McCain's Iran-Contra

As a rule I do not spend much time talking about the 2008 Presidential campaign because it is moronically early to be wasting breath and column inches on much of what is going on. The only thing that could possibly matter at this point is how much money potential candidates are raising. Most everything else is a wasted effort.

That being said I did come across something today that underscores the difficulty John McCain is having, and will continue to have, with most conservatives. Over at CQ they are marking the 5th anniversary of McCain/Feingold:

Traditionally, fifth anniversary gifts come in wood, although more modern givers select silver. That seems appropriate as the nation celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold (Senate version) or Shays-Meehan (House version). Five years ago, wooden-headed politicians sold out the First Amendment for thirty pieces of silver in order to enact the first restrictions on political speech since the Sedition Act of the early 20th century.

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Let's make this plain: even if the BCRA had managed to lower the amount of money spent in campaigns and reduce the cynicism that politicians from both parties created in spades, it still would be wrong. Our founders knew full well what happens when government becomes the arbiter of politically acceptable speech; it tends to allow only that speech which perpetuates its power.

For this, one need look no further than the BCRA itself. What did it restrict? It forbade the airing of campaign ads from special-interest groups that criticized incumbent members of Congress within a certain number of days before an election, supposedly to discourage unfair attacks by challengers. This was necessitated by the underperformance of incumbents in elections, where they typically had anemic re-election rates of around 96%.

Let's emphasize this once again -- the BCRA made it illegal to air criticisms of incumbent politicians. In America. Even if one can forgive the Byzantine and artificial categorization of cash that the BCRA extended, we simply cannot forgive this, even had it proven effective at cleaning up politics. And it hasn't.

In the face of such (IMO well justified) criticisms, McCain shows himself to be completely tone deaf.

"Twenty years ago," McCain lectures, "Americans only had three sources for news -- ABC, CBS, and NBC." Aside from his faulty chronology (by 1987, we had CNN and C-SPAN), it's a complete non-sequitur. No one argues that we have a lot more options for information now, but those came well before the BCRA, and the BCRA has been used to interfere with at least some of them, including the blogosphere for a short time.

The BCRA has done nothing to restrain so-called checkbook politics, corruption still abounds, and people are less free to enter the debate than they were before the passage of the BCRA. The only thing the BCRA has done is to protect incumbents and to employ legions of lawyers and accountants. That's the legacy McCain avoids in this little bit of misdirection.

McCain's stubborn refusal to face up to the unpopularity of his assault on free speech rights will ultimately doom his presidential aspirations: His long, slow, agonizing bus trip to what the Daily Show calls "crushed-in-the-primaries-ville."

But it doesn't have to be this way. McCain should pull a page from Ronald Reagan's Presidential history and perform the Iran-Contra mea culpa. He should go before conservative audiences and say something like:

"When I began the legislative process that was to become the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act I truly believed there was a great problem afflicting our country with unregulated expenditures poisoning our political process. There were some who worried that taking such a path would erode our precious First Amendment rights to free speech. At the time I disagreed with those that took that view. I thought it was a false dichotomy being proposed by the critics and that our freedoms would not be put in danger by what I was advocating.

Now, five years later, we can see the fruits of this approach...of my approach...and I am forced to admit that my critics were right. Please know, I never would have undertaken this effort if I had thought it would infringe upon the sacred rights we enjoy as citizens of this great country. But I, with great humility, must admit that that is exactly what has happened.

I will dedicate myself, whether as a Senator or as the President, to restoring the free speech rights my well-meaning but deeply flawed legislation has damaged.

And to all of those who have argued with me over years on this subject I want to add: Thank you for your steadfast defense of our Constitution and our liberties. I finally get it."

In the end it will all boil down to a syllogism:

McCain will never be the Republican nominee without saying saying like the preceding.

McCain will never say anything like the preceding. (He is simply too egotistical I believe.)

Therefore, McCain will never be the Republican nominee.