It’s been a week since Democrats in the House of Representatives chose to go on vacation without renewing the intelligence community’s legal authority to monitor the people trying to kill us. So what’s the presumptive Republican presidential nominee doing?
Why, he’s going right after Democrat frontrunner Barack Obama on the gripping issue of our time: non-mandatory campaign-finance guidelines.
That’ll show ‘em. Can’t you just feel the excitement? Why, if I were Chris Matthews, I’d be getting one of those tingles up my leg about now.
John McCain is going to be the Republican candidate. Given the options, he’s going to collect votes on the Right. But there’s a reason many of us will never warm up to him. He almost never fails to disappoint — or, better, to rankle.
The shameful roulette game Democrats are playing with our national security ought to be tailor-made for McCain. Surveillance is patently vital to protecting Americans, so much so that, to preserve it, the Bush administration made agonizing concessions during negotiations over intelligence-reform legislation. That cleared the way for overwhelming bipartisan assent in a Senate controlled by Democrats. Yet, it isn’t just House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s charges fighting this bill. McCain’s two plausible rivals in the fall campaign, Obama and the fading Sen. Hillary Clinton, are in the opposition.
Not only, therefore, do we have a national-security crisis. We have it over an issue that lends itself to what McCain sees as his signature selling point: commander-in-chief-ready strength and experience. Simultaneously, the issue exposes McCain’s competitors as captives of the fringe Left, out of step with mainstream Democrats — which, today, is saying something.
Moreover, the security issue resonates powerfully with conservatives. We are the constituency whose enthusiastic support McCain plainly lacks but desperately needs if he is to have a prayer in November. Thus, this is a chance for him to draw the sharp contrast, to say: “I’m over here with you; they’re over there with MoveOn, the ACLU and CAIR.”
In short, for McCain, intelligence reform is a home-run waiting to happen. Nevertheless, but for some tentative swings in the on-deck circle, he’s not exactly tripping over himself to step into the batter’s box.
How could this be? I suspect it’s because when you check the record on stepped-up intelligence collection, as on many other things, John McCain has been, well, John McCain.
The NSA’s warrantless-surveillance program, targeting suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States, was exposed by McCain’s erstwhile admirers at the
New York Times in late 2005.
So what was the senator’s first response? Was it to study the matter carefully? Weigh the exigencies confronting President Bush after a massive attack on the homeland by an enemy capable of, and determined to carry out, more of the same? Educate himself on applicable principles that stretch back to the Civil War era
Prize cases and beyond? Note that goo-gobs of precedent affirm the sovereign’s power to search without warrants when our borders are breached?
No. McCain went maverick. His first reaction was to pronounce that President Bush had acted illegally.
On the day the
Times broke the story, before any in-depth analysis could conceivably have been done, the senator — who is not a lawyer and demonstrates little interest in legal theory — was quick to
tell MSNBC, “Theoretically, I obviously wouldn’t like it” (i.e., the NSA program).
A month later, he decided he knew enough to
opine for Fox’s Chris Wallace that the President lacked the authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping. McCain thus strode into familiar territory: anchoring the cadre of Republican moderates generally available to the Left to hammer the Right during high-profile debates. Among others, the
ACLU, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and the
Baltimore Chronicle made note that, regardless of President Bush’s claims to the contrary, the maverick deemed the program unlawful.
Recall that the NSA controversy broke right as Democrats were closing ranks for their last national-security dereliction, blocking reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Concurrently, McCain was rallying Congress to extend interrogation protections to terrorists, against futile opposition from the White House. Still, without a trace of irony, McCain expressed bewilderment at the president’s failure to extend the hand of friendship on surveillance.
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