The votes were still being tallied last Tuesday night when George W. Bush launched his counterattack against John McCain. "He came at me from the left here in New Hampshire," Bush told CNN's Larry King, "and so it's going to be a clear race between a more moderate-to-liberal candidate vs. a conservative candidate in the state of South Carolina." Bush wants to convince Carolina Republicans that he is the only conservative in the race--that McCain is a closet Clinton who won in New Hampshire because the state has become a hilly suburb of Boston, Taxachusetts. That's a tough sell, since McCain has always been a staunch conservative--pro-life, pro-gun, antitax, antiregulation. But Bush argues that McCain's advocacy of campaign-finance reform and his opposition to whopping tax cuts mean he has abandoned his ideals. The argument is designed to shore up Bush's right-wing support in South Carolina, but it wasn't working so well last week, as McCain inched past Bush in the TIME/CNN poll. Yet Bush and his surrogates aren't the only ones wondering whether McCain has morphed into some strange new breed of politician. The New Republic recently put McCain on its cover next to the headline, THIS MAN IS NOT A REPUBLICAN.
The basic argument goes like this: McCain's campaign-finance rebellion--and the force of the Republican reaction against him--was a seismic shock that knocked him free from G.O.P. orthodoxy. And so he attacks Republican pork-barrel projects, questions the need for increased military spending, worries about the gap between rich and poor, and supports new health-care entitlements (insurance for children, a prescription-drug benefit) and even, in the vaguest of terms, universal health care. McCain has also been butting heads with Bush on the question of tax cuts--arguing that the truly conservative position is to keep the tax cut modest and use the surplus to save Social Security and pay down the debt. Bush calls that a Clintonian approach--on Friday in South Carolina he began airing TV spots saying as much--but according to the new TIME/CNN poll, nearly three-quarters of likely G.O.P. primary voters in the state agree with McCain. Does that make him a conservative apostate or a new kind of conservative?
Neither. McCain is an old kind of Republican--to be precise, he is several old kinds of Republican rolled into one. He grabs various strands of Republicanism and doesn't worry when they contradict. He's a self-styled populist and a free-trading internationalist, a noisy reformer who keeps his hands off business and has corporate lobbyists raising money for him. He picks an assortment of G.O.P. role models and invites them to rumble inside his head.
Barry Goldwater is one. The Arizona Senator and McCain mentor (McCain succeeded him in office) founded the modern conservative movement, ran for President and lost, said just about anything that came into his mind (a clear influence right there) and, in his later years, tempered his social conservatism in ways McCain might be starting to now. Goldwater was a voice for fiscal prudence. When Ronald Reagan ran up a $1.3 trillion deficit during the 1980s, Goldwater lambasted him, demanding the sort of debt reduction that McCain argues for today.