For the longest time the Beltway Pundit Brigade has had a love affair with John McCain and Joe Lieberman. As best as I can tell, they loved these two guys because they were willing to say bad things about their own party and their own party leaders. This was supposed to indicate their independence and maverick style. It also made for good copy. But a funny thing happened. Lieberman and McCain kept getting less and less popular. Lieberman lost the Democratic nomination for his own senate seat and John McCain can’t raise any money for his presidential run. It’s gotten to the point where John McCain may simply drop out of the race.
THE former presidential front-runner, John McCain, may drop out of the 2008 race by September if his fundraising dries up and his poll ratings continue to drop, according to Republican insiders.
The speculation, vigorously denied by McCain’s camp, is sweeping Republican circles after a disastrous few weeks in which the principled Arizona senator has clashed with the party’s conservative base on immigration and also alienated independent voters by backing President George W Bush’s troop surge in Iraq.
I think it is time to consider why McCain and Lieberman have seen such a dramatic reversal of fortune in the Bush years.
Both of them have been vocal supporters of the war in Iraq, even calling for more troops. Both of them have been advocating that we bomb-bomb-bomb Iran. Their belligerency is definitely out of step with the dominant mood of the country and has had a direct relationship to their plummeting popularity.
But McCain has done much worse than Lieberman. Lieberman was re-elected as an independent on the strength of Republican voters. The love he lost among Democrats has been made up by admiration from the right. Not so for McCain, who seems to have calibrated everything wrong. He gets little credit from Republicans for his steadfast support of the war, but that position precludes him from getting support from the left.
In any case, both Lieberman and McCain have seen their their stars drop far and fast. This leaves us with a question. David Broder says:
…there is a palpable hunger among the public for someone who will attack the problems facing the country — the war in Iraq, immigration, energy, health care — and not worry about the politics.
Well…that is kind of what McCain and Lieberman are known for, isn’t it? McCain supports the president’s immigration plan even though he represents a border state and Republican primary voters hate the bill. Lieberman supports the war even though it almost cost him his seat. They are very serious people that take principled and contrarian positions on the big issues. And it’s not so much that they don’t worry about the politics (for crying out loud, they’re politicians) but that they expect their maverick style to be good politics.
Beltway gasbags like David Broder think that Congress would be a better place if more people acted like Lieberman and McCain. Maybe so, maybe not. But one thing Broder is simply wrong about is that there is any ‘palpable hunger’ among the people for more politicians like Joe and John.
The Bush administration has been polarizing, but at 26% in the polls the polarization is getting quite lopsided. What most Americans want, at this point, is for politicians to oppose the Bush administration and to do it effectively. In other words, the people want partisanship from Democrats and independence from Republicans. McCain was never a darling of the average Republican primary voter, but his support dried up for a different reason. Independents didn’t see him acting independently of the president on the war.
The McCain-Lieberman brand is quite dead. And DC pundits are going to need to go back to basics and revise their common wisdom about the American electorate.
