{"id":15482,"date":"2008-05-09T10:00:17","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15482.html"},"modified":"2008-05-09T10:00:17","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:00:17","slug":"about-that-record-of-working-across-party-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/about-that-record-of-working-across-party-lines\/","title":{"rendered":"About that record of ‘working across party lines’…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Ambinder noted that this clip<\/a> of Fox News personality Juan Williams is making the rounds in “Republican circles.”<\/p>\n

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For those who can’t watch clips online, the video features Williams, on Fox News, saying, “You think about everything from campaign finance to immigration and on and there’s John McCain working across party lines. Sen. Obama doesn’t have a record. Now he can make the claim and he can hold himself up as pure and trying to reach to a new generation of post-partisan politics, but he has to do so largely based on rhetoric and wishful thinking, because he doesn’t have the record.” He made the comment on the air on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Ambinder added, “You can bet that a big McCain talking point in the fall will be almost exactly as phrased” by Williams. I think that’s true. In fact, I wouldn’t be especially surprised if the McCain campaign simply started airing Williams’ remarks directly in its commercials.<\/p>\n

But before the “Republican circles” get too pleased with themselves, it’s probably worth noting a few flaws in this. First, pro-McCain testimonials from Fox News personalities really don’t carry a lot of weight. It’s a bit like members of the National Republican Committee telling people what a great guy McCain is — it lacks credibility and objectivity.<\/p>\n

Second, and more importantly, Williams cited two specific examples to bolster his assertion, without noting (or perhaps even realizing) that McCain used<\/i> to work across party lines on campaign-finance legislation and immigration, but he’s since abandoned his more centrist approach to both.
\n
\nMedia Matters noted<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Williams did not note that McCain now says that he would no longer support his own bill if it came up for a vote in the Senate. Additionally, McCain has reversed himself on the issue of border security; he now says that “we’ve got to secure the borders first” — a position at odds with his prior assertion that border security could not be disaggregated from other aspects of comprehensive immigration reform without being rendered ineffective.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quite right. Pre-campaign McCain — you know, the one who considered leaving the Republican Party in ’01 and weighed joining John Kerry’s ticket in ’04 — was willing to talk to Democrats about legislation. Republican Nominee McCain bears no resemblance.<\/p>\n

And third, as Mark Kleiman noted<\/a>, not only is Williams wrong about McCain, he’s also wrong about Obama.<\/p>\n

Obama has more genuine bipartisan achievement to his credit in his short career than McCain does in his long one.<\/p>\n

Obama has several substantial bi-partisan accomplishments. In Springfield, he sponsored successful bills for children’s health care, an earned income tax credit, ethics and campaign finance reform, and videotaped police interrogations (an anti-torture measure). In Washington, it was ethics reform again and work with Richard Lugar on loose nukes. That is not a thin record.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No wonder the clip is making the rounds in “Republican circles”; it’s not especially well grounded in reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc Ambinder noted that this clip of Fox News personality Juan Williams is making the rounds in “Republican circles.” For those who can’t watch clips online, the video features Williams, on Fox News, saying, “You think about everything from campaign finance to immigration and on and there’s John McCain working across party lines. Sen. Obama […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}