McCain faces choice after victory

Now
that Sen. John McCain has won
Arizona’s Republican primary, the question is whether the senator will
move
back toward the political center.

McCain
shifted positions on a range
of issues, including campaign finance reform and immigration, in taking
on
former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) in a Senate primary. The strategy
worked,
as McCain on Tuesday won a resounding victory.

{mosads}The
senator, who is expected to
easily win a fifth term in November, no longer needs to appeal to
conservative
primary voters.

Given
the political environment, few
believe McCain will revert immediately back to the political center.

“Not
for now,” said Ross Baker, a
political scientist at Rutgers University.

But
many political observers think
the man once known as the “maverick” for his habit of taking on his own
party
will eventually move toward the middle.

“McCain
will probably take a couple
of baby steps center on a couple of carefully chosen issues,” said
Jennifer
Duffy, senior analyst at The Cook Political Report.

McCain
emerged as President Obama’s
critic in chief after his defeat in the 2008 presidential contest,
surprising
those who thought he might reach out to the new president.

In
a scathing speech on the Senate
floor in March of 2009, McCain blasted Obama on government spending.

Mocking
the White House for failing
to speak out against earmarks such as a $1.7 million fund for pig odor
research
in Iowa, McCain said: “So much for the promise of change, Mr. President.
So
much for the promise of change.”

The
shifts in position and hearty
criticism of the president came as a surprise to some political
observers who
had watched McCain lock horns with his own party throughout his career.

While
supporters maintain McCain
simply did what he had to do to win in a year when incumbents are more
endangered than they have been in decades, the 73-year-old senator
attracted a
lot of criticism for his effort to appease the Republican base in
Arizona.

During
an interview on MSNBC’s
“Morning Joe” program on Tuesday, The New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman said
McCain was on the “Say-Anything-to-Get-Elected-Express.”

McCain
bristled visibly during the
primary campaign, as reporters peppered him about his apparent change of
positions on immigration reform and climate change.

McCain
has repeatedly said he has
not changed his positions, attributing that notion to “the Eastern
press.” A McCain spokeswoman, Brooke
Buchanan, did not respond to a comment for this article.

McCain
never underestimated
Hayworth, moving quickly to define him and attacking his record in
Congress. If
McCain hadn’t moved right, his supporters say, he would have risked
an
embarrassing end to his political career less than two years after his
loss to
Obama.

Some
political analysts like Baker
predict McCain will move back toward the middle.

“He’ll
move slowly. But I do believe
he’ll move,” said Baker. “This is a creature of habit. This is a man who
knows
and understands the conservative movement in America. But he also knows
it can
go too far … He’ll move slowly back to the middle.”

Others
are counting on another shift
by McCain.

Lynn
Tramonte, the deputy director
of America’s Voice — a group dedicated to passing comprehensive
immigration
reform, said, “We need him to come back to where he is.”

She
added: “We know he did an abrupt
right turn, and we know why. But this project is too important. America
needs
immigration reform. And we need it sooner rather than later.”

McCain
helped lead the fight for
immigration reform in 2006 and 2007, but both years it fell short in the
Senate. In 2009 and 2010, he has spoken out more forcefully on border-security
measures.

Soon
after McCain lost to Obama in
2008, there was concern among conservatives that the president and the
senator
would form an alliance.

At
the time, former Sen. Rick
Santorum (R-Pa.) penned an op-ed saying McCain could be Obama’s
“ace-in-the-hole.”

Santorum
wrote, “This unlikely ace
can deliver not only the GOP moderates needed to break a filibuster, but
also
the stamp of bipartisanship: the 2008 GOP standard bearer, John McCain.”

That
didn’t happen, but the question
for Santorum and other conservatives now is whether McCain might try to
take on
that role in the next Congress.