Candidates Clash; Congress Toils

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 27, 2000 | by James P. Lucier

After his Michigan win, McCain continued exploiting the open-primary system, directing his campaign toward Democrats, independents and space aliens.

Returns from the latest round of GOP presidential primaries show John McCain's campaign is stalling. In Congress, lawmakers are cooking the books to `balance' the federal budget.

As Congress straggled in after the President's Day recess (which actually lasted 10 days), Republicans and Democrats wrestled with the idea of who might be sworn as president in January 2001. Bill Bradley, Vice President Al Gore's challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, seemed to be lost in the dust. He was trying to wage an earnest liberal's campaign against a hard-boiled establishment liberal. In the Washington state primary Bradley looked forlorn, losing 65 to 24 percent. For him it looked to be over.

After a decisive Michigan win, Arizona Sen. John McCain continued in Virginia and Washington state his strategy of exploiting the open-primary system, directing his campaign toward Democrats, independents and space aliens yearning for a Republican administration without Republicans. It is a Trojan-horse strategy.

Actual Republicans in the Old Dominion looked at this warily. Although McCain brought in enough strangers in the belly of the horse to get 44 percent of the overall vote, Bush still trounced him with 53 percent. More tellingly, 69 percent of the Republicans went with Bush, rejecting the sage counsels of the media pundits that the Republican Party could enlarge its base only by adopting Democratic ways.

More bizarre yet was McCain's tactic of traveling to Virginia Beach, Va., home of evangelist and onetime Republican presidential hopeful Pat Robertson, to denounce Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell as "forces of evil" in the Republican Party. No bill of particulars was trotted out, although the week before Robertson had sent targeted phone calls to Michigan quoting several vicious and bigoted passages in the autobiography of former U.S. senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, McCain's national campaign chairman.

Then McCain made Virginians snigger when he boasted he would trounce the "Gilmore-Warner Machine," referring to Virginia's Gov. James Gilmore and senior U.S. Sen. John Warner. Not only has the corruption of machine politics been virtually absent from Virginia for generations, but Gilmore and Warner, both of them gentle and soft-spoken, nevertheless represent opposite factions of the Virginia Republicans and barely are on speaking terms. Gilmore responded by reminding Northern Virginians that McCain tried to bully Congress into extending the hours for noisy flights into Ronald Reagan National Airport in Alexandria, Va. He pointed out to Virginians in the Chesapeake region that McCain's attempt to slash naval shipbuilding would have devastated jobs in Newport News; and recalled for Virginians in Southside Virginia, center of family tobacco farms, that McCain was an architect with the Democrats of the $900 billion tobacco tax.

"McCain's strength is in Northern Virginia," Gilmore's spokesman, Michael McSherry, tells Insight. "The farther you go away from the newspaper routes of the Washington Post, the less influence McCain has."

In Washington state it was a similar story, although there the votes are counted by party as well as by unaffiliated ballots. The parties need count only the party ballots toward delegate selection, and there Bush triumphed over McCain by 58 percent to 38 percent. Yet the parties also can consider the unaffiliated ballots, which McCain won almost 2-to-1, 62 percent to 34 percent. Combining the two categories, Bush squeaked ahead with 49 percent of the vote to McCain's 47 percent. Nevertheless, Bush's 292,173 votes were a greater number than those of any other candidate, including Gore.

In the beginning of the primary season, Bush was a little like the kid who is driven to school every day in a limousine and arrives in freshly starched clothes. After getting his nose bloodied a couple of times by the schoolyard bully, he has learned to hold his ground and punch back. He is the better man for it.

Meanwhile, Congress faces the embarrassing question of what to do with a new, unexpected $23 billion surplus in excess of Social Security needs for fiscal 2001. The House has set out to give the tax code the death of a thousand cuts, one week repealing the "marriage tax" (which pushes couples into a higher tax bracket when two incomes are combined) and the next week removing the cap on Social Security earnings.

Despite the dream of Republican members of Congress that controlling the House and Senate would give them the opportunity to cut the size of government, the amount of discretionary spending -- the best marker of what Congress is doing to cut the size of government -- continues to skyrocket. The GOP also had vowed to hold the line on nondefense spending while strengthening the military, but just the opposite has happened: Threatened with Clinton vetoes, they have held defense spending flat after the Democratic slashes of the early nineties, while increasing nondefense discretionary spending (see graphic).