[Mb-civic] GOP's Improbable Pair - Ruth Marcus - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

GOP's Improbable Pair

By Ruth Marcus
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A19

MEMPHIS -- John McCain and Trent Lott aren't the strangest of political 
bedfellows, but the two Republican senators aren't the most obviously 
compatible couple either: The politics version of Match.com wouldn't 
likely fix up the iconoclast from Arizona with the Ol' Miss cheerleader. 
Though their family political ties stretch back to 1889, when a McCain 
ancestor backed Lott's great-great-uncle for state treasurer, Lott 
acknowledges, "John and I fight like cats and dogs."

During the 2000 campaign, McCain relentlessly flayed a Lott-backed, 
Mississippi-based ship as pork barrel spending at its worst; Lott 
returned the compliment by endorsing George W. Bush over his fellow 
senator. Over the years, they've clashed on everything from campaign 
finance reform to telecommunications policy.

So Lott's current labors on behalf of the emerging McCain presidential 
campaign are telling -- both about the careful political groundwork 
McCain is laying for 2008 and about the growing unease among party 
activists that they will lose the White House. Behind the scenes -- and 
quite openly at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here over 
the weekend -- Lott has been working to burnish the Arizona senator's 
standing among the Republican faithful who remain skeptical of, or even 
hostile to, McCain.

Lott's support for McCain may contain more than a little element of 
payback and self-interest -- after all, Lott was ousted from his job as 
majority leader by one of McCain's presidential rivals, Tennessee's Bill 
Frist, and McCain could help Lott regain a leadership post.

But it also reflects an unsentimental assessment that McCain is, as Lott 
puts it, "our best horse this time around." Thus, some leaders such as 
Lott and, perhaps more important, some big-money men, are placing early 
bets on McCain. That trend may continue, but it remains unclear whether 
a skeptical base -- still angry at McCain over his disputes with 
President Bush in 2000, chafing at his championing of campaign finance 
reform, or unconvinced of his social conservative credentials -- will 
follow.

"I must say I think they're somewhat leery of him," Lott says. "But we 
want to win the next election. Pragmatism is a powerful force in politics."

As a result, the once-conventional political wisdom -- that McCain would 
be a formidable general election candidate but can't make it past the 
gantlet of Republican primary voters -- is crumbling along with Bush's 
approval ratings. And though McCain is working hard to help the party in 
2006, the paradox is that a rout in November would do wonders for McCain 
2008.

If the base -- at least some of the base -- is starting to think about 
electability, McCain is thinking base, and has been for some time. He 
moved to make amends for the 2000 campaign in 2004, campaigning on 
Bush's behalf, and he's been at it nonstop since -- helping raise money 
across the country and holding fence-mending meetings with social 
conservatives. After voting against the original Bush tax cuts in 2001, 
and again in 2003, McCain backed extending cuts on capital gains and 
dividend taxes last month -- a switch that won praise from an ordinarily 
unfriendly Wall Street Journal editorial page.

"I think he's helped himself a lot," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says 
of McCain's relations with Republican voters. Speaking at the 
conference, Barbour, the former party chairman, did his part to help, 
plugging McCain as a "hard-nosed deficit hawk."

Nonetheless, McCain, as Lott puts it, "has got work to do. He knows 
that." Iowans, for instance, are still smarting over McCain's decision 
to spurn their caucuses in 2000 -- and, even if they forgave that sin, 
they still might not be takers. "I don't think they think he's a real 
Republican," says Rep. Steven King (R-Iowa).

Indeed, for a man who needs to assuage those doubts -- and who is 
opposed to abortion rights and gay marriage -- McCain's speech here was 
notably devoid of the red-meat social issues tossed out by the other 
prospective candidates: He was the only one of the six who didn't 
mention those sure crowd-pleasers.

"I wanted to discuss the important salient issues that we are facing at 
this moment -- they are the corruption, the earmarking, Iran and Iraq," 
McCain said in an interview afterward. "Those are the challenges that we 
as a party and a nation are facing. If this had been the year 2008 maybe 
I would have focused more on general overall themes and basic issues 
that are the pillars of our party."

If McCain runs in 2008, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a supporter, 
told reporters the race will be different than the 2000 campaign: This 
time, McCain will be trying "to become the leader of the party, not the 
leader of a movement" and one who is "sensitive to the idea that . . . 
social and economic conservative groups are the heart and soul of this 
party."

The conference was held at Memphis's Peabody Hotel, famous for the ducks 
that parade in stately formation each day to and from the lobby's marble 
fountain, waddling to the strains of a Sousa march. The party that 
McCain now seeks to lead would prefer a primary campaign as orderly and 
predictable as the daily procession in the Peabody lobby. The test for 
McCain is whether -- with the help of Lott and others -- he can manage 
to get the GOP ducks in a row, marching smartly behind him and not 
quacking too loudly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301485.html?nav=hcmodule
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