John McCain: Dangerous, Extreme, Out Of Touch With America

It seems to me that waaaaaaaaay too little has been said about South Dakota's repudiation of the criminalization of abortion that the South Dakota legislature passed following the appointment of Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court. My guess is that we're hearing so little about this because it doesn't fit in the meme that the Republicans and MSM are so desperate to launch: that Americans are "really" conservative and that, particularly on social issues, the Democrats better not get any liberal ideas. The South Dakota story disproves that theory so it has been swept under the carpet and, instead, we hear about the hate-on-gay measures that did pass (although, interestingly, not everywhere).

It's been true for, oh, almost forever, that the majority of Americans want abortion to be safe and legal -- a decision left to the woman involved. But you sure wouldn't know that to listen to the news. As Jamison Foser points out:

Earlier this year, McCain indicated that if he was governor of South Dakota, he would have signed that state's blanket ban on abortion. On Tuesday, South Dakota voters rejected that ban by a decisive 12-point margin.

Think about that for a moment.

South Dakota is among the most conservative states in the nation. It is one of only 11 states in which President Bush's net approval rating is better than negative 10; in 2004, Bush carried the state by 21 points.

John McCain, the media's poster child for the "sensible center," holds a position on abortion that is far to the right of that held by the people of South Dakota.

So, on what is perhaps the most widely-used ideological litmus test, John McCain is far to the right not just of the country as a whole, but of the electorate of one of the most conservative states in the nation.

How about what is arguably the biggest issue of our time: the Iraq war? McCain is a staunch supporter of the Iraq war, and has suggested sending more American troops to fight it. Polls have consistently shown - and Tuesday's results confirmed - that the American people disapprove of the war, and want to end it. McCain is, in short, far to the right of public opinion on Iraq.

The simple fact the pundits won't tell you is that the national Republican Party has veered far to the right over the past dozen years, and the national Democratic Party is quite centrist. (Whether that's a good thing, or reflective of the positions of the parties' rank-and-file voters is another question.) On issues ranging from tax and budget policy to health care to the minimum wage to abortion to the war in Iraq to the environment, so-called "far left" Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi hold positions that enjoy the support of the American people. Even on issues that Democrats have essentially stopped talking about and acting on, like universal health care and gun safety legislation, their positions are quite moderate.

So when media report that Democrats won by embracing "moderate" or "centrist" positions, that's true - but not in the way that they mean it. Democrats have long embraced centrist positions. The suggestion, however, that they won by running towards the right, or towards the center, rather than by continuing to occupy it, is as wrong as it is widespread. As Media Matters detailed this week, the Democrats who won previously-Republican seats did so largely by taking traditional Democratic positions - which is to say, centrist positions.

But when political journalists and pundits use words like "centrist" and "moderate," they aren't talking about Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin. They are -- quite bizarrely -- talking about people like the far-right John McCain.