You can prove he's a partisan, you can't prove he's embittered.
Sure i can, i can also prove he is a hired gun.
A Conversation with "Real McCain" Author Cliff Schecter
Jon Perr
Back in 2000, Democratic strategist and political writer Cliff Schecter contributed $20 to the presidential campaign of Arizona Republican Senator John McCain. An admirer of McCain's independent streak then in opposing Republican orthodoxy on supply-side tax cuts and overturning Roe v Wade, Schecter admitted, "I trusted him." Eight years and seemingly endless McCain flip-flops later, Cliff Schecter wants his money back.
That in a nutshell is the genesis of Schecter's new book, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't. Betrayed by McCain across almost every issue foreign and domestic, Schecter now says "I realized I'd been snookered." The result in The Real McCain is an essential handbook for the 2008 election, a chronicle of John McCain's devolution from mythical maverick to craven opportunist.
I recently had the chance to catch up with Schecter to talk about his book and his take on the political landscape in the run-up to the election in November. Our conversation, like his book, was fast-moving and frequently funny.
At the outset, it's worth noting that Schecter is in some ways an unlikely messenger against McCain. To be sure, the progressive firebrand and Democratic strategist (his resume features work on Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign and a stint with uber-polling firm Penn Schoen) proudly advances the liberal line on cable news shows, in newspaper columns as well as at blogs including FireDogLake and Huffington Post. But in the past, the New Yorker crossed the partisan no-man's land to pull the lever for Republican Governor George Pataki. And, as he put it, "I'm embarrassed to admit that I once voted for Rudy Giuliani."
But Schecter's dalliance with the dark side reached its apogee with then straight-talking moderate John McCain. "There's a reason I liked him in 2000," Schecter said. Bucking the party line on women's reproductive rights, McCain in 1999 announced "certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations." McCain similarly opposed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, claiming in 2001, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief." And Schecter remembered John McCain's August 1990 words on the eve of the Gulf War:
"If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode significantly. Nor should it be supported. We even cannot contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood."
Fast forward to the 2008 election, as Schecter details, and John McCain the maverick, the reformer and the moderate is a distant memory. "That McCain," he writes, "is no longer with us, if he ever truly was."
So when publisher PoliPointPress began looking to the liberal commentariat last year for a campaign '08 profile of John McCain, Cliff Schecter was a natural selection. As he described it, "I was looking for redemption."http://www.blueoregon.com/2008/07/a-conversation.html