McCain exposes 'dark side' of the GOP

By: Kevin Eggleston

Posted: 4/1/08

In the 2000 presidential primary election, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express crashed because his talk was too straight. During that campaign, McCain delighted liberals and independents with his candid observations on the darker elements of his party.

Sen. McCain decried evangelist leaders like Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance" and, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, labeled the establishment of the GOP the "Death Star." Not surprisingly, with honorable truth-telling like that, Sen. McCain lost the Republican nomination.

In response, McCain had a choice. He could continue to fire his torpedoes at the GOP, or he could cozy up to them in an attempt to win a future nomination with the tried and true method of pandering.

McCain chose the latter.

In 2004, Sen. McCain - who was famously offered the VP spot by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry - forfeited what was most certainly a ticket to the White House for a chance to make nice with Republicans for a shot at the top spot in 2008. He hushed rumors of a Kerry-McCain ticket by publicly supporting the reelection campaign of President Bush, just four years after the Bush campaign won South Carolina in part by spreading dirty rumors of McCain fathering an illegitimate black child.

After just one photo of President Bush embracing McCain as if he were the GOP's prodigal son, it was clear the Bush tactics were simply water under the bridge.

In 2006, McCain continued rebuilding bridges he had righteously burned down just several years before. This time, it was with a speaking engagement at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

Just six years after McCain told America, "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right," the senator was pandering to the right.

Despite McCain's denials that making amends with Falwell was an attempt to make nice with a base of the party, even Falwell acknowledged to ABC News that what McCain was doing was nothing short of political maneuvering.

"I do think, like any wise politician moving toward a presidential election, he is trying to build alliances," he said.

Unfortunately, McCain chose to build an alliance with a man who has stated that gays and feminists were to blame for 9/11. It was an awkward alliance to say the least, as McCain still voted against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage that same year. But by reaching out to the homophobic wing of the Republican Party instead of rejecting it, McCain was essentially tolerating the intolerant.

It's now clear, had McCain spoken out against Bush from the start, he would be in an even better position in what has become the anti-Bush election. Instead, he chose ever-visible support, even visiting the White House to accept the president's endorsement. With his political pandering, as well as his fervent support of the Iraq War and self-proclaimed ignorance on economic issues, McCain has morphed from the Republican anti-Bush to the next-in-line in the Bush Dynasty.

Sen. McCain is fond of the phrase, "Presidential ambition is a disease, which can only be cured by embalming fluid." As the soon-to-be 72-year-old seeks to be the oldest person to enter the Oval Office, one hopes McCain's "disease" doesn't further cloud his conscience. It was in the spirit of ambition he tried to re-court Bush and make nice with the religious right, and it is unbridled ambition now that causes him to seek the highest office in the land despite being at an age in which 1/3 of Americans begin to lose cognitive skills, according to The Boston Globe.

McCain is a man with a more than honorable past and a proud career as an upstanding and influential senator. But before the media and the voters cast him as their maverick hero, it should be remembered that McCain's "Straight Talk Express" ran out of gas long ago. These days, he has found himself a different mode of transportation - the Bush/Cheney "Death Star."

Four more years? I didn't think so.

Kevin Eggleston is a sophomore political science and television, radio and film major. His columns appear every Tuesday. He can be reached at kmeggles@syr.edu.