McCain, Again
A typical McCain effort.

By Rich Lowry
January 25, 2001 9:05 a.m.

ohn McCain, the most tiresome "interesting" politician in American life, is back. His renewed push for campaign-finance reform has all the hallmarks of a typical McCain effort: there's the passive-aggressive desire to damage, or at least inconvenience, George W. Bush (who had the temerity to criticize McCain during the primaries); that old,

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delightful self-righteousness; and, of course, proposed legislation that, through the force of various bans and rules, attempts to squeeze some of the vitality out of American politics. McCain is as exciting as a New York Times editorial. One wishes he would once do something that made everyone sit up and say, "Gee, that's interesting." Maybe he did it in the primary campaign when he opposed "tax cuts for the rich" and denounced one-third of the Republican party as "evil" — but, then again, all that was sort of predictable too. So, prepare yourself for another dreary dose of "straight-talk" over the next few weeks.

The other day McCain was justifying his distracting early push for his cause by arguing "I also have a mandate." This is an idea that relies on the pervasive misunderstanding that McCain's success in the Republican primaries somehow stemmed from his desire to ban phony "issue ads" 60 days prior to an election, and other scintillating tidbits from the McCain-Feingold bill. The most amusing expression of this idea came from Bill Kristol and Jeffrey Bell in a New York Times op-ed after Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton inked their "soft money" deal. Kristol and Bell argued that conservatives would have to reconcile their disdain for campaign-finance reform with their desire to beat Hillary — both because the Lazio deal would so hamstring the soft-money dependent Hillary and because there is such roiling grassroots agitation against soft money!

Kristol and Bell wrote: "Conventional wisdom in Washington, especially conservative conventional wisdom, is that campaign finance reform doesn't matter as an issue. Conservatives resolutely refuse to learn any lesson from John McCain's thumping of George W. Bush in New Hampshire, when he made campaign reform his central theme — or from Mr. McCain's subsequent defeat after he veered from that message. But campaign reform turns out to have surprising political salience. Conservatives should welcome this fact, since they have no stake in the current system."

Well, there are a couple of problems with this. First, the notion that McCain veered off his campaign-finance message, say, in South Carolina is demonstrably false — as any Nexis search will reveal. McCain's problem, in fact, was that he got on the wrong side of issues that Republican

“The notion that McCain veered off his campaign-finance message is demonstrably false.”

voters actually cared about — for instance, tax cuts — while obsessing over one they didn't — namely, soft money (no one even knows what soft money is). Second, the Lazio juggernaut somehow didn't materialize, for a couple of reasons: 1) It is impossible to bottle McCain's magic, which is related to his patriotism, his general themes, and his personality, not to his pet legislation; 2) the huddled masses of New York care less about election law (Lazio's message) than they do about more mundane things, like, oh say, upstate jobs (Hillary's message).

Pollster Andrew Kohut, also in the New York Times — but relying less on airy assertions and more on data — provided the best analysis of McCain, and the myth of the "McCain voter" back in March: "Across the country, McCain backers do not share values or care strongly about the same issues, and they are not drawn from a common demographic base.

"While political reform was the keystone of the Arizona senator's campaign, only a minority of McCain voters cited campaign-finance changes as the foremost issue. In New York, only 19 percent of his backers made this claim — more (23 percent) said "moral values" was their top concern — and the number was not bigger in other Super Tuesday states including California (14 percent), Ohio (14 percent), Maryland (18 percent), and Massachusetts (18 percent). Even in Mr. McCain's greatest triumphs, the New Hampshire and Michigan primaries, only minorities of his backers were reform-minded."

All that said, McCain is in a better position in the Senate than last year, mostly because there are now more Democrats. It is quite possible that legislation will actually pass this year, and there is even a chance that part of it might even do some good if it lifts the limits on "hard money" contributions (the problem with the system isn't that it's under-regulated but that it's over-regulated). Meanwhile, those who take the First Amendment seriously can take at least some comfort in the fact that, as long as politics matters, people will want to influence it and money will find its way into the system. That's exactly what happened in New York, where both parties found creative ways around the soft-money deal. So, in the end, the chances are that McCain will engage in that most Washington of exercises: passing a bill purporting to solve a "problem" or "crisis," when it really does nothing of the kind.

That's what, inside the Beltway, they call "business as usual." As for McCain's "mandate," he doesn't have one — unless, of course, you count the one he seems to think he's been granted from Heaven.