Staff Editorial

Editorial Cartoon

Adam D. Elrod

The primary season is officially under way with the completion of the first state primary election in New Hampshire, whose population is roughly one-quarter that of the greater Houston area. 

After a pathetic showing in the Iowa Caucus, in which he placed fifth and garnered only 5 percent of the vote, Sen. John McCain defeated Republican rival Gov. George W. Bush by a solid 18.4 percent.

McCain called his victory a repudiation of the "anointed" governor and a signal to the Republican establishment that the status quo will no longer suffice. 

He calls himself a "Washington outsider" and has declared war on the "special interest groups" in America through campaign finance reform.

This claim of being an "outsider" is truly puzzling to me because, of the five remaining Republican candidates, McCain is the only one who could possibly be considered an "insider." He is a long-time senator from Arizona, he is the only GOP candidate who holds an office that operates within the Beltway, and he deals with the day-to-day operations of the national government.

Bush operates in Texas and, until now, has had little to do on the national scale. Alan Keyes is a former Ambassador to the United Nations and lives in Maryland. Steve Forbes owns Forbes Magazine and, except for election time, stays out of the political limelight. Gary Bauer is a family values activist who formerly worked in the Reagan administration, but has been out of Washington for almost a decade. In all honesty, McCain is no more a "Washington outsider" than Vice President Al Gore.

Even more puzzling is the fact that McCain's primary campaign platform is campaign finance reform. With Gore, President Clinton and McCain trumpeting finance reform, it seems that the only people calling for new campaign finance laws are the people that have had trouble obeying the laws that already exist.

With a number of campaign finance scandals under his belt, including the Keating Five and the recent revelation that he has used his chairmanship of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to assist some of his campaign contributors, McCain still claims that present campaign finance laws "taint all of us, including myself." He refuses, however, to stop accepting soft money contributions, even though he castigates soft money contributors, who he calls "special interests," in virtually every speech.

After his strong showing in New Hampshire, I have no doubt that McCain will be around for a while, but do not fool yourself into thinking that his victory in the Granite State has anything to do with the prevailing sentiment within the party. According to exit polls in New Hampshire, 49 percent of those voting in the Republican Primary defined themselves as either moderate or liberal.

This is a staggering statistic, when you consider that the Republican Primary drew almost twice as many voters as the Democratic Primary (a role reversal from the 1996 New Hampshire Primary). When you consider that the New Hampshire population tends to be more liberal than the general population and that the New Hampshire Primary allows those that define themselves as independent, rather than Republican or Democrat, to vote in whichever primary they choose, it is obvious that it was New Hampshire's liberal and independent population that elected McCain, not Republicans.

I will concede that an "anointment" is occurring here, but it has nothing to do with Bush. McCain has been "anointed" by New Hampshire liberals and the Democratic media into a position of power in a conservative party.