June 16, 2009 |
Let's start with foreign policy. Within the framework of U.S. geopolitical primacy shared by both parties, Barack Obama has departed significantly from the foreign policy of George W. Bush in both substance and style. With respect to substance, he is fulfilling his campaign promise to draw down U.S. involvement in Iraq cautiously while increasing resources for the fight against bin Laden's jihadists and their Taliban supporters, who, unlike Saddam Hussein, planned or suborned the 9/11 attacks.
McCain, by contrast, not only supported Bush's unnecessary and unjustified Iraq war, but has consistently been more hawkish than Bush, as difficult as that may be to imagine. Remember, during the 2000 Republican presidential primary McCain, not Bush, was the initial favorite of the neoconservatives, who proudly called themselves "McCainiacs." During the second Bush term of 2005-09, Republican realists like Defense Secretary Robert Gates (whom Obama wisely has retained) replaced neocons and neocon-friendly hawks allied with Dick Cheney such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. If McCain had been elected, it seems likely that this would have been reversed. Neocons like Elliott Abrams, instead of dwelling in exile at the Council on Foreign Relations, might well be back making foreign policy in the executive branch.
The difference in foreign policy style would have been even more striking. America produces two kinds of soldiers -- flamboyant, aggressive warriors like MacArthur and Patton, and quiet, prudent military statesmen like Washington, Marshall and Eisenhower. McCain, the former Navy pilot and son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, belongs to the former mold. His patriotic and pro-military oratory is both sincere and moving to Americans -- it has often moved me -- but proclamations about the virtue of America's cause and America's invincible might that go over well in pancake dinners on the campaign trail tend to alarm people in other countries. Whatever his other lasting achievements may be, Barack Obama in only a few months has already proven to the world that all Americans are not vainglorious, swaggering, self-righteous provincials who prefer to lead by intimidation rather than by inspiration and negotiation.
Nowhere is the difference between the Obama administration and a counterfactual McCain administration greater than in Middle Eastern policy. Despite domestic political limitations, President Obama, by taking a hard line on the expansion of illegal Israeli colonies ("settlements") in Palestine, has stood up to the Israeli right and its American allies more than any president since George Herbert Walker Bush in the aftermath of the Gulf War. If McCain were president, Israel's far-right Prime Minister Netanyahu would have a close friend in the White House and the executive branch almost certainly would be staffed in part with officials with longtime ties to the Israeli right wing, as it was under George W. Bush.
In foreign policy a McCain administration would have been a third Bush term -- or even worse than Bush III, if McCain had brought neocons back to replace the realists of Bush's second term. In domestic policy, a McCain administration probably would also have been a third Bush term.
McCain opposed Bush's tax cuts at the time of their passage. However, by the time he won the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he had not only drunk the Bush Kool-Aid but mixed some more. During the campaign he proposed making Bush's tax cuts permanent and slashing an additional $300 billion.
To be sure, presidents do not always govern on the basis of their campaign promises (contrast Obama's campaign rhetoric with his present waffling on military tribunals and Chinese currency manipulation). McCain's evident lack of interest in economics, compared to military and foreign issues, helped to sink his campaign after the world economy crashed in 2008. It is impossible to be sure how he would have responded to the crisis, had he been elected. But we can make educated guesses about the possibilities.
For one thing, a division certainly would have emerged between Republicans with ties to Wall Street and populist conservatives, particularly if McCain had retained Hank Paulson as secretary of the Treasury. Just as under Obama, under McCain congressional Republicans probably would have opposed bailouts for zombie banks and other too-big-to-fail institutions. The Wall Street wing of each party tends to defeat the populist wing, except during presidential primaries every four years -- and then only in rhetoric. So it seems likely that President McCain, perhaps reluctantly, would have consented to a continuation of the Paulson policy of bailing out the financial sector to avoid nationalization. In other words, the McCain-Paulson bailout policy would probably have been very similar to the Obama-Summers-Geithner bailout policy.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/16/president_mccain/index.html
