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Compassionate CorporatismMcCain vs. Bush on corporate corruption.

By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, July 11, 2002, at 6:56 PM ET

As John McCain begins today's speech to the National Press Club on corporate reform, it's clear to many of us in the audience that we're not going to get a reprise of the speech President Bush gave on Wall Street two days ago. We can see from the text of the speech that McCain's proposals differ from Bush's. But what really sets the two men apart is their body language. Bush looked sad about corruption; McCain looks angry. Bush talked about corporate cheaters as though they were wayward members of his family; McCain talks about them as though they're thugs.

Bush's presentation on Tuesday was lethargic and matter of fact. He conveyed paternal disappointment at the misconduct of some executives but emphasized how few they were. He sought to reassure investors, not to upset them.

McCain's demeanor is the opposite. Unlike Bush, who opened his Tuesday remarks with a smile, McCain maintains a stony face throughout his speech. He delivers his toughest words through clenched teeth. He calls corporate offenders "selfish," "unethical," and "self-serving." He decries "reckless greed," "sweetheart loans," and "crony capitalism." In the Q and A, he warns of "lobbyists crawling all over Capitol Hill" to dilute accounting reform. It's hard to imagine Bush speaking this way about the business community. The difference between Bush's speech and McCain's is the difference between being lectured by the pope and being lectured by an enraged Calvinist minister.

Where Bush looks for conscience and good behavior, McCain looks for a fight. McCain mistrusts niceness. He scorns the impotence of "pleas for character building." He flexes his eyebrows derisively as he recalls the promise of Harvey Pitt, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to make SEC oversight "kinder and gentler." Facing an audience of reporters, the senator chides "business journalists that have grown too comfortable on their beat to look beyond a corporation's annual report." He devours a hostile question and invites the reporter to take another shot at him. In McCain's world, hate is as important as love. "To love the free market," he concludes in the final sentence of his speech, "is to loathe the scandalous behavior of those who have betrayed" it.

The temperamental split between the two men leads to an ideological split. Bush says there's more goodness in the private sector than the public sees; McCain says there's more corruption. Bush blames a few bad apples; McCain blames "pressures" that he calls "systemic." Both men defend the free market, but McCain kicks conservative dogma in the teeth. "The current threat to our prosperity comes not from overregulation," he says, but from "diffident oversight" of corporations.

In turn, the ideological split produces a policy split. Bush ducked the issue of executive stock options; McCain says options "must be reported as an operating expense." Bush proposed to confine government intervention in executive compensation to cases of fraud; McCain says all executives should be forbidden to sell stock in their companies until they depart. Bush said Pitt deserves to stay in his job; McCain says Pitt must go.

Is McCain angry enough to run against Bush? The senator's words suggest not. He praises Bush's speech and vouches for the president's sincerity. But McCain drops a pair of hints that more lurks beneath the surface. When asked about controversial transactions in Bush's own business career, McCain says, "I'm confident the president will give a full explanation of anything that happened." That's an answer worthy of Tom Daschle. And when asked whether the current corporate scandals add up to "a platform for a potential challenge" to Bush by an independent candidate, McCain issues an elaborate reply about the purely legislative nature of his intentions. Not until the senator finishes talking about himself does the reporter point out, ever so gently, that the question wasn't about him.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Part of the BB Fray quickly turned to the question of McCain's political intentions: will he fight Bush from within? Will he switch parties? What would the democrats do in either case? This led The Fray to questions about McCain's past and how it might dog his future. At this point, the "whither McCain" fray merged with the "McCain's as bad as/worse than Bush" (or the democrats, or politicians in general).

Remarks From The Fray:

Saletan gets to the heart of the McCain contradiction. As an independent candidate, McCain is a real threat to both Bush and the Democrats. McCain's popular. He's been around the presidential block. He has a policy agenda and he's strong on honesty and integrity where Bush is weak and getting weaker every day. But McCain still looks like a loser. He's an angry tempermental guy seeking to appeal to a group of middle-class swing voters who don't like political anger. Like Perot, McCain's popularity would melt under the heat of hostile press scrutiny. Maybe McCain has a chance if there's no recovery and corporate scandals continue. Maybe he has a chance if the war on terrorism continues to look like the war on drugs. But most likely he doesn't have a chance at all.

-- Keep a Clear Eye

(To reply, click here.)

Is McCain mad enough to run against Bush? You bet he is. You do not run the sort of underhanded, dirty-politics campaign that the bushies ran against a man with Sen. McCain's sense of personal honor and expect him to forget about it. The bushies lied, twisted arms, bribed and generally pulled out all the ethical stops in destroying McCain. Most importantly, they trashed his good name and honor. In doing so they won the nomination and earned an undying, unresting foe.

Don't let McCain's formal obeisance to Mr Bush fool you. Personally, I would not be surprised to see McCain jump parties just to destroy the man who besmirched his honor. The sad thing is that Mr Bush, as with so much else, doesn't have a clue in the world. He has no idea what his campaign did nor what a foe he has in McCain.

-- balzac

(To reply, click here.)

The Democrats find McCain a useful tool for undermining and/or attacking the incumbent president, and it would not really matter who happened to be in office. If McCain should suddenly be perceived as an obstacle to a democratic presidency, the "kid gloves" will come off very quickly, and McCain will have to defend every detail of his past--whether or not it is relevant to his ambitions. While McCain has been touted as a "centrist" candidate who can unite voters from both parties, I see no evidence that he can unite leaders of either.

-- 1-2 Oscar

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Within the journalistic pack certain notes once sounded are repeated by every member, as if from instinct. One of these is ascription of differences between George Bush and John McCain to differences in "ideology." Let's look at this a little more closely.

Examine two propositions: first, that President Bush is ideologically committed to a policy of loose regulation (or, better, voluntary regulation) of corporate accounting procedures and other business practices. Second, that President Bush built his personal fortune through the sponsorship of businessmen engaged in practices similar to those now receiving so much media attention, is personally friendly with numerous corporate types and grateful to them for financing lavishly his political campaigns, and is reluctant to impose regulation against their wishes for these reasons. Given what we know of George W. Bush, which of these is more credible?…

A somewhat stronger case can be made for John McCain having a distinct ideology about business regulation, but only somewhat. Independently wealthy (through his wife's family), with a safe Senate seat and as former Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee McCain is not personally indebted to the heads of very large corporations as Bush is and is moreover accustomed to hearing big businesses ask him not only for freedom from regulation but for special help from the government. He has scant reason to trust everything some corporate CEO tells him about insider trading, stock price manipulation or accounting gimmickry. He may be led by his ideology to endorse a stronger SEC and suspect more shady corporate practices than have been made public thus far, but it's more likely that he is taking those positions because he knows better than most what is really going on.

Why the emphasis by the press pack on ideology? Because it is important to them, first of all -- ideology really is how they orient themselves on issues like this. The other reason is that it feeds that perennial storyline, The Next Campaign; ideological splits lead to political splits lead to the primaries in 2004, perhaps, or in the addled fantasy of a couple of Democratic writers a few months ago even a McCain party switch. I can't blame the media for this, exactly. Campaigns are legitimate big stories, and given the other choices it's only natural for press types to want McCain in the next one.

But it isn't going to happen. McCain's speech today really was about securities and accounting regulation, not the next campaign.

-- Zathras

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