Apparently John McCain, the all but official Republican nominee for president of the United States, has never heard the saying “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
According to a New York Times article that appeared over the weekend, the McCain campaign will request that President Bush appear without McCain at fund-raisers in support of McCain, but only rarely actually appear with McCain in public.
While there may be precedent for such a role for the sitting president during a campaign, the reasons here are cause for concern. The McCain camp may say it is trying to give the candidate his own public image; however, it is really just trying to hide alarming similarities between Bush and McCain.
“What an incumbent president can do is help a new nominee with fund-raisers, maybe with unifying the party, maybe with getting out the vote in Republican areas,” said one of McCain’s advisers, Charles Black, to The New York Times. “But the important thing to remember is: The nominee is on their own. And no president, no matter how popular and effective politically, can carry somebody.”
This may be true if it actually applied to this campaign, but strong support by the current president could be the nail in the coffin for anyone’s campaign this year.
According to a Gallup poll for January of this year, only 31 percent of U.S. adult citizens approve of the president. Furthermore, 65 percent of adults disapprove of the president right now, so being associated with George W. Bush does not make sense politically. These numbers are why these actions do not necessarily have a precedent.
For instance, in the 1988 presidential campaign, President Ronald Reagan did not appear in public with George H.W. Bush very often. However, at the end of his term, Reagan had a job approval rating of 68 percent in a CBS News/New York Times poll. This seems to suggest that in 1988, George H.W. Bush legitimately wanted to create his own public image despite the positive effect association with Reagan would have had.
That said, when the McCain camp says it does not want McCain and Bush to appear together often in public, I can’t help but think they simply do not want McCain to be associated with Bush.
“Candidates will do whatever they can to get elected within reason,” said political science professor Phil Gussin. “In some areas of (McCain’s) campaign Bush will be an asset, and in other areas he will be detrimental. McCain is being strategic.”
The problem here is that some of the policies that McCain supports, such as the surge in Iraq or Bush’s tax cuts, are policies that have been completely detrimental to the country. By not appearing with Bush, McCain is essentially hiding these facts from the general electorate who most likely will not research his positions on these issues.
The war in Iraq has proven to be a failed policy, and McCain has been one of its biggest supporters, asking Americans to have patience while men and women are in Iraq fighting in a war that should not have occurred in the first place.
Furthermore, the Bush tax cuts have led to the extremely high national deficit that we as a country face. However, on his Web site, McCain says that he would “make the Bush income and investment tax cuts permanent.”
More alarming perhaps are examples of areas where McCain has switched his position on issues that the Bush administration supports. In 2005, McCain was clearly against using torture as a means to obtain information during interrogations of enemy combatants. However, just this week, he said Bush should veto a bill that would ban waterboarding, an interrogation method in which an individual is dunked in water to simulate drowning. Overall, McCain seems to be doing his best to distance himself from Bush on these issues, which makes sense politically.
“President Bush is not a very popular president right now,” said David Lazar, president of Bruin Republicans and former Daily Bruin Viewpoint columnist. “If (McCain) identified with Bush, it would hurt him.”
Of course this is true, and distancing himself from the president would be fine if McCain actually represented the prospect of ending the policies of George W. Bush. However, McCain supports the policies of the Bush administration that have been the most unpopular, and hiding this from voters is an example of the same kind of politics that John McCain has tried to go against in his entire career.
If you think McCain should not be able to eat his cake, e-mail Margolis at mmargolis@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.