GOP 'mavericks' have concerns with McCain

[one...two...tree 2,762]

In the past week alone, a handful of liberal, moderate and independent-leaning GOP officials have announced they support Obama.

By ALEXANDER BURNS

While John McCain’s often-touted maverick tendencies have frequently gotten him into trouble with conservatives in his party, in the waning weeks of the election it’s becoming clear that he’s also got a problem with another Republican constituency: his fellow GOP mavericks.

In the past week alone, a handful of liberal, moderate and independent-leaning Republican officials have publicly announced they are supporting Barack Obama. Few of them are still important party figures —and at least one is no longer a member of the Republican Party—but even so, their public repudiation of McCain is a dispiriting blow since his record of breaking with party orthodoxy in many ways resembles their own.

Over the summer, former Iowa Congressman and House Banking Committee Chairman James A. Leach, a liberal Republican who also lost his office in 2006, announced his support for Obama and spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

And in September, Maryland Congressman Wayne Gilchrest, a moderate who was defeated in the Republican primary in his bid for reelection this year, told a Baltimore radio station he was backing the Obama-Biden presidential campaign.

“I think they are prudent, they are knowledgeable,” Gilchrest explained. “We just can’t use four more years of the same kind of policy that’s somewhat hazardous which leads to recklessness.”

"By failing to move to the center, he alienated a huge portion of Republicans who are disenchanted from the last eight years," said former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who left the Republican Party after losing reelection in 2006 and endorsed Obama in February.

In the past week, the pace of the cross-party endorsements has picked up, with former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsing Obama on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on October 19 and former two-term Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson backing him on October 23.

Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, an unorthodox politician who campaigned for Mitt Romney in last year’s Republican primaries, endorsed Obama Friday, praising him as a “once-in-a-lifetime candidate” and criticizing the GOP for “playing on an increasingly small field in the last couple of elections.”

Two days later, former South Dakota Sen. Larry Pressler, who like McCain once served as a Senate Commerce Committee chairman, also endorsed Obama.

“The Republican Party I knew in the 1970s is just all gone,” he said, explaining that he preferred Obama’s economic plan.

Given the cast of political characters, it is hardly surprising that some of these figures endorsed a Democrat for president. All have broken with the Republican Party in the past on key votes or in public statements. Weld went so far as to resign his office as governor to accept a Clinton administration appointment, though his nomination foundered in the Senate.

But if one candidate from this year’s GOP presidential field could have been expected to pull in support from wayward Republicans, it would have been McCain, and some of his fellow mavericks describe his failure to reach out as a missed opportunity.

“I expected to see him move much more dramatically to the center,” said Chafee. "It didn't happen."

Chafee expressed regret for what he described as McCain’s move away from his past record.

“He voted against drilling in ANWR,” Chafee added. “He and I were the only two Republicans to vote against the tax cuts in ’01. Now he says, make them permanent.”

Leach contradicted Chafee’s account of McCain’s voting record, asserting that the Arizona senator “has always been very conservative on virtually all the issues.”

But the former 15-term congressman agreed that the McCain campaign’s aggressive approach to the campaign was turning off other moderate Republicans.

“It is pretty hard to identify with efforts to divide the country,” Leach said. “I don’t think negative campaigns should be rewarded. And this is a very dispiriting campaign that the McCain-Palin ticket is running.”

That’s a line of criticism other Republicans have echoed. Announcing his endorsement of Obama, Powell complained that the Republican Party had “moved even further to the right,” and said the McCain campaign’s recent criticism of Obama “goes too far.”

Former Michigan Gov. William Milliken, who endorsed McCain during the Republican primaries earlier this year, publicly withdrew his support for McCain in early October but did not endorse Obama, saying: “I’m disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.”

Of course, McCain hasn’t completely lost the maverick vote. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been perceived as a wild card in his party, is one of McCain’s most stalwart supporters. And Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent who spoke on McCain’s behalf at the Republican National Convention, has touted McCain’s party-bucking credentials as a central reason for his support.

“I think you know that both of the presidential candidates this year have talked about changing the culture of Washington,” Lieberman said at the convention in St. Paul. “Only one of them has shown the courage and the capability to rise above the smallness of our politics to get big things done for our country and our people, and that one is John S. McCain.”

For many of the Republicans endorsing Obama, though, that argument seems to be less persuasive than it once was – in part due to the conservative running mate McCain chose right before the convention where Lieberman made his post-partisan sales pitch.

“McCain was exactly right that she’s attracting energy in the Republican base. That’s very important to him,” said Leach. “But that…doesn’t appeal to all Republicans, so that’s what’s awkward.”

Carlson, the former Minnesota governor, was harsher in his assessment, blasting “the choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate, and the resultant shallow campaign based on fear and suspicion, [that] looks frighteningly similar to the politics of Karl Rove.”

As many aisle-crossing endorsements Obama’s picked up in the last week – he also attracted the backing of former Reagan administration officials Ken Adelman and Charles Fried, and former White House press secretary Scott McClellan – Chafee suggested there may be more Republicans supporting Obama without advertising it.

“The Obama campaign has had me call different leaning Republicans and asked them to publicly support [Obama and Biden],” Chafee said. “They’ll tell me privately, ‘I’m going to vote for them.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14986.html