New media meme: candidate flip-flops no longer matter

In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign decided early on in the race exactly how they’d define John Kerry: “flip-flopper.” The charge was quickly parroted by the media, and reinforced the Republican campaign’s narrative: in the first post-9/11 election, in a time of war, we don’t want someone who’s inconsistent.

Four years later, it’s the Republican who has reversed course on literally dozens of issues. And now, the media has decided that the dreaded flip-flops really don’t matter after all.

Time’s Michael Scherer sounds bored with all the talk about policy reversals.

[T]he legacy of Bush/Cheney ’04 remains, and Democrats have apparently learned their lesson. The core message of the Obama/DNC campaign is that McCain has flip-flopped on all his old maverick image. The key message of the McCain/RNC campaign is that Obama is an opportunist who will flip-flop when it helps him politically. And so it goes. Every day, flip-flop charges bang up against the political press like moths on a screen door. And we let some of them in, sometimes with the unexamined conceit that any shift in position is a window into the candidate’s lack of character, toughness or principle.

Andrew Sullivan agrees that flip-flops no longer mean much.

It’s often a completely idiotic way to analyze a candidate. Sometimes a flip-flop is a sign of real maturity in a politician responding to new events or facts. And sometimes, rigid consistency is disastrous.

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus argued today that these policy reversals may actually be a good quality in a candidate, a sign of “welcome pragmatism,” and “evidence of open-mindedness.” Marcus encouraged us to “not flip out too much about flip-flops.”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer came to a similar conclusion a couple of weeks ago, “There’s nothing wrong with people changing their minds. We all do it – all the time.”

What a remarkable coincidence. When Kerry is charged as a flip-flopper, policy reversals become the central focus of the presidential campaign. When McCain is exposed as having reversed course dozens of times, leading media voices announce, “On second thought, all this flip-flop talk is kind of annoying.”



To reiterate an argument I raised a few weeks ago, as the self-designated keeper of the Official List of McCain Flip-Flops, I thought I’d take a moment to respond to this new, more tolerant, media perspective.

In short, there’s nothing substantively wrong with what any of these journalists have argued. I’m very much inclined to agree that there’s nothing offensive about a political figure changing his or her mind. Policy makers come to one conclusion, they gain more information, and then they reach a different conclusion. That is, to be sure, a good thing — it reflects a politician with an open mind and a healthy intellectual curiosity. Better to have a leader who changes his or her mind based on new information than one who stubbornly sticks to outmoded policy positions, regardless of facts or circumstances.

So why do McCain’s flip-flops matter? Because all available evidence suggests his reversals aren’t sincere, they’re cynically calculated for political gain. This isn’t indicative of an open mind; it’s actually indicative of a character flaw. And given the premise of McCain’s presidential campaign, it’s an area in desperate need of media scrutiny.

I won’t bother republishing the full list of 48 that I’ve come up with over the last several months — I just ran it recently, Keith Olbermann promoted it on Monday, and I’ll have an updated version next week — but go ahead and look it over, keeping an eye on the ideological trend. Some of the reversals are because McCain is embarrassed by what he used to believe — he argued, for example, that the war in Iraq would be easy, which looks ridiculous now, and which leads him to argue that he knew all along that the war was “probably going to be long and hard and tough.”

Most of the flip-flops, though, show McCain dropping his centrist/moderate credentials in order to be more in line with today’s Republican mainstream. Tax cuts, foreign policy, immigration, abortion, the religious right, the environment, detainee policy, campaign finance reform. In every instance, McCain was a “maverick,” willing to break with his party. Now, he isn’t. The perception people have of McCain is outdated, reflective of a man who no longer has any use for his previous persona.

What’s wrong with a politician who changes his or her views? Nothing in particular, but when a politician changes his views so much that he has an entirely different worldview, and that new worldview is conveniently necessary to win his party’s presidential nomination, is it unreasonable to wonder whether it’s entirely sincere? Especially when there’s no other apparent explanation for four dozen significant reversals?

What’s wrong with political leaders simply saying they’ve had a change of heart? Nothing, just so long as it’s genuine. Given the circumstances, one would have to be hopelessly naive to think McCain, all of a sudden, out of the blue, just happened to reinvent himself and his policy agenda based on nothing more than a simple “change of heart.”

Are there are worse qualities in a presidential candidate than changing one’s mind about a policy matter? Sure. McCain has been in Congress for decades; he’s bound to shift now and then on various controversies.

But therein lies the point — McCain was consistent on most of these issues, right up until he started running for president, at which point he conveniently abandoned literally dozens of positions he used to hold. The problem isn’t just the incessant flip-flops — though that’s part of it — it’s more about the shameless pandering and hollow convictions behind the incessant flip-flops. That the media still perceives McCain as some kind of “straight talker” who refuses to sway with the political winds makes this all the more glaring.

As Josh Marshall recently put it, “McCain is absolutely gung-ho and certain that he’s right about whatever his position and ‘principles’ are at the given moment. But they change repeatedly.”