Why do so many conservatives have so little use for John McCain? They find his unceasing agitation for more restrictions on campaign finance grating. For partisan Republicans, it's enough that Democrats agree with McCain. For small-government conservatives, the anti-money bias that McCain shares with every newspaper editorialist in the country betrays both a willingness to increase the power of the liberal media (since conservative advocacy groups would be muffled by campaign finance restrictions), and a woeful misunderstanding of Washington (it's only because government is so big and bloated that people must spend so much money, soft and hard, on politics). For constitutionalists, McCain's sin is even worse: Like all those who would restrict political donations, he fails to understand that money is hard to disentangle from speech, and that his pet reform amounts to an assault on the First Amendment.
So George W. Bush is the answer, right? Wrong. To listen to some GOP loyalists, you might think Bush really zinged McCain on campaign finance at the Iowa debate last week. But consider what Bush said: "Here's my worry with [McCain's] plan: It's going to hurt the Republican party, John, and I'm worried for this reason. . . . The Democrat party is really the Democrat party and the labor unions in America. And my worry is that you do nothing about what's called paycheck protection. We do nothing about saying to the labor, you can't take a laboring man's money and spend it the way you see fit.
"There's a lot of laboring people who are Republicans and conservatives. And yet under the vision you've got or -- I guess you've got -- or people in Washington have, it's okay that they just take their money and spend it the way they want to spend it. I don't think it's fair. And I think that's unilateral disarmament.
"I agree with you, we ought not to have corporate soft money and labor soft money. But there better be paycheck protection. Otherwise our Republican Party and our conservative values don't have a shot."
Here's what's striking about Bush's answer: It's pure partisanship (by gum, we gotta stop that "Democrat party"). On every substantive point -- the disagreeability of money in politics, the willingness to throw the First Amendment overboard -- Bush turns out to be a McCain clone. He just seems to think McCain was inept in drafting campaign-finance legislation. No wonder Bush got good press for this exchange: He was the perfect caricature of a money-hungry Republican.