Living Politics: Mccain Remains Bush's Top Nemesis

As if re-explaining his silver-spoon-fed business career wasn't hard enough, George W. Bush has another burden to carry through this nervous breakdown of the American economy: John McCain. Two years after Bush dispatched him to the dust of Arizona in the Republican primaries, McCain remains Bush's most dedicated-and effective-foe.

Actually, McCain usually is trying to push the president in a politically beneficial direction, toward an agenda with street-level appeal to those outside the conservative, Christian base of the GOP. But the president and his advisers, who view McCain as a vindictive pest, don't see it that way. They'd rather he sit down and shut up. They can forget it.

Take the current Wall Street mess. Bush gave an earnest speech in Manhattan the other day. It contained a fair number of reasonable, and tough, proposals for reform, including doubling criminal penalties, lots of new money for SEC enforcement, and a new Justice Department task force to attack "bad apples" in the barrel of Big Business. The president didn't go far enough for the Democrats, of course. But they are easy to dismiss as donation-grubbing insiders eager for a way to cover their rears and find an issue for the fall.

OUTDOING THE DEMOCRATS

For Bush, McCain is the more troublesome foe-a fellow Republican with reform proposals that, in some instances, exceed in severity even what most Democrats are advocating. And wherever Bush looks, there is McCain: undercutting in advance Bush's speech with a stinging op-ed piece in The New York Times; appearing on "Imus in the Morning" the day after the speech to (in respectful tones) comment on its deficiencies; rewriting his own speech to the National Press Club to upstage and (in respectful tones) disagree with the president; agreeing to appear on "Meet the Press" this Sunday to do the same.

Exquisitely positioned at the intersecting fault lines of American politics, McCain is arguably more influential than ever-and certainly as annoying as ever to the man who beat him in 2000. Inside the GOP, McCainanite candidates are winning primaries, often over those backed by Bush and Karl Rove. In the (barely) Democrat-controlled Senate, McCain is the cosponsor of choice-the one Republican you most want to have on your side. Perhaps most important, the maverick but media-savvy McCain can operate either as a Washington Insider or an I-Loathe-the-System Outsider, appealing to millions of disaffected independent voters who see the Beltway and both major parties as hopelessly corrupt.