1 CHAPTER 2: MCSAME VERSUS THE TAX AND SPEND LIBERAL In the world constructed by the Obama campaign, George W Bush was on the ballot.―The most influential politician in 2008 won‘t be on the ballot,‖ Democratic consultant David Axelrod told the Illinois Senator he helped elect in 2004.1 ―His name is George W. Bush. With few exceptions, the history of presidential politics shows that public opinion and attitudes about who should next occupy the oval office are largely shaped by the perceptions of the retiring incumbent.‖2 In 2008 the task of Republican nominee Arizona Senator John McCain was to become one of those exceptions. The responsibility for ensuring that he didn‘t do so resided with the campaign of Democratic nominee Barack Obama. In this chapter, we examine the most often aired attack by and against each of the two major party candidates: McCain as ―McSame‖ versus Obama as ―tax and spend liberal.‖ Specifically, where Obama defined himself as the agent of needed change and equated McCain with Bush and the failed politics and policies of Washington, McCain cast himself as a maverick and contended that the liberal changes Obama proposed would worsen the economy and harm the middle class. Obama parried the tax and spend charge by arguing that McCain would push up taxes and perpetuate policies that had mangled the economy and mired the country in Iraq. The Democrat blunted charges of out of touch liberalism with autobiographical vignettes steeped in American middle class values. By contrast, McCain drew sustenance for his claims that he had and would place country first from his heroic defiance of his North Vietnamese captors in a war beyond the lived memory of most of the electorate. 1 David Axelrod is the founder of AKPD Message and Media, a Chicago-based political consulting firm, and was the chief strategist for President Obama during the 2008 election. He is currently the President Obama‘s top political advisor. 2 David Axelrod, ―Campaign Organization and Strategy.‖ In Electing the President 2008: The Annenberg Election Debriefing, edited by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009): 68. 2 Lost in the crossfire between the two camps were two key facts. First, both presidential contenders proposed new taxes and increased spending, the difference being who was advantaged by the policies of each. Second, the Obama-McCain-Bush record of alliance and attack was more complex than either candidate admitted. So for example, in a number of instances, Obama had sided with Bush when McCain had not. In others, both had come down on the same side as or taken a view opposed to the president‘s. Specifically Obama voted for and McCain against Bush‘s energy bill while both agreed with the incumbent on the basic contours of immigration reform. There were also instances in which the two nominees embraced a policy anathema to Bush such as use of cap and trade to address climate change. The Backdrop: An Unpopular President Although both Bush‘s approval ratings and the growth in the economy were subpar, the biography of the Republican Party‘s nominee tugged at a central historical fact embedded in past elections and hence the theorists‘ models of them. Not since Governor Adlai Stevenson and General Dwight David Eisenhower ran to succeed President Harry Truman in 1952 had the presidential contest failed to include either a vice president seeking election or an incumbent bent on retaining the key to the Oval Office. In other words, unlike most of the elections modeled in the television age, in 2008 the outgoing president did not have a lineal heir in the race. Instead the Republican nominee had fiercely fought George W. Bush for his party‘s nomination in 2000 and, during Bush‘s eight year term, had amassed a list of significant defections from the president‘s policies. McCain, for example, had opposed the first two Bush tax cuts, voted against the prescription drug benefit, supported re-importation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, championed the Patients‘ Bill of Rights, cast some of the administration‘s 3 ―enhanced interrogation techniques‖ of suspected terrorists as ―torture,‖ argued for closing Guantanamo, opposed a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, challenged administration-imposed restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, taken on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, pushed for an increase in troop levels in Iraq that came to be known as the surge, and sponsored legislation to deal with global warming. Moreover, halfway into Bush‘s second term, the 2006 elections swept the Democrats into control of the House and Senate which meant that the economic woes of 2008 happened with a Republican in the White House and Democrats on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a configuration that opened the question, ―Which party, if either and not both, would be blamed for the mess?‖ One dilemma for the senior senator from Arizona was that the success of the surge strategy that he championed moved the Iraq war out of the headlines and subordinated the question, ―Which would be the better commander in chief?‖, one on which McCain consistently topped Obama, to the question on which McCain never held a lead—―Which was better at handling the economy?‖ Another problem for McCain was that in the primaries he had either downplayed or fled from the credentials that bolstered his prospects with independents in the general election. The price of nourishing his chances with party regulars in the winter primaries was undercutting them with moderates in the fall election.3 Unsurprisingly, throughout the contest for the Republican nomination, the Arizonan was hammered from the right, a phenomenon that increased the likelihood that, without intense courting, portions of the Republican conservative base might sit the election out. The grievances that wing of the Republican party had with McCain‘s legislative record were stoked by anger at his co-sponsorship of immigration reform legislation and ―campaign finance rules that many on 3 ―McCain has been hailed by liberals and lionized in the mainstream news media for being a rebel,‖ noted an article in Time in early February. ―This maverick reputation, so prized for its general-election appeal, makes it difficult for McCain to pass the primary threshold.‖ (James Carney, ―The Phoenix.‖ Time. 4 February 2008, 35). 4 the right consider a violation of free speech. And he made a deal with Democrats to break a deadlock on judicial nominations that many on the right considered near treasonous.‖4 In a harbinger of problems to come, at the 2007 meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, McCain was booed.5 Moreover, in the early primaries, conservative icon Rush Limbaugh routinely railed against McCain‘s bid.6 Our NAES data suggest that the political talk show host‘s attacks increased his listeners‘ perceptions that the Arizonan was a Machiavellian moderate in conservative‘s clothing.7 Complicating matters for McCain was the fact that throughout their face-off in the primaries, well-financed former Massachusetts‘ governor Mitt Romney tried to outflank the Arizonan from the right by stressing McCain‘s heretical views. ―Senator McCain was one of two Republicans who voted against the Bush tax cuts,‖ noted Romney in the Fox News debate in early January.8 The Romney campaign argued as well that McCain was for all intents and purposes a Democrat who was ―pushing the Democrat position on immigration, taxes, energy.‖9 By featuring McCain‘s impulse to safeguard taxpayers‘ dollars and police government spending, one could make the case that he was a true fiscal conservative. ―While other conservatives failed to see how corporations were insinuating themselves into their movement,‖ noted right-of-center New York Times’ columnist David Brooks in November 2007, ―McCain went after Boeing contracts. While others failed to see the rising tide of corruption around them, 4 David D. Kirkpatrick, ―As McCain Wins, Critics on Right Look Again,‖ New York Times, 1 February 2008, A20. 5James Carney, ―The Phoenix,‖ Time, 4 February 2008, 35. 6 See Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Bruce W. Hardy, ―Media, Endorsements and the 2008 Primaries.‖ In S. S. Smith and M. J. Springer (Eds.), Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process, (Washington: Brookings Press, 2009) 64-84. 7 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 8 Michael Luo and David D. Kirpatrick, ―As Primary Day Looms in New Hampshire, Republican Rivals Go After One Another.‖ New York Times, 7 January 2008, A16. 9 Elisabeth Bumiller and Michael Luo, ―Reasons Vary, but McCain and Romney Compete for the Same Prize,‖ New York Times, 2 February 2008, A13. 5 McCain led the charge against Jack Abramoff. While others ignored the spending binge, McCain was among the fiscal hawks.‖10 But prime or make salient other facets of his life story and the Vietnam War hero seemed instead surprisingly liberal. In its editorial endorsement of his bid for the Republican Party nomination, the New York Times, for example, applauded the very positions that had earned Limbaugh‘s opprobrium: McCain-Kennedy (immigration reform), McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform), and McCain-Lieberman (climate change legislation). ―Senator John McCain of Arizona is the only Republican who promises to