CNN’s Jack Cafferty did an on-air commentary a few days ago on John McCain’s major policy flip-flops for months now. It’s a “delicate dance,” Cafferty said, “and if McCain’s not careful, he’s liable to break a hip.”
Yesterday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer followed up by asking the question, “What’s wrong with a politician who changes views?” Whether this was related to Cafferty’s commentary is unclear, but Blitzer seemed anxious to give political leaders a pass for reversing course on various policies.
There’s nothing wrong with people changing their minds. We all do it – all the time. But as Luke Russert reminded us at his father’s funeral this week, politicians have a hard time admitting that they ever change their minds. They are apparently afraid that they will be accused of flip-flopping, which supposedly is bad for a politician.
Luke said that Tim Russert would also point out that the Americans are a very forgiving people. They will certainly accept politicians changing their minds as long as they are up front about it. What’s wrong with political leaders simply saying they’ve had a change of heart? “I used to think one way, but now think another.”
Including Russert in this context is rather ironic, given that his brand of “gotcha” questions was predicated on the belief that politicians who change their minds have necessarily done something wrong.
Nevertheless, as the self-designated keeper of the Official List of McCain Flip-Flops, I thought I’d take a moment to respond to Blitzer’s observation.
In short, he’s right. There’s nothing offensive at all about a political figure changing his or her mind. Policy makers come to one conclusion, they gain more information, and then they reach a different conclusion. In some ways, this is actually a positive — it reflects a politician with an open mind and a healthy intellectual curiosity. Better to have a leader who changes his or her mind based on new information than one who stubbornly sticks to outmoded policy positions, regardless of facts or circumstances.
So why do I challenge McCain on his flip-flops? Because all available evidence suggests his reversals aren’t sincere, they’re cynically calculated for political gain. This isn’t indicative of an open mind; it’s actually indicative of a character flaw.
I won’t bother republishing the full list of 48 that I’ve come up with over the last several months — I just ran it a couple of days ago — but go ahead and look it over, keeping an eye on the ideological trend. Some of the reversals are because McCain is embarrassed by what he used to believe — he argued, for example, that the war in Iraq would be easy, which looks ridiculous now, which leads him to argue that he knew all along that the war was “probably going to be long and hard and tough.”
Most of the flip-flops, though, show McCain dropping his centrist/moderate credentials in order to be more in line with today’s Republican mainstream. Tax cuts, foreign policy, immigration, abortion, the religious right, the environment, detainee policy, campaign finance reform. In every instance, McCain was a “maverick,” willing to break with his party. Now, he isn’t.
“What’s wrong with a politician who changes views?” Nothing in particular, but when a politician changes his views so much that he has an entirely different worldview, and that new worldview is conveniently necessary to win his party’s presidential nomination, is it unreasonable to wonder whether it’s entirely sincere? Especially when there’s no other apparent explanation for four dozen significant policy reversals?
“What’s wrong with political leaders simply saying they’ve had a change of heart?” Nothing, just so long as it’s genuine. Given the circumstances, one would have to be hopelessly naive to think McCain, all of a sudden, out of the blue, just happened to reinvent himself and his policy agenda based on nothing more than a simple “change of heart.”
Are there are worse qualities in a presidential candidate than changing one’s mind about a policy matter? Sure. McCain has been in Congress for decades; he’s bound to shift now and then on various controversies.
But therein lies the point — McCain was consistent on most of these issues, right up until he started running for president, at which point he conveniently abandoned literally dozens of positions he used to hold. The problem isn’t just the incessant flip-flops — though that’s part of it — it’s more about the shameless pandering and hollow convictions behind the incessant flip-flops. That the media still perceives McCain as some kind of “straight talker” who refuses to sway with the political winds makes this all the more glaring.
As Josh Marshall recently put it, “McCain is absolutely gung-ho and certain that he’s right about whatever his position and ‘principles’ are at the given moment. But they change repeatedly.”