It's McCain-mania season again, and this time the man beating the drum for the iconoclastic senator from Arizona isn't an opinion journalist. It's the presumptive Democratic candidate for president.
"I'm not the president today," John Kerry told Don Imus last week, but "I have any number of people that I would make secretary of defense, beginning with our good friend John McCain as an example." Kerry rattled off a couple of other possible candidates for the cabinet post, including Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John Warner, the ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Admiral William Perry.
Democrats, by increasingly large margins, believe that America ought not to have gone to war in Iraq, and some observers have noted that Kerry could alienate his base by hewing to the political center on foreign-policy issues and demanding greater U.S. troop involvement in Iraq. “The McCain-as-defense-secretary idea strikes me as particularly likely to alienate the Democratic base,” argues The New Republic's Noam Scheiber. “Defense is probably the issue on which McCain is furthest out of step with Democratic voters.”
Certainly public support for the intervention in Iraq has plummeted in the wake of the Abu Ghraib pictures and controversy, and with Ralph Nader in the race, the possibility that anti-war voters could cast a decisive number of protest votes is a real one.
McCain might not work for Kerry. But the idea that he would make a great replacement for Donald Rumsfeld has not been confined to the Kerry camp, or even to the more hawkish members of the Democratic Party in the past weeks. Starting more than a week ago, a number of Democratic political consultants and operatives independently began pushing the idea in various parts of the party. I first heard the idea advocated by a liberal, anti-war political consultant who specializes in minority-voter turnout. By May 7, the idea had become part of Democratic Representative Martin Meehan's daily talking points. Last Monday, it was a topic of discussion at Mike McCurry's Grassroots Enterprises. All this chatter was ratcheted up when Kerry himself mentioned McCain later that week.
The idea, according to the Democrats I've spoken with, is not to select an individual who has an anti-war agenda. George W. Bush would never choose such a person, and anyway, McCain doesn't fit that bill -- like Kerry and many other Democrats, he advocates increasing troop levels in Iraq in order to stabilize the security situation there. The point is to find someone who could restore U.S. credibility in the Arab world and the international arena and provide a strong symbolic break with the recent past.
Having an American who was tortured in a prisoner-of-war camp replace a man who at best cavalierly allowed -- and at worst actually approved of -- the humiliation and torment of Iraqi prisoners would be profoundly meaningful as a show of American contrition and as a commitment to a newly respectful course of action in the treatment of Arab prisoners. One can only imagine the power of McCain going to Iraq to oversee the destruction of Abu Ghraib, once and for all. It would be a speech for the ages.
There was a moment, at about the time the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke, when Bush might have been able to replace his defense secretary in such a way as to show decisive leadership. Having made a public commitment to Rumsfeld these past weeks, though, it now seems too late for that. Yet had Bush added McCain to his cabinet, he would have had a shot at co-opting one of his most powerful intraparty critics during an election season -- and depriving the Democrats of their strongest Republican (sometimes) ally in the Senate. The president would have been tapping a Vietnam veteran popular with Democrats, making criticism of his lack of Vietnam service more difficult and possibly increasing support from some moderates and independents, who are increasingly dissatisfied with his administration. He'd have gotten someone popular with the press and known for his openness (in contrast with Rumsfeld, who is renowned for his secrecy and disdain for the media). Because McCain is well-known in the Senate, he could have been confirmed to the cabinet swiftly and without too much of a debate – or debacle. And to top it all off, McCain was a pro-war hawk from the get-go, so selecting him would not have amounted to a repudiation of the administration's goals in Iraq, only a repudiation of Rumsfeld's competence in achieving them.
Though appealing, the idea that Bush could or would pick McCain to replace Rumsfeld is, of course, a political fantasy. Bush and McCain never really made up after the vicious Republican primary campaign of 2000, and though McCain chairs Bush's re-election committee in Arizona, he is as frequently a critic of the president as he is a supporter. And with the Republic majority in the Senate so slim, losing any member of that body to the cabinet could potentially break the Republicans' lock on all three elected chambers of government. Further, McCain has said he would not take the position were it offered by Bush, preferring to remain in the Senate, where he is next in line to chair the Senate Armed Services Committee.
But for Kerry, naming McCain on the Imus show was a way to send a signal to moderate and independent voters that a Kerry administration would work across partisan lines and heal the great red-blue rift. Though Republicans play scorched-earth politics, slamming Kerry and other administration critics as unpatriotic and worse, it is a common Democratic belief that what is required of Democratic politicians is bipartisan statesmanship, rather than returning fire with fire by becoming as sharply partisan as the Republicans.
Further, pitching McCain as defense secretary earned Kerry lots of nice media play in the battleground state of Arizona, which he had just visited for the annual Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) conference on May 8 (and which Bush visited the following day). McCain had defended Kerry in The Arizona Republic from attacks by Vice President Dick Cheney during the pre-Abu Ghraib flap about Kerry's Vietnam medals. By pushing McCain, Kerry returned the praise and the favor, assisting with the latest wave of favorable press for the senator in his home state and around the country.
And if Kerry also created an impression that the two men share more of a common agenda than they perhaps do, ingratiating himself with Arizona fans of McCain, why, then, so much the better. After all, reported The Economist, McCain is believed to have sufficient power in Arizona that he can swing 4 percent of voters there one way or the other, and fully 23 percent of the state's electorate now registers as independents.
When asked, the Kerry campaign plays down the McCain proposal, noting that Kerry had not spoken with any of the individuals he named before suggesting them as possible Rumsfeld replacements. “He was giving examples of people who could do the job,” insists Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. “He wasn't floating anything … . He has worked with everyone he named and believed they are national leaders and have served with distinction and that's really as much as it is.”
Indeed, McCain is not the only person Kerry named. The individuals Kerry listed as possible Rumsfeld successors would have a range of approaches to handling the situation in Iraq. The Wall Street Journal was perplexed by the catalog, writing on its editorial page that the names “cover the gamut of security opinion in both major parties -- from Mr. McCain on the hawkish end of the GOP, to the more moderate Armed Services Committee Chairman Mr. Warner, to the moderately liberal Mr. Perry, to the leftish Mr. Levin. You could call it an over-the-rainbow coalition. What we can't figure out from these four names … is the kind of national security policy Mr. Kerry would actually pursue.”
But that strikes me as part of the point. Levin, for his part, has not called for Rumsfeld's ouster, out of concern that the next person in the Pentagon hierarchy is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. And the fact that Kerry might consider Levin suggests to foreign policy liberals that they, too, might see their perspectives included in a big-tent Kerry administration. Some might call it straddling the middle. Others might call it inclusive politics. Or maybe Kerry just likes to mention McCain because, as he told the DLC in Arizona, “It drives Karl Rove nuts.”
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor. Her column appears each week in the online edition.
