March 4, 2000
ABROAD AT HOME / By ANTHONY LEWIS
When Money Is the Measure of All Things
DALLAS -- John McCain has voted consistently in the Senate for
the causes of the Christian right. He has opposed abortion rights,
gun control and anti-discrimination laws protecting gays and lesbians. He
voted to convict President Clinton.
Yet the National Right to Life Committee and Pat Robertson, the
right-wing evangelist, have bitterly opposed him in the Republican
primaries. Why?
Senator McCain asked himself that question in his extraordinary Virginia
Beach speech the other day. He answered: "Because I don't pander to
them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our
message."
Money is our message. In that memorable phrase Senator McCain
caught what has happened to the conservative movement and the
Republican Party.
Conservatives used to take pride in themselves as the movement of
ideas. But the ideas that propelled them to control of Congress are now
mostly stale or irrelevant.
Fighting Communism waned as a theme with the crumbling of the Soviet
Union and its allied regimes. The budget deficit, decried by Republicans
for so many decades, has been transformed by President Clinton into a
surplus. Slashing taxes, as George W.
Bush has learned to his regret, is now viewed by most of the public as a
threat to present prosperity and future Social Security retirement benefits.
Without ideas in which they have confidence, most conservatives have
focused increasingly on money as the way to get the public to vote for
them. That is why they are so furious at Senator McCain. His proposal
for campaign finance limits would take away the overwhelming financial
advantage they get from their affluent backers.
The Republican Party has traditionally been the party of the well-to-do.
But in the past its conservative leaders -- men like Senator Robert A.
Taft -- were not so obsessed with money. They had strong policy views
that they believed would persuade the public.
Governor Bush has said that the McCain campaign finance bill would be
"unilateral disarmament" by the Republicans. He did not mean his words
this way, but what he really seemed to be saying was that the armament
of the party these days is not ideas but cash.
In the current issue of the liberal biweekly The American Prospect, John
B. Judis describes how conservative luminaries set out to maintain control
after Republicans won the House in 1994. Ideological lobbyists like
Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform met weekly with
Republican Congressional leaders and business lobbyists. The aim was to
get so-called soft money flowing from corporate political action
committees. And it has flowed heavily toward the G.O.P.
Soft money, which is money contributed to political parties, is not
regulated by current federal law as is money given to candidates. The
legislation sponsored by Senator McCain and Senator Russell Feingold,
Democrat of Wisconsin, would bring soft money under limitations.
"I have called for the reform of campaign finance practices that have
sacrificed our principles to the demands of big-money special interests,"
Senator McCain said in Virginia Beach. "I have spoken against forces
that have turned politics into a battle of bucks instead of a battle of ideas.
. . . America is greater than the accumulation of wealth, and so our
party should be."
In those words Senator McCain sounded like Theodore Roosevelt
decrying "malefactors of great wealth." Indeed, he said at the end that
Republicans should be "the party of Theodore Roosevelt, not the party of
special interests."
It may be that Senator McCain's campaign crested in Michigan. His
losses in Virginia and Washington make his prospects look bleak unless
he can pull off a miracle next week in New York and California.
The odds against upsetting the conservative powers that be were always
daunting. But in challenging their money culture, and in particular what he
called the Christian right's "agents of intolerance," Senator McCain has
had a powerful impact on our politics.
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The forces making politics a battle of big bucks rather than ideas grow ever stronger in our age of big-bucks mass-media mass manipulation; witness blitzkrieg mendacious 30-second TV attack ads, e.g., the recent 11th-hour breast cancer and environmental issue shystering funded by some sleazy tycoon who has the politician in his pocket. Long live the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. Also of Thomas Jefferson:
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1816 |
