Local writer, Dexter Duggan writes and interesting article in The Wanderer regarding Senator McCain’s record on sanctity of life issues.

PHOENIX — At the piquantly named and politically themed Nixon’s bar and restaurant here, Super Tuesday’s segment of the race to the White House glared from three television screens as John McCain, about a mile away at the Arizona Biltmore resort, prepared to face the cameras.

What to make of this man who sells himself as a profile in courage, but keeps a very low profile and shows little courage on the key pro-life issue?

A low profile on pro-life, that is, except when his campaign advertising tries to woo traditionalist voters.

Perhaps due to his oft-cited Communist POW captivity decades ago, the easy way often doesn’t seem to be McCain’s way.

Having had it hard in Vietnam, Arizona’s senior senator seems to prefer making it as hard on himself as possible to win the conservative base of the Republican Party to smooth his march to the White House.

Why try to build a bond of trust with traditionalists when McCain can wag his finger in their faces and blow steam out his ears?

An icon to the liberal media and currently Arizona’s most famous politician nationally and overseas, McCain apparently couldn’t even win half the GOP vote in his home state on the Mardi Gras day of Super Tuesday, February 5, two days after the Super Bowl in Arizona and the day before Lent began.

Among the top three vote-getters here — with the final vote still being tallied — Mike Huckabee, whom most Arizonans had never even heard of a few months ago, got nearly 41,000 votes while the legendary McCain received only about five times as many, around 214,000 votes.

Mitt Romney came in at about 154,000 votes.

In his blog, Washington Times reporter Stephen Dinan said that Huckabee’s Super Tuesday wins in five Southern states “show there’s a pocket of the country where voters just aren’t sure about the two guys with more name recognition and more money [McCain and Romney], but without the rock-solid pro-life positions they crave.”

Referring to McCain’s lackluster vote result here, Rob Haney, the Republican chairman of Arizona’s Legislative District 11, McCain’s home district, told The Wanderer, “The people that know him best like him least, that’s what it means.”

In contrast, Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, won about 60% of that state’s February 5 vote while McCain placed second by taking about 20%.

Just after Super Tuesday, The Washington Times quoted Haney, a resolute local foe of McCain, that he would stay home rather than vote for either McCain or the Democratic presidential candidate in November.

Perhaps thinking of McCain’s stated position that he acts as he does to stand by his principles, a woman called Phoenix’s KFYI talk radio (550 AM) on February 6 to say her principles require that she not vote for McCain or the Democrats.

Considerable national media coverage says McCain has a perfect pro-life voting record, which is inaccurate.

At its web site, the National Right to Life Committee says its political action committee recognizes that Huckabee takes “the strongest pro-life position on all of the life issues” of any of the presidential candidates still in the race.

NRLC says it “is also grateful for the strong pro-life voting record on abortion” of McCain, and “also appreciates the pro-life position taken in this presidential campaign” by Romney.

But shortly before formally entering the presidential race last year, McCain gave a trademark “maverick” slap to pro-lifers by voting for federal funding for destructive embryonic stem-cell research — funding which President Bush proceeded to veto.

Shane Wikfors, former executive director of Arizona Right to Life, recalled for The Wanderer that he met with a McCain aide a few years ago to discuss how the senator was doing with conservatives and what approach he could take on the embryonic research funding.

Wikfors said he told the aide that McCain could vote against it and give the reason “that he was protecting the taxpayer from spending money on an unproven science.”

Although McCain presents himself as a spending watchdog, he voted for this destructive funding.

McCain’s face is on campaign literature aplenty these days, but he doesn’t show that face at Arizona pro-life events.

Other Arizona Republicans serving in Congress turn up at pro-life gatherings here to extend their greetings and to speak, including one of the GOP’s leaders in the House, John Shadegg, and the Number Two Republican in the Senate, Jon Kyl. Congressmen Trent Franks and Jeff Flake and former Cong. J.D. Hayworth also have dropped by. But McCain is notable by his absence.

“To my knowledge, McCain has never spoken” at an Arizona Right to Life event, Wikfors told The Wanderer. “…McCain has typically avoided the pro-life, pro-family grass-roots folks. The perception is that they make him very uncomfortable. He has not attended any [Republican] Party events in the last few years, and every time I have seen him there, he usually heads for the nearest exit after his speech.”

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) told national radio host Hugh Hewitt on January 9 that when he worked with McCain in the Senate, no one fought harder than McCain to avoid voting on important social-conservative issues: “He always fought against us to even bring them up, because he was uncomfortable voting for them.”

One may recall that Bill Clinton grew into a full-throated pro-abortionist only when he didn’t have to face the morally traditionalist voters of Arkansas as their governor. What would restrain a President McCain from a similar transformation?

Would McCain actually dare displease his liberal chums by challenging their culture war and nominating pro-life Supreme Court justices? He reportedly will make some sort of pledge to choose conservative justices at a February 7 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., as this issue of The Wanderer goes to press.

However, before he was actively running for president, maverick McCain snubbed the CPAC last year, failing to appear.

Invited To No Avail

McCain’s record is of being passively pro-life. He has never been a stand-up champion of the unborn. Indeed, a headline in the February 3 National Catholic Register captured it nicely: “McCain Sits Down for Life.”

But even sitting down at a local pro-life dinner is more than McCain can bring himself to do.

At the Arizona Right to Life banquet two years ago, the wives of Sen. Jon Kyl and the state’s pro-life GOP congressmen were listed in the program as honorary hostesses of the event. Although McCain did buy an advertising page in the program, wife Cindy McCain was missing from the list of hostesses.

Jennifer Wright, events coordinator at that time for Arizona Right to Life, told The Wanderer that Mrs. McCain was invited along with all the other wives, to no avail.

“We contacted McCain’s office in writing and by phone and received no response,” Wright said.

“We were never told ‘no,’ but our repeated requests went unanswered. If memory serves me correctly, their office was contacted more times than the other offices because the other offices responded and McCain’s did not, so we persisted.”

Eventually, Wright said, a McCain aide contacted her a few days before the dinner to sponsor a table, but he said scheduling precluded McCain and his wife from attending.

She said Cindy McCain also was invited to be an honorary hostess for 2007, but “that request was also unanswered.”

In the “McCain Sits Down for Life” Register article, author Mark Stricherz wrote that McCain conveys the impression of preferring to talk about anything but abortion.

“He doesn’t raise his voice or get animated; he doesn’t boast of being correct on a major issue; and he doesn’t talk about the subject at length or in detail,” Stricherz wrote. “By contrast, McCain talks with passion about ‘keep[ing] this country safe from its enemies’ in the war on terror and ‘restoring the trust of the American people in their government.’ He leaves little doubt that he is committed to ‘our defense of free markets, low taxes, and small government.’

“McCain’s uneasiness with talking about abortion belies the conventional wisdom that he is a straight-talking pro-lifer…

“In truth, John McCain is a weak pro-lifer,” Stricherz wrote. “As recently as 2006, the National Right to Life Committee gave McCain a rating of 75%….

“Whether his passive support for life endures will likely depend on whether pro-lifers allow it to endure,” he wrote.

Written Off

Some nationally known pro-lifers have written off McCain already. Focus on the Family’s patriarch, James Dobson, quickly attracted attention when he told radio talk host Laura Ingraham on February 5 that he may abstain from voting for president this November.

“Should Sen. McCain capture the nomination, as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime,” Dobson said in a statement at the Ingraham web site.

If McCain is the GOP nominee and either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama the Democratic choice, “I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life,” he said.

Other pro-life activists hold out hope of dealing with McCain.

Joe Scheidler, national director of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, told The Wanderer that now that McCain’s campaign has been resurrected, “we may have to adjust to the fact that he’s just a lot better than the alternative. And I say ‘a lot better’ because we would have absolutely no possibility of even discussing the issues with Hillary or Barack, whereas we already have contacts with McCain….

“In any event, our course will be clear if McCain is what we get,” Scheidler said, “and if we were able to work diligently to stop abortion and try to ‘change hearts and minds’ during eight years of Bill Clinton, we can surely continue doing that under even Hillary or Obama. Christ worked under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Great.”

Pro-lifers facing unfavorable presidential possibilities this year may sense the exhilaration of upcoming battle. Ex-naval aviator McCain must know the feeling.

Thanks to The Wanderer for allowing Sonoran Alliance to reprint this article.