One of the points I’ve tried to emphasize with my ever-growing list of John McCain’s flip-flops is that this isn’t just about catching McCain with a bunch of “gotchas.” The point, rather, is to highlight McCain’s malleable principles. As Josh Marshall put it a while back, “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.”
Yesterday, for example, McCain visited South Florida to go after Barack Obama for his willingness to break with a decades-old, ineffective policy towards Cuba. The problem, of course, is that McCain used to support breaking with the policy, too, before his latest transformation into conservative Republican nominee.
John McCain told Cuban-Americans Tuesday that he would maintain the decades-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba if he is elected president, and he attacked Barack Obama for his willingness to meet with Cuba’s leader.
Sen. McCain’s stance on Cuba appears to have evolved since the 2000 presidential primaries, when he faced Mr. Bush, then the Texas governor. At the time, Mr. Bush played to the Cuban-American exile community and Mr. McCain acted the moderate, recalling his role in normalizing relations between the U.S. and Vietnam and saying the U.S. could lay out a similar road map with the regime.
Tuesday, Sen. McCain denied having changed policies, saying he never supported engagement with Cuba unless it held free elections first. “My position on Cuba has been exactly the same,” he said.
It takes quite a bit of creative spinning to make that assessment accurate. The Miami Herald reported in 1999 that McCain was the only Republican candidate who believed “there could be room for negotiation on the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.” In 2000, McCain told CNN, “I’m not in favor of sticking my finger in the eye of Fidel Castro. In fact, I would favor a road map towards normalization of relations such as we presented to the Vietnamese and led to a normalization of relations between our two countries.”
Going back further, to 1994, McCain opposed cutting off remittances because it punished people “whose misfortune it is to live in tyranny.”
The old McCain clearly isn’t on the same page as the new McCain.
For its part, the Obama campaign returned the volley:
“There’s nothing more naive than continuing a policy that has failed for decades, but that’s all John McCain offered today as he continued to campaign for a third term of George Bush’s foreign policy. In his attempt to distort my record while fully embracing George Bush’s, Senator McCain conveniently left out the fact that eight years ago — back when he was running as a straight talker — he himself called for negotiating an end to the embargo.
The American people have a clear choice between a Bush-McCain Cuba policy that has done absolutely nothing to advance the liberty of the Cuban people, or a new direction that pursues Cuban freedom through direct and principled diplomacy, and unlimited family travel and remittances for Cuban Americans.”
Is it me, or does this keep happening? Indeed, it just happened last week — McCain went after Obama over Hamas, and then we learn that McCain was open to discussions with Hamas. Now McCain goes after Obama over Cuba, only to discover that McCain used to be open to normalizing relations with Castro’s regime.
The problem, of course, isn’t that McCain was wrong — it’s that he was right and then gave up his position for political expediency. It’s a pattern we’ve seen over and over again.
How the McCain campaign came up with the idea of running the senator as a principled candidate who never sways with the wind is beyond me. These guys are leading with their chin.