McCain: GOP lost its way
November 17, 2006
McCain Tells Conservatives G.O.P.’s Defeat Was Payback for Losing ‘Our Principles’
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — Senator John McCain said Thursday that Republicans had lost the midterm elections because “we abandoned our principles” on fiscal policy and government restraint, inviting a backlash from Americans over what they saw as widespread hypocrisy.
Mr. McCain — in back-to-back speeches delivered on the day he formally created his presidential exploratory committee — portrayed the election result as deserved punishment of Republicans for their performance in office, rather than an affirmation of the Democratic Party. Speaking to two conservative audiences still reeling from the Republicans’ losses of the House and Senate, he said Republicans could recover from the election but only if they took lessons from the results.
“Hypocrisy, my friends, is the most obvious of political sins — and the people will punish it,” said Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona. “We were elected to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. We increased the size of government in the false hope that we could bribe the public into keeping us in office.
“We lost our principles and our majority,” he said. “And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first.”
The speeches were what aides described as the start of a new phase in Mr. McCain’s likely try for the presidency, though he will make a formal decision on whether to run next year. The addresses, amounting to a sharp repudiation of his own party as well as an unambiguous embrace of conservative ideology, come as Republicans debate what lessons should be drawn from the defeat.
Mr. McCain, speaking here to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, said the outcome did not represent a rejection of “our values and governing philosophy.”
“On the contrary, I think they rejected us because they felt we had come to value our incumbency over our principle,” he said. “And partisanship, from both parties, was no longer a contest of ideas, but an ever cruder and uncivil brawl over the spoils of power.
“Americans had elected us to change government, and they rejected us because they believed government had changed us,” he said. “We must spend the next two years reacquainting the public and ourselves with the reason we came to office in the first place: to serve a cause greater than our self-interest.”
One of Mr. McCain’s political tasks as he considers a presidential campaign has been to reinforce his standing with conservatives. Mr. McCain has found himself at odds with conservative leaders in opposing the call for immigration measures to prevent illegal immigrants from attaining citizenship.
In his talks, to the Federalist Society and to Gopac, a conservative political action committee, Mr. McCain addressed a subject that has distressed many conservatives about Republicans — the galloping deficit and increases in spending.
“Last year, a Republican Congress passed a highway bill with 6,371 special projects costing the taxpayers 24 billion dollars,” he said at Gopac, drawing light applause. “Those and other earmarks passed by a Republican Congress included $50 million for an indoor rainforest, $500,000 for a teapot museum; $350,000 for an Inner Harmony Foundation and Wellness Center; and of course, as you all know, $223 million for a bridge to nowhere. I didn’t see these projects in the fine print of the Contract with America, and neither did the voters.”
But Mr. McCain also used the talks to reiterate his position on Iraq, urging Washington not to take the wrong lesson from the election, and arguing that the way to success was through increased troop strength.
“In no other time are we more morally obliged to speak the truth to our country, as we best see it, than in a time of war,” he said. “So let me say this, without additional combat forces we will not win this war.”
“As troubling as it is, I can ask a young marine to go back to Iraq,” he said. “What I cannot do is ask him to return to Iraq, to risk life and limb, so that we might delay our defeat for a few months or a year. That is more to ask than patriotism requires.”
Mr. McCain was not without humor on Thursday. “In the words of Chairman Mao,” he said, “it’s always darkest before it’s totally black.” His audience laughed.Cain
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Originally Posted by TYLERTECHSAS
