The New York Observer, January 16th, 2008
No presidential candidate—and perhaps no politician in the United States—believes in the Iraq war as deeply as John McCain does.
Years before 9/11 somehow landed Iraq on the Bush administration’s agenda, McCain was calling for the U.S. to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, and install a government to America’s liking.
Even in the face of that policy’s manifest failure, he has stood fast, calling Iraq “the central front of the war on terror,” ridiculing those who would withdraw troops as proponents of “surrender to al-Qaeda,” and defiantly proclaiming that he’d be willing to commit U.S. troops to Iraq for another 100 years. For a stretch in the fall, he even rechristened his campaign bus the “No Surrender Express,” and he’s gone out of his way in Republican debates to liken the one G.O.P. candidate who opposes the war, Ron Paul, to the appeasers of Adolf Hitler.
“I've heard him now in many debates talking about bringing our troops home, and about the war in Iraq, and how it's failed,” McCain said of Paul in one such exchange. “And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II. You allow Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism.”
Logic says that this is the recipe for McCain to make common cause with his party’s base, which has long embraced the war and long been suspicious of McCain, and to win the nomination. And logic further dictates that it’s a recipe for disaster in the general election; that after more than five years of war, voters simply won’t stomach a Republican nominee as intimately tied to the war as McCain is.
But here’s the punchline: McCain’s resurgent campaign for the Republican nomination is, for now at least, being fueled by support from voters who say they are against the war—not the party base that supports it.
In New Hampshire, 21 percent of voters in the Republican primary told exit pollsters that they “somewhat disapprove” of the war. But 49 percent of those voters cast ballots for McCain—more than twice the total of any other candidate. Another 14 percent of the New Hampshire G.O.P. electorate said they “strongly disapprove” of the war. But McCain was their first choice as well, with 38 percent. (Ron Paul got 26.).
On the flip side, the 25 percent of G.O.P. voters in New Hampshire who said that they “strongly approve” of the war sided with Mitt Romney over McCain by an astounding 44 to 23 percent margin.
Since McCain only won New Hampshire by six points over Romney, it can be fairly said that he owes his victory—and his political revival and potentially his nomination—to what he might consider the pro-appeasement vote.
The same pattern was evident in this week’s Michigan primary, where McCain’s nine-point loss to Mitt Romney would have been much worse had war opponents not rallied behind the Arizona Senator.
It’s not like McCain has been trying to keep his opinions on Iraq quiet. His support for the war, and his harsh personal characterizations of its critics, feature prominently in his stump speech and are among the first things he mentions in debates and television interviews. And his record in the Senate, where he has bitterly (and successfully) fought every effort to force a Congressionally-mandated end to the war, should demonstrate clearly to Republicans that he means exactly what he says on the subject.
Some voters who are against the war are certainly well aware of where McCain stands but are siding with him anyway because they think that other considerations—whether McCain’s stances on other issues or his general leadership character—outweigh the war. The fact that ever other Republican candidate also professes support for the war—except for Paul—makes this decision a little easier for anti-war voters.
But that alone can’t account for why so many self-identified war foes are with him—and why he is struggling so mightily with those who embrace the war most enthusiastically. A clearer explanation can be found when you consider the degree to which mass opinion is shaped by personality and personal reputation—and the thin to nonexistent grounding in the details of policy that most voters have.
This accounts for the pass war opponents are giving McCain. Many of them, undoubtedly, are one-time McCainiacs, independent-minded moderates and outsiders who fell in love with McCain’s maverick streak (and his quick wit) in 2000 and who have rediscovered it again in 2008. They aren’t aware of the significance of his decade-plus support for forced democratization, or the policy implications of the “surrender” taunts he hurls at war critics. They know him as a war hero and maverick and—without knowing or caring much about his actual record—intuitively trust him and his leadership.
Whatever the explanation, one thing is clear: the reasonable-sounding assumption that McCain’s pro-war stance puts him off-limits to anti-war voters isn’t holding up. Which means that if he ends up being the nominee, the Democrats had better have a Plan B.
