Some of John McCain’s most visible and engaged advisers have advanced positions that appear to conflict with the Arizona senator’s stances on hot-button topics. McCain’s cacophonous Cabinet

Republican faithful have grumbled in recent weeks about the lack of a consistent message from John McCain’s campaign on key issues, leading observers to wonder what McCain’s top advisers are thinking.

The answer, it turns out, could be part of the problem.


Some of McCain’s most visible and engaged advisers have advanced positions that appear to conflict with the Arizona senator’s stances on hot-button topics ranging from climate change and oil drilling to tax cuts, contraception and education.

Of course, it’s not unusual for politicians to seek advice from a variety of perspectives.

But the ideological mishmash in McCain’s Kitchen Cabinet lends itself to questions about who’s crafting the campaign’s message and highlights the tricky policy record McCain is struggling to navigate on the campaign trail.

McCain has staked out an eclectic and occasionally politically inconvenient hodgepodge of policy positions that has bucked the Republican line on some issues, backed it on others and — on still others — gone from bucking it to backing it. Keeping him on message would be a challenge for the most unified chorus of advisers — and Team McCain is hardly that.

His campaign spokesman, Taylor Griffin, challenged the extent of policy differences between McCain and his staff and informal advisers. But Griffin also said McCain “seeks advisers that provide a broad range of perspectives. The one thing they all agree on is that John McCain has the experience and leadership to put our economy back on track, bring real reform to Washington and keep the American people safe.”

To be fair, McCain’s Democratic rival, Barack Obama, also has dissenters in his inner circle.

Obama opposes plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, yet he signed a top energy adviser who worked to implement Yucca plans. And Obama backs a second stimulus package initially opposed by one of his top economic advisers. But, aside from the embarrassing revelation that another economic adviser told Canadian officials to ignore Obama’s tough talk on trade deals, Obama’s campaign has mostly been able to avoid high-profile policy contradictions between its central staff and its candidate.



That’s a testament to Obama’s messaging, which has been more tightly controlled than McCain’s. But it’s also probably attributable in part to Obama’s aversion during his relatively short career in public service to taking stark stances on controversial issues.

Over his long career, McCain has been out front on a number of controversial issues — and his occasional penchant for heretical stances that diverge from GOP orthodoxy is put in sharper relief through his differences with some of his key advisers.

Take energy and the environment.

McCain was one of the first national Republicans to embrace climate change as a political issue. And his stance still galls some conservatives, including a nonprofit organization headed until February 2006 by Nancy Pfotenhauer, now a senior energy and economic adviser to the McCain campaign.

The small-government group she ran, Americans for Prosperity, decries “global warming alarmism” and opposes emissions cap-and-trade proposals such as those McCain has supported. She also wrote an op-ed in 2002 warning that increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards would result in lighter, less safe cars “that will almost inevitably increase fatalities on our nation’s roads.” She accused politicians seeking to raise CAFE standards — a group that currently includes McCain — of pandering to “environmental special interest groups.”

But in a campaign conference call with bloggers last week, Pfotenhauer defended McCain’s cap-and-trade plan and efforts to reduce carbon emissions. She also reiterated his opposition to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, though last month McCain himself indicated a willingness to reconsider it.

Americans for Prosperity has long supported ANWR drilling and also offshore drilling, which McCain had opposed until a recent conversion brought him into line with the Republican Party position.

McCain also had a change of heart on the Bush tax cuts; he provoked fiscal conservatives’ ire by initially opposing them because he said they inordinately favored the wealthy.

McCain now calls for the tax cuts to be made permanent, but his chief economist, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, gave ammunition for opponents through his repeated questioning of the cuts’ effectiveness while he was director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a post he left in late 2005.

As a member of the McCain campaign, Holtz-Eakin has advocated McCain’s vision for making the cuts permanent. But critics find that advocacy unconvincing, given the comprehensive analyses by the CBO under Holtz-Eakin’s tenure that predicted little gain from the cuts.

The campaign declined to make either Holtz-Eakin or Pfotenhauer available for interviews for this story.

But McCain aides periodically have been forced to explain policy differences in real time.

McCain this month told the NAACP he “will fully fund” the No Child Left Behind Act, which teachers groups contend hasn’t been successful in part because it isn’t adequately funded.

In front of the NAACP, McCain called the 2001 legislation “a good beginning,” though he also asserted it “has to be fixed.”

His pronouncement was consistent with one made two days earlier by Carly Fiorina, a senior campaign adviser, but it seemed to depart from an earlier pronouncement by Lisa Graham Keegan, McCain’s education policy adviser. In June, she told a group of education reporters that McCain believes NCLB is “adequately funded,” an argument she made years before joining the campaign.

Holtz-Eakin tried to clarify McCain’s NAACP comments, telling reporters on a conference call that McCain, in the speech, “committed to ... continuing the funding for No Child Left Behind.”

Another top McCain economic adviser, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), was seen as playing a prominent role in crafting McCain’s first crack at addressing the mortgage crisis, unveiled in a March speech in which he largely rejected aggressive government intervention.

McCain’s campaign later clarified that he would support assistance for “deserving” homeowners. And it eventually parted ways with Gramm after McCain denounced his old friend’s assertions this month that the economic slump “is a mental recession” and that “we have sort of become a nation of whiners.”

Fiorina also has found herself at ideological odds with McCain on key issues.

McCain stumbled when asked about her suggestion this month that insurance companies should cover birth control prescriptions. In recent years, McCain has voted against requiring such coverage. The campaign subsequently clarified that McCain opposes all insurance mandates and contended that Fiorina’s comments were consistent with that stance.

And Fiorina this month suggested that McCain might be open to new taxes on the wealthy, which conflicts with McCain’s own pledges not to consider any new taxes.

This week, though, McCain signaled he might be willing to consider raising payroll taxes for Social Security. Then on Tuesday, he sternly said, “No,” when asked at a Nevada event if he would raise taxes as president.

McCain’s campaign has been sensitive to perceptions of conflicting agendas. It implemented a no-lobbying policy for aides after it was revealed that top advisers Rick Davis and Charlie Black had lobbied for pro-Russian and pro-Chinese interests, respectively. McCain harbors concerns about those interests.

Lisa Lerer contributed to this story.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that Barack Obama opposed corporate tax cuts that one of his advisors supports. Obama has said he is open to lowering corporate taxes.

