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Reagan is another hero. McCain voted for the Reagan budgets to which Goldwater objected, and today he calls himself "a proud conservative in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and my favorite, Theodore Roosevelt." But Reagan and Roosevelt represent very different traditions. Reagan passed tax cuts for the rich (McCain voted for them); Roosevelt called for a social safety net and graduated income tax to shrink the gap between rich and poor. And that sounds like McCain lately. "I'm not giving tax cuts for the rich," he says. Roosevelt's progressive-era reforms helped create government regulations; Reagan wanted to ease them. McCain again takes from both, and has not figured out how to reconcile the two competing impulses. He wants to fix education and improve health care without new federal programs, so he ends up with half-baked policies and fuzzy talk about block grants--the kind of thing Reagan and Roosevelt might both somehow approve of.
Is that clear? Of course it isn't, because McCain isn't clear on these matters, even in his own mind. The problem with trying to define McCain's Republicanism is that McCain is winging it much of the time, making it up as he goes along. Some of his thinking seems to have evolved out of discussions no more formal than the rolling press conferences on his Straight Talk Express. He likes to admit what he doesn't know--a risky kind of candor for a candidate who wants to be taken seriously--and he's sometimes ready to scrap a policy on the spot. When Jonathan Chait of the New Republic questioned his commitment to the dispossessed--pointing out that McCain's tax-cut plan does nothing for low-income people--McCain said, "Maybe I'm not paying attention to the poorest of America. Maybe my priorities are not correct. I selected this course not thinking that it's perfect but thinking that it's the best that I could come up with."
On foreign affairs and the military, McCain is an acknowledged expert, and his chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee has taught him about the mysteries of the information economy. But on most other issues, he's paper thin; he can give you a position but not its underpinnings. He puts his faith in experts and asks voters to as well. "We need to get the smartest minds together to help work this out," he says about too many issues: William Bennett on drug policy, Lindsey Graham on health care, John Breaux on Medicare. Out of all the domestic issues that cut with voters, his campaign has offered detailed proposals only on Social Security reform, taxes and health care, and that plan was held together with Post-it notes and glue sticks. He has got away with all this because his campaign isn't about his policies; it's about his character and personality. That's why people who disagree with him say they will vote for him anyway, and why his supporters tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. They trust him, so they trust that he will come up with a plan.
Reporters fall into the same trap. In his genial conversations with the press, McCain often seems a good deal more moderate than he actually is. He muses about helping the have-nots, but his policies tend to help the have-a-lots. He speaks of universal health care but offers no plan to get anywhere close. And reporters give him leeway because his reputation as a crusader for reform--someone who wants to "kick the big-money boys out of Washington"--is so disarming.