It makes perfect sense that the McCain campaign would make at least cursory efforts to reach out to Hillary Clinton’s most ardent supporters. John McCain does, after all, have very little to lose. There are some lingering hard feelings after the longest and closest Democratic presidential primary ever, and even though the intra-party factions agree on everything and share a common agenda, McCain hopes to convince a few Dems that his ideas, vision, issue positions, platform, and voting record are completely irrelevant in a presidential campaign.
As far as McCain is concerned, if it works, great — he’ll be the first conservative Republican to succeed with the support of liberal Democrats. If it doesn’t work, McCain might score a few points with independents who appreciate his outreach. Either way, it’s time well spent.
But in his drive to divide Dems, McCain has once again embraced the role of con man.
After his public conference call with Clinton supporters … Saturday, John McCain met privately with some 75 of those supporters in his Virginia headquarters, two people who were there said.
McCain’s staff extended the last-minute invitation to Clinton die-hards, including a founder of a group called “Party Unity, My Ass” (PUMA), and substantial numbers came from Washington, D.C., and New York. They represented passionate campaign volunteers and supporters, but they’re essentially a marginal group in Clinton’s orbit, including no one with a prominent campaign role, public office, or close relationship with the candidate.
“He stayed for a good almost half hour afterwards shaking hands, listening to our concerns, talking to us,” said PUMA founder Will Bower, who said he thought many of the people there would vote for McCain.
McCain, of course, is anxious to stack the federal judiciary with very conservative jurists. Asked about this last night, McCain assured Clinton supporters that “he supported Bill Clinton with both Ginsburg and Breyer.”
Similarly, when asked about marriage equality for gay couples, one attendee said McCain explained that his position is “the same as [John] Kerry’s position.”
In other words, in attempting to divide Democrats, McCain has decided to try blatant deception, and hope Clinton supporters don’t know the difference. There’s no reason on earth to think this will work. Plenty of Clinton supporters are disappointed and resentful, but they’re not crazy.
On judges, McCain thinks voting to confirm Ginsburg and Breyer is evidence of moderation. That’s absurd. Breyer was confirmed with an 87-vote majority. For that matter, 96 senators voted to confirm Ginsburg. Voting with the majority was hardly a bold act of courage for McCain.
Indeed, even pointing to these two votes is a classic red herring. The question isn’t whether McCain voted to confirm qualified judges nominated by a Democratic president, the question is what McCain will do to the judiciary if he’s the president. We already know the answer to that question — because McCain has told us over and over again of his deeply-held desire to make the courts even more conservative than they are now.
Indeed, McCain is telling anyone who will listen that he’d be even further to the right than Bush on this issue, subtly criticizing Griswold, and by extension, the very notion of a right to privacy. McCain did, after all, champion Robert Bork’s nomination. “Might he really be a ‘maverick’ when it comes to the Supreme Court? The answer, almost certainly, is no. The Senator has long touted his opposition to Roe, and has voted for every one of Bush’s judicial appointments; the rhetoric of his speech shows that he is getting his advice on the Court from the most extreme elements of the conservative movement.”
What’s more, McCain will not only replace Supreme Court justices, but also lower-court judges and entire executive-branch bureaucracy with conservative Republican officials.
How conservative is McCain on judges? Even Joe Lieberman has expressed concerns about McCain and the judiciary — and I refuse to believe that resentful Clinton supporters are to Lieberman’s right on this issue.
As for gay rights, for McCain to equate his position with John Kerry’s is utterly ridiculous. Kerry supports civil unions, McCain doesn’t. Kerry supports allowing gay Americans to serve openly in the military, McCain doesn’t. Hell, McCain actively supported and campaigned for an amendment to Arizona’s constitution that would “ban gay marriages and deny government benefits to unmarried couples.” Similar to Kerry? Not so much.
Yesterday, a long-time friend of the blog, who was largely sympathetic to Clinton during the primaries, noted that these hard feelings in Democratic circles are a “personal, emotional thing.” He argued that it’s a mistake to “reason with strong feelings.”
Fair enough. Emotional reactions often don’t make sense; emotions sometimes even lead people to make horrible mistakes that they later regret. I get it.
But in this case, McCain is trying to reason with strong feelings by perpetrating a fraud, pretending to be something he’s not. I’m hard pressed to imagine anyone who was smart enough to be a progressive Democrat being foolish enough to fall for such a transparent scam.