in the Republican party, or go the Reform route? Plenty of his advisers want to go. The motives are various: They're bitter about the way the Bush campaign and the GOP establishment treated them;
they think McCain might just be able to win the presidency; they're excited by the idea of it. In the "leave" camp are campaign manager Rick Davis, political director John Weaver, and media strategist Mike Murphy. Campaign chairman Warren Rudman, who has never been deeply committed to the GOP and is quite angry about Pat Robertson's phone calls in Michigan labeling him a "vicious bigot," is probably counseling McCain to go, too. The Republican politicians and former politicians who supported McCain — such as Lindsey Graham, Chuck Hagel, Fred Thompson, and Vin Weber — want him to stay, of course. Adviser Marshall Wittmann is neutral. The big
question is where the candidate himself stands. He says he won't run on a third-party line.
REVISING CALIFORNIA
There was plenty of good news for conservatives out of California. The landslide passage of the referendum against gay marriage suggests 1) that gay marriage can't win a vote anywhere outside a courtroom, and 2) that California's supposed social liberalism has been overstated. On that
second point, the fact that only 30 percent of California voters agreed with Al Gore's position on abortion (that it should be legal "always") is also noteworthy. The primary results certainly didn't bear out Governor Gray Davis's contention that the pro-life position dooms Republicans in November: Among the majority of voters with lukewarm views on the issue, a majority supported the pro-lifers — Bush, McCain, and Keyes — not the Democrats.
The exit polls also suggest that "Clinton fatigue" is not just the invention of pundits. Fully 61 percent of California voters disapprove of Clinton as a person, and Gore took only 17 percent of their votes.
Another piece of good news: Campaign-finance reform took a clobbering. Proposition 25, written by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron K. Unz and endorsed by McCain, would have capped political donations in the state. It failed overwhelmingly, 65 percent to 35 percent. That outcome is a partial vindication of California's House Republican delegation, approached by Unz last year about a deal to include a GOP-friendly redistricting plan in the proposition's language. Golden State Republicans kept Unz at arm's length, and thereby avoided an embarrassment at the polls. But they still face an intractable problem: Democrats control Sacramento, and the next round of redistricting is on the horizon.
KEYES BREAKS THROUGH
Super Tuesday was very good to George W. Bush, but it also marked the high tide of another candidate's campaign. Alan Keyes came in second in the Minnesota caucus, edging out McCain.
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Updated By:
Ramesh Ponnuru - Senior Editor
John J. Miller - National Political Reporter
Kate Dwyer - Editorial Associate
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