In recent months, John McCain has truly began to ramp up his effort to play the the ultra-right within the Republican Party in order to advance his chances at winning the GOP presidential nod next year. The effort, which may have begun with his embrace of President Bush's reelection campaign after flirting with the notion of supporting John Kerry during the spring and early summer of 2004 or perhaps even earlier, has exposed McCain to many as a profoundly cynical politician and an arch-conservative, to boot. But many Americans still see McCain in the light in which they saw him during the 2000 primaries -- as a maverick and as a moderate.
Take a look at the latest CBS News poll (.pdf). Just 28 percent of registered voters view McCain as a conservative, fewer than the 34 percent who view him as a moderate. A full 15 percent of registered voters see McCain as a liberal, meaning that close to half of all voters believe he is either in the middle of the political spectrum or on the left. If you take out the 23 percent of voters who don't know enough about McCain to state what they believe his ideology is, 44 percent believe him to be a moderate and 19 percent believe him to be a liberal while just 36 percent view him as a conservative.
So suffice it to say that there is still quite a bit to do in the effort to expose John McCain for the reactionary conservative that he is. Luckily, he is taking a number of steps to aid in this effort, including embracing and indeed arguing on behalf of the President's plan to escalate the war, as well as advocating on behalf of abstinence-based sex education and for Roe V. Wade to be overturned -- none of which are particularly moderate or liberal actions. Still, even with these rather overtly conservative actions, and ones that have proceeded them, a lot of voters still see McCain as a conservative. They may have sneaking suspicions about him that they can't put their finger on but which cause them to stop considering his candidacy, but as of yet they still don't view him as a conservative. So when we have the opportunity to write about that Arizona Senator now and in the future, it would not be a bad idea to explicitly state that he is indeed a conservative, and an ardent one at that.
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