The New Republic

John McCain was mad. Fuming mad. It was then the early days of his
political career, and he had paid an unscheduled visit to a Planned
Parenthood clinic in Mesa, which was within his Arizona
congressional district. That's when Gloria Feldt, then the CEO of
the group's local chapter, got a phone call. "Congressman McCain is
here," a staffer told her, "and he is screaming and it is upsetting
the patients."Feldt says McCain had always refused her offers to visit a clinic,
but had apparently decided to make a spot visit of his own. What
had raised his ire was a shelf containing information about Title X
federal funding, which some clinics receive to support
non-abortion-related reproductive health care for low-income women.
McCain was upset that the clinic provided paper for people to write
their representatives in support of the legislation, which requires
constant advocacy because Congress must reauthorize it every year.
"His immediate and incorrect assumption," says Feldt, "was that we
were using federal funds to pay for lobbying." Feldt got on the
phone. "He was screaming, 'I am going to defund her, I am going to
get the federal government to defund you.' ... [H]e rants and he
raves and finally he hangs up on me."

Most voters would not recognize that passionate crusader as John
McCain. Which is hardly surprising. McCain has spent years
manipulating the public's perception of his stance on abortion and
reproductive health. He's been against overturning Roe v. Wade and
he's been for it; he's embraced the idea of a pro- choice running
mate and, more recently, recoiled from it. It's no wonder the
public is confused.

The right has been twisted in knots for years over whether McCain
respects "life" enough to earn its support. And, among Democrats
and pro-choicers, the confusion is even greater. Poll after poll
shows them unclear on McCain's positions. Planned Parenthood's
president Cecile Richards says that, even after McCain secured the
Republican nomination this year, long-time Planned Parenthood
supporters she met with didn't know the candidate's position on Roe
v. Wade. McCain's maverick reputation and his calculated political
meanderings on choice add up to one thing: The public thinks McCain
just might be a moderate on abortion.

The fact that he's not could matter a great deal in the election.
According to one poll, about half of all women voters backing
McCain said they were pro- choice, including 36 percent who say
they strongly support Roe. More importantly, these women voters
think that McCain might agree with them on abortion. The same
research found that "more than seven in ten pro-choice McCain
supporters ... have yet to learn that McCain's position on abortion
is directly at odds with their own." And the issue is not that they
don't care. One June poll found that, when Democratic women voters
in twelve battleground states learned McCain's position on
abortion, Obama gained twelve points among them.

McCain's views may matter especially to Hillary Clinton supporters,
many of whom are pro-choice; according to syndicated columnist
Froma Harrop, "[T]hey'll want to know this: Would McCain stock the
Supreme Court with foes of Roe v. Wade?" But, she writes, "The
answer is unclear but probably 'no.' While McCain has positioned
himself as 'pro-life' during this campaign, his statements over the
years show considerable latitude on the issue."

That, however, is simply not true. There is no "latitude" in
McCain's position on abortion. Interviews with dozens of people who
have dealt with him on the issue--pro-choice and pro-life
activists, Hill staffers, McCain confidants, pollsters, and
staffers--along with a two-and-a-half-decade-long perfectly
anti-abortion voting record, make that clear. And his record on
related issues, like contraception, is no better. "I think it is
outrageous that people give him a pass, as they gave George W. Bush
a pass," reflects Feldt. "John McCain will be that and worse."

The confounding problem with Mr. Straight Talk is that his public
statements on abortion have been anything but straight. This
meandering began most seriously in 1999, as McCain made his first
bid for the presidency. On the eve of that campaign he told the San
Francisco Chronicle that he'd "love to see a point where [Roe] is
irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer
necessary. ... But certainly in the short term, or even the long
term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then
force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and
dangerous operations." That same year, he suggested that
Republicans revert to the language of the party's 1980 platform,
which affirmed GOP support of a constitutional amendment to defend
the unborn, but also "recognize[d] differing views on this question
among Americans in general--and in our own Party." McCain said, "I
believe we are an inclusive party, and we can be so without
changing our principles." He also told reporters that if his
then-15-year-old daughter got pregnant, they would make "a private
decision that we would share within our family and not with anyone
else"--a response that to some ears sounded a lot like code for the
right to privacy and abortion. McCain even said he would consider a
pro-choice running mate.

It was ideologically moderate but politically dangerous positions
like these that earned McCain his reputation as a "maverick"--and
that got him creamed by the GOP's right-wing base. The National
Right to Life Committee helped destroy him in the all-important
South Carolina primary, running ads that said, "If you want a
strongly pro-life president ... don't support John McCain."

So, this time around, McCain has swerved sharply to the right. The
campaign website of the same man who, eight years ago, said Roe
shouldn't be overturned now says, "John McCain believes Roe v. Wade
is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he
will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in
the business of legislating from the bench." He sent heartfelt
words to the National Right to Life Committee's annual convention:
"I am pro- life," he told them, "because I know what it is like to
live without human rights, where human life is accorded no inherent
value. And I know that I have a personal obligation to advocate
human rights wherever they are denied ... when we fail to respect
the inherent dignity of all human life, born or unborn. " McCain's
advisers have said that he will not fight to soften the Republican
platform on abortion, and McCain himself has said that it would be
"difficult" to choose a pro-choice running mate.

To many voters, the McCain of 2000 is the true McCain, with his
latest statements constituting an understandable, if undignified,
pander to the GOP's right-wing base. They simply cannot believe
that the maverick who defied the party's hard-core social
conservatives on embryonic stem cell research and campaign finance
reform would toe the conservative line on abortion. But, in truth,
it was his 2000 position on abortion that was the outlier--a
short-lived attempt to court the center after George W. Bush had
locked up the religious right's support. McCain is not, and never
was, a moderate.

During his political career, McCain has participated in 130
reproductive health-related votes on Capitol Hill; of these, he
voted with the anti-abortion camp in 125. McCain has consistently
backed rights for the unborn, voting to cover fetuses under the
State Children's Health Insurance Program and supporting the Unborn
Victims of Violence Act, which allowed a "child in utero" to be
recognized as a legal victim of a crime. He has voted in favor of
the global gag rule, which prevents U.S. funds from going to
international family- planning clinics that use their own money to
perform abortions, offer information about abortion, or take a
pro-choice stand. And he has voted to appoint half a dozen
anti-abortion judges to the federal bench, as well as Samuel Alito,
John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork to the Supreme
Court. During the Bork hearings, McCain attacked the Court's
creation of a right to privacy in Roe v. Wade: "Whether one is pro-
or anti-abortion," McCain said in an October 1987 hearing, "it is
difficult to argue that the Court's opinion is not constitutionally
suspect."

Some of these votes were, politically speaking, no-brainers for
anyone vaguely in the pro-life camp. But McCain also joined efforts
supported only by the radical wing of his party. He voted, for
instance, with only one-fifth of the Senate to remove
family-planning grants from a 1988 spending bill and with only 18
senators that same year against allowing Medicaid to pay for
abortions in cases of rape or incest.

In 1994, the year after abortion provider David Gunn was killed
outside a Florida clinic, McCain voted with 29 members of the
Senate against establishing penalties for violent or threatening
interference outside abortion clinics. Many solidly pro-life
Republicans--Mitch McConnell, Kit Bond, John Danforth-- voted in
favor of the bill, called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances
Act (face). "We tried to get as many co-sponsors as we could, and we
postured the thing as anti-vigilante violence," recalls Judy
Appelbaum, a Washington lawyer who was counsel to Senator Edward
Kennedy at the time and the lead Hill staffer on the bill. "We
argued that, even if you oppose abortion, you should not condone
these actions." According to Appelbaum, law enforcement officials,
newspaper editorialists, health care providers, and law-and-order
politicians all supported the bill. "There were a number of very
anti-choice senators who voted for face," she says, "and [McCain]
wasn't one of them." Instead, McCain joined senators like Orrin
Hatch and Jesse Helms in opposition.

Conservative writer Charlotte Allen summarized McCain's
congressional career well last year in The Weekly Standard, noting,
"[He] has never failed to cast his vote in favor of whatever
abortion restrictions are arguably permitted under Roe v. Wade:
bans against partial-birth abortion, abortions on military bases,
transporting minors across state lines to obtain abortions behind
their parents' backs, and government funding for abortion both in
the United States and abroad. ... In addition, McCain has voted to
confirm every 'strict constructionist' judge ... appointed by the
various Republican presidents who have served during his tenure."
And, she added, "Planned Parenthood and naral Pro-Choice America
... consistently award him ratings of absolute zero on their
scorecards."

The record, however, doesn't seem to be enough to convince the
electorate that McCain's votes honestly represent his beliefs. But,
as I learned on a recent trip to Arizona, people who have known
McCain for years confirm that when it comes to abortion, he's a
true, if quiet, believer.

My first stop in Phoenix was the office of Grant Woods, who served
as McCain's chief of staff during his first term in the House,
helped with his campaigns throughout the 1980s, and is now a member
of his Arizona Leadership Team. "I am very familiar with his
position [on abortion]," reflected Woods, a cowboy-style lawyer,
slow-talking and casual, who said that he embraces the true
conservative position--that a woman should make her own decision
rather than having the government make it for her. "It was one on
which I disagreed with him from the beginning." Like many voters
today, Woods said he "wondered about the depth of [McCain's]
commitment to that position initially because I had the impression
that it wasn't something that he'd given a lot of thought to. "
But, over the years, he continued, "I was completely convinced that
this was a very sincere position that he had thought through and
arrived at." Woods recalled a number of conversations with McCain,
including one "up in the mountains late at night," in which the
lawyer suggested that reasonable minds could differ. "When we
really explored it, it really came down [for] him to a
sanctity-of-life question. ... He did get very emotional one time we
talked about it. He truly believed."

The next day, I headed down to Tucson and spent most of the day in
the gracious, pink adobe-style Arizona Inn. In the antique-filled
sitting room, Dennis DeConcini, who served eight years in the
Senate with McCain and got caught, with McCain, in the Keating Five
scandal, was holding court, dishing his dislike for his fellow
senator to this reporter and, he said, to others who were coming
later in the day. He talked about McCain's furious temper, his lack
of friends in the Senate, and his unwillingness to go to bat for
Arizona. He said that, knowing the candidate as well as he does, "I
don't think he would be a good president." But, if there's anything
remotely positive that the anti- abortion DeConcini would say about
McCain, it's this: "I think he's pro-life because he just can't be
anything else. I think he's there."

And so it went through McCain's Arizona associates. Freddy
Hershberger, who ran Barry Goldwater's Tucson office and herself
served in the state legislature as a pro-choice Republican in the
'90s, told me that, when she once said something which suggested
that McCain shared her views on abortion, "He immediately said that
nothing could be further from the truth. ... He all but smacked me
down." Deb Gullett, who was McCain's chief of staff in the early
'90s and was his top aide during the 2000 presidential campaign, is
strongly pro-choice and a force for moderate Republicanism in
Arizona. She believes McCain has a "fundamental pro-life position"
and said that she never pushed him on the issue. "What would be the
point of belaboring the discussion?"

Carolyn Gerster, an elderly but still practicing doctor who helped
found Arizona Right to Life and the National Right to Life
Committee, recalled meeting with McCain when he was first in the
House. The meeting was supposed to last 30 minutes, but the pair
spoke for two hours. She says McCain has always been available when
she's asked for his time and cites his support for embryonic stem
cell research and campaign finance reform as the only times he's
disturbed his pro-life record. Another prominent anti-abortion
activist, John Jakubczyk, gave me a copy of a 1982 Arizona Right to
Life dinner program in which McCain placed an ad and showed me a
folder thick with letters from McCain; he explained that the
Arizona pro-life community endorsed McCain, during his first run
for office, over other anti-abortion candidates because it thought
he was most likely to win, because it trusted his pro-life views,
and because it believed he would be effective in pursuing its
agenda.

Despite all this evidence, McCain's anti-abortion fervor hasn't
registered with the public--in no small part because, in addition
to his waffling on choice in the 2000 campaign, he hardly sounds
like a true believer on other reproductive-health-related issues.
When pressed to speak about them, he often evinces stunning
ignorance, a fact that helps reassure the moderate middle that he
could not possibly be as conservative as his record suggests. In
early July, for example, a reporter raised the issue of whether it
was "unfair" that insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth
control. His response was painful to watch: "I certainly do not
want to discuss that issue," he said immediately. She then asked
about his votes against legislation requiring insurance plans to
cover prescription birth control, legislation the anti-
contraception right strongly opposed. He rubbed his mouth, rolled
his eyes, flexed his fingers, crossed his arms, and more, before
admitting, "I don't know enough about it to give you an informed
answer." Finally, he told the reporter that he did not recall how
he voted. "It's something that I had not thought much about," he
added.

At another press conference, when a journalist asked him whether he
thought contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV, he paused--for
much too long--then answered, "You've stumped me." The reporter
asked whether U.S. taxpayer money should fund contraception to
prevent aids in Africa. "I'm not very wise on it," McCain said.
What about grants for sex education? A long pause, then, "Ahhh. I
think I support the president's policy." And, when the reporter
pressed again, he finally said (after a reported twelve-second
pause), "I've never gotten into these issues before"--an odd
statement, given that he has voted on legislation related to all of
them.

Clearly, these were not the responses of a devoted social
conservative. What's more, on a few notable occasions, McCain has
outright defied the right wing. The most prominent of these was his
ongoing support, throughout the '90s, of embryonic stem cell
research, on which he believed Congress had to "act affirmatively
to support research to save lives." People who know him say that
his support was a response to watching his friend and mentor
Representative Morris Udall suffer from Parkinson's and that he
believed his position was entirely consistent with his pro-life
view. His leadership on campaign finance reform also infuriated
social conservatives, who feared they would lose lobbying power,
though that clearly wasn't McCain's intention.

But the public should not be distracted by these deviations from
right-wing orthodoxy. McCain may or may not truly understand the
broader definition of "pro-life," which these days also includes
opposition to traditional and emergency contraception,
family-planning, euthanasia, and related federal funding both here
and abroad. (Playing the bumbling fool and satisfying no one is
certainly an easier escape than trying to satisfy all.) But, as on
abortion, both data and anecdote show there is little latitude in
his positions. He has voted to end the Title X family-planning
program, which pays for everything from birth control to breast
cancer screenings and which is a target for the right because the
recipients of these dollars also tend to be clinics that offer
contraception to unwed and underage women and that offer abortions.
He has backed largely discredited abstinence-only education, voting
in 1996 to take $75 million from the Maternal and Child Health
Block Grant to establish such a program; ten years later, he voted
against teen-pregnancyprevention programs. He has supported
parental notification laws governing not only abortion but
contraception for teens, and, though he didn't want to talk to the
press about it, he's voted against requiring insurance companies to
cover birth control. In international family affairs, McCain has
voted not only in favor of the global gag rule, but also to defund
the United Nations group that provides family-planning services
(not abortions) for poor women, and to spend a third of overseas
HIV/aids prevention funds on abstinence education.

Moreover, say advocates, he is not open to dialogue. "Whether it's
abortion care, birth control, or comprehensive sex education,
McCain is not moderate or a maverick," says Donna Crane, policy
director of naral Pro-Choice America and a key lobbyist on these
questions. "We never ask--and we never hear pro-choice Republicans
question--whether McCain will be with us on a vote. He's always on
the wrong side."

Gloria Feldt says that, during her time in Arizona and later as
president of the national Planned Parenthood Federation of America,
her staff never tried to talk to McCain about abortion, but they
did approach him about family-planning. He always refused to meet
with them; he even refused to meet prominent Republicans on the
Planned Parenthood board. "When I went to his D.C. office, I would
be put into his waiting room forever and ever and ever, and
eventually a staff person would come out and put me off, and
finally I just gave up," Feldt recalls.

Sharlene Bozack was public affairs director for Planned Parenthood
of Central and Northern Arizona between 1989 and 1995. One day, she
came to D.C. for ppfa's annual day of lobbying and encountered
McCain on the Hill. "I relive it every time I see the man on TV,"
she told me over the phone from Phoenix. She and Feldt had run into
McCain, introduced themselves, and asked if they could speak with
him. He agreed, and they got on the train that runs between Capitol
buildings. Bozack was talking to him about international
contraception access. Suddenly, she recalls, he was no longer calm,
cool, and collected. "He turned toward me and put his index finger
out and started pounding me in the chest saying, 'You know my
position on this,' and 'How dare you ask me about this,' and 'You
are just trying to intimidate me.'"

So as not to alienate the Clinton middle--and perhaps in order to
keep his foot out of his mouth-- McCain has not voluntarily spoken
on the campaign trail about many issues dear to social
conservatives. (The McCain campaign did not respond to repeated
requests for comment for this story.) Instead, he has used one
issue--judicial nominations--as his proxy. In a May campaign speech
at Wake Forest University, McCain slammed "judicial activism"--a
common barb among social conservatives--and promised to restore
"humility" to the federal courts and to nominate Supreme Court
justices in the mold of Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

McCain also created a 48-person Justice Advisory Committee that
would, in theory, help a President McCain select nominees to the
federal and Supreme courts. That committee features a host of legal
minds from the Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 administrations. Its
headline names include senators Sam Brownback, Jon Kyl, and Trent
Lott, all of whom have thoroughly pro-life pedigrees. Other members
include William Barr, who wrote a Department of Justice opinion in
1992 opposing the Freedom of Choice Act on both anti-abortion and
federalist grounds; Charles Cooper, who under Reagan headed the
Office of Legal Counsel, where he helped draft regulations that
would prevent family-planning clinics that take federal funds from
providing abortion counseling; Charles Fried, solicitor general
under Reagan, who helped write a lengthy administration brief in
Thornburgh v. acog that made the case for overturning Roe on
anti-abortion and states-rights grounds; and Thomas Merrill, who
was U.S. deputy solicitor general and co-author of the Reagan
administration's amicus brief in Webster v. Reproductive Health
Services asking the Court to overturn Roe. No member of the
committee who has been active on reproductive health issues
represents a pro- choice or even a moderately pro-life position.

It is clear that McCain is taking no chances with the right this
time around. The question is whether pro-choice voters are going to
take a chance on McCain. "No matter where he might have been," says
Planned Parenthood's Richards, "it's pretty clear where he is now."
And what is pretty clear now is not half as clear as it would
become were he elected president.

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