Just as Sen. John McCain appeared to be putting some distance between himself and President Bush — distancing himself from the president on China's hosting of the Olympics, calling for a major change in Bush's prescription drug program and harshly criticizing Wall Street CEOs — Bush goes and ruins it.
The president today is announcing his own global warming plan, erasing McCain's chief argument for how he's different from a third Bush term.
Here was McCain yesterday on MSNBC's "Hardball" program, when host Chris Matthews asked him how he would be different:
"What's an area of disagreement? Climate change. Climate change. I believe that climate change is real. I think we have to act."
I wrote an analysis last month arguing that if McCain is to be seen as a third Bush term, it's because Bush has embraced McCain more than vice versa. Today's announcement will only fuel that appearance.
Whether McCain's climate change policy was right or wrong, he had counted on it to help win over some independent voters fed up with Bush but not sold on Democrats either. Now he'll either have to run further to the left to try to outmaneuver Bush, or else have to accept that on this issue Bush has once again tacked toward him.
— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times
Comments (1)
If Bush, McCain, Clinton, or Obama want to win over the independent voters they will have to produce something better than tree rings, hot spots and consensus science to deterministically prove that carbon can control the weather. Third World countries claim to be starving because of a linear decision to switch to biofuels. Any analysis that doesn't take in the complete complexity of decisional impacts on climate control put economic as well as life cycle processes at risk. Are they willing to take accountability for it? In today's political environment, blame is a key branch on the decision tree, therefore I think that, the most likely path of failure.
Posted by Larry Stone | April 16, 2008 1:47 PM