It is true that McCain has taken some bold stands in opposition to his party. He opposed the repeal of the estate tax in 2002. He recognizes the danger posed by climate change, and actually has a substantive proposal on how to address the problem. He teamed up with liberal senators like Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold and Massachusetts’ Ted Kennedy on campaign finance reform and immigration reform, respectively. He is an honorable man who sincerely believes in the national interest.
However, McCain is no moderate. Just like President Bush, he supports allowing workers to invest part of their Social Security funds, a Republican code word for privatization. He rejects stem cell research, which he decries as “the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes.” In this position, he has the support of barely one third of the American people, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. He now wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, and his proposal to necessitate a supermajority in Congress to raise taxes is one of the most dangerous ideas in the presidential contest; it would result in government gridlock and even larger deficits. When asked whether he would be comfortable occupying Iraq for the fifty years suggested by Bush, McCain responded, “Make it a hundred.” For a man whose greatest strength is reputedly his foreign policy expertise, this is a disturbing foray into the worst policies of doctrinaire neo-conservatism.
Why are McCain’s shoddy centrist credentials his defining feature as a politician, rather than the consistent conservatism that has defined his career in public life? The misrepresentation of John McCain is emblematic of problem with a media that seeks to entertain first and inform second, and to that end attempts to create the most compelling storylines and characters. Television and print media pundits alike have created this image of McCain as the defianthero of resistance within the GOP, the Republican who has more in common with Democrats than with Bush.
Similarly, the vacuous nature of our political commentary—combined with the laziness of the electorate—allowed the story of the Democratic primaries to evolve into a contest between the “historic candidacies” of two political celebrities. This left no room for the boring white (and Hispanic) men who had the effrontery to assume that Democrats might want to make a decision based on the actual policy proposals of the contenders. There is something wrong in America when Edwards, Richardson, Biden and Dodd are denied a fair hearing before the voting public because higher-ups at MSNBC and CNN decide that they are not interesting enough.
Sadly, the media has defined the storylines of this election, dictating which candidates were viable and which were not, and casting the positions of the presidential hopefuls in terms that often bear little resemblance to reality. In the general election, if John McCain is indeed the GOP nominee, one would expect the press to focus on his falsely-touted moderate credentials. This may well cause millions of centrists and liberals to vote Republican, possibly even deciding the outcome of the election. It would be a terrible shame if Americans in general, and Amherst students in particular, based their vote on the press’ artificial storyline and not on their own research and informed decision-making.