McCain on War, Tobacco, and Ricky Martin

by Christian Hummel

The Dartmouth Review: With the recent defections of Rep. Michael Forbes and your colleague Bob Smith from the Republican party, what do you think defines the GOP in 1999?

John McCain: I believe the issues that define the Republican Party in 1999 should be a strong national defense, a coherent foreign policy, lower taxes, and less regulation. Also, there should be more power and authority invested in states and local authorities. We also need to advocate for reform of the campaign financing system and reform of the IRS.

TDR: You're often considered a maverick because of the political issues you take on—campaign finance reform, tobacco. Why is it that you fight these battles and not your colleagues?

JM: First, I'm not afraid to lose, and second, I have had some successes, such as gaining passage of the line-item veto, even though it was later declared unconstitutional. Yet on two major issues, tobacco and campaign finance reform, I have been a miserable failure. I don't know if I'll ever be able to attack the tobacco issue, but I am convinced that over time, we'll have campaign finance reform.

TDR: Phillip Morris recently retreated from the coordinated campaign it had been waging against you. How do you interpret that?

JM: What happened was the Smoker's Alliance actually launched an ethics claim against me that has been dismissed. Phillip Morris decided that this outfit, which they fund, had gone too far. The other tobacco companies, by the way, did not condemn the effort. People know you by your friends, and they know you by your enemies. I'm proud to have the tobacco companies as my enemies.

TDR: What are the specifics behind your campaign finance reform plan?

JM: It basically bans soft money. It calls for full disclosure of campaign contributions and expenditures. It restricts so-called issue advocacy ads in the last 60 days of a campaign. If the ads mention a candidate's name, in other words, they're an attack ad and they have to be funded by the candidate, who has a thousand dollar contribution limit. My plan tries to eliminate the pernicious effect of soft money from American politics.

You saw the front page of The New York Times on Sunday with the headline, “Democrats to Raise $200 Million in Soft Money to Counter Bush.” Bush's people are going to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in soft money to counter the Democrats. The everybody-does-it syndrome prevails here, and it's a national disgrace.

TDR: During your career, you've run into to your own campaign finance controversy. How do you explain your political survival following the Keating Five Scandal, an event that would have sunk most politicians?

JM: A federal investigation, with Bob Bennett as an Independent Counsel, recommended that John Glenn and I be dropped from the inquiry. Since I was the only Republican, that didn't happen. After three years of investigation, I was judged to have “used poor judgement.” My opinion is that I did worse than that. I think the reason that I probably survived was the way that I handled it. As soon as the story broke, I spent three days going over all the documents and the paperwork. I then had a three-and-a-half hour press conference in Phoenix and went on every talk show in America. I answered any question that anybody had at the time about it honestly. I admitted where I believed I was wrong.

TDR: President Clinton spent a good deal of the 1992 campaign criticizing George Bush's foreign policy. Yet during his two terms in office, Clinton has not displayed a coherent foreign policy of his own. What do you believe should be America's foreign policy priorities right now?

JM: Our challenges in the 20th Century are the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, the rise of ethnic and tribal strife, the rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism, and the emergence of China as a world superpower.

Those are the challenges we face in the next century, and they are not totally independent of each other. We need a coherent, focused concept of what we want the world to look like, where our interests and our values lie, and what the risks are to those interests and values. The greatest disgrace of this administration is the president has conducted a feckless, photo-op foreign policy for which we may have to pay a heavy price in American blood.

TDR: In an op-ed piece you published around Memorial Day, you raised the question of the relation between our goals as Americans and the realities of world policy. How can these two be reconciled in situations like Kosovo and Somalia?

JM: We have to more clearly define where our interests and our values are at risk. We can't go to places like Haiti and Somalia and expect to have a beneficial effect. But we also have to understand where our interests and values are at risk, in places like the Persian Gulf and others. The difference must be far more clearly defined than it has in the past. Sometimes, as in the case of Somalia, intervention means you end up being not only worse off as a country, but the place where you intervened ends up worse off as well if you fail.

TDR: What other significant events do you see on the radar screen coming up in the next two years, events that Americans are going to have to deal with?

JM: It's very hard to predict. If six months ago, we said there wouldn't be a major foreign policy crisis in Kosovo, very few people would have agreed. But I think that it's clear that we are headed toward a very significant debate, perhaps even showdown, with the president about the budget surplus, tax cuts, Medicare, Social Security, and the debt. All of them are interconnected, and I think that may be a very big issue.

Clearly, Medicare and prescription drugs will continue to be major issues as well. But we're in such economic good times that, if you look at the polls, there doesn't seem to be one or two compelling issues out there now. Yes, education is still a high priority.

So is Social Security and Medicare. What you don't see, as you have many times in the past, is one big issue that jumps out at you like unemployment or inflation. A lot of that has to do with the very strong economy that we're enjoying.

TDR: One last question, Senator. You've referred to Leonardo DiCaprio as a...

JM: As an androgynous wimp.

TDR: I'm just curious if you feel that anyone else is an androgynous wimp.

JM: I'm very worried about this guy Ricky Martin.

TDR: Any final comments?

JM: Just one. There are a number of colleges and institutions of higher learning in the State of New Hampshire, Dartmouth being one of the most important.

I intend to spend time on the campus. I intend to enlist the aid and assistance and involvement of Dartmouth students in this crusade to clean up American politics. I believe that college students can be an important element as to whether I win or lose this primary in the State of New Hampshire.