Political Two Step
who's stepping on toes on the primary floor?
2008-02-11
By Monroe Anderson

This is the year of delicate dancing. 
    
Playing naughty or nice has not managed to give Clinton or Obama a leg-up over the other. The senators who would be president remain virtually tied in their quest for their party's nomination. Even after Obama's sweep Saturday in Washington, Nebraska and Louisiana, he and his challenger are so close that the winner may be decided by the party's super-delegates in a brokered convention this summer in Denver.
   
But Obama and Clinton are not the only contenders tangled in a tango. John McCain, who is looking like the sure thing for the Republican party's presidential nomination, is learning to two-step between the race he'd like to run and the one the radical right wants to run for him. Somewhere during the 20 years he's been in the senate and this past year's presidential race, McCain has become a RINO (Republican in Name Only), according to the loudest and looniest in the GOP.   
   
Although McCain has been recognized as a genuine American hero since his days as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam era, the rock-rib conservative was simultaneously cheered and booed when he spoke last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C. The far right's rank-and-file are not falling in line for McCain.
   
Even after dropping out of the race, Mitt Romney won the straw poll over McCain at that event. And on Saturday, long-shot challenger Mike Huckabee trounced McCain in the Kansas caucus even as the Arkansas senator was being hailed as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
   
Ann Coulter, the far right's poison-pen-for-hire, has announced that if McCain is the party's candidate, she'll vote for "the she-devil," Hillary Clinton. Right-wing radio shrews, Russ Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham have been spewing out daily doses of anti-McCain diatribes to their national talk show audiences. Even Fox Cable Network airhead Sean Hannity has thrown his two cents worth of “McCain's not worthy” into the right's national temper tantrum over not having Ronald Reagan to schtick around anymore.
   
There is a long list of outspoken Republicans who are voicing their lack of enthusiasm for their likely candidate, the top criticisms being McCain's stances on taxes, immigration reform, gay marriage, stem cell research and global warming. And, he has a nasty temper and a foul mouth to boot.
   
Long considered to be a maverick, McCain voted against President Bush's tax cuts twice, in 2001 and again two years later. The first time, he argued that the tax cuts helped the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the second time he said there should be no tax relief until the cost of the Iraq war was known. He has also supported making a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants while refusing to support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. And, in the ultimate betrayal of right-thinking, the senator from Arizona sides with science, preferring relaxed restrictions on federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research and calling for an aggressive action against global warming.
   
The Republican's radical right considered tax cuts part of the scripture, illegal immigration a cardinal sin and the pursuit of science blasphemous. Limbaugh, Coulter, Ingraham and the gang are subscribing to a scorched earth where Hillary is allowed to win in November. They believe she'll do an even worse job than Bush has done over the past eight years, paving the way for a true conservative to win the White House in 2012.
   
In his attempt to court the party's crazies, McCain now says he wants to extend the tax cuts and that he now understands that the border between Mexico and the United States must be sealed first. He's also promising to appoint supreme justices cloning Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts to further the radical right's efforts to turn back the clock on women and civil rights.
   
So Obama and Clinton tread lightly, but they need not worry: With McCain traipsing between satisfying the right, the far rights, and wooing the independents, the Democratic nominee should be able to waltz into the White House come November.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.