I suspect that Senator John McCain understands the distinction between voluntary and mandatory. He knows how an all-volunteer Army differs from a drafted one. He gets the truth that you may make a charitable gift but you must pay your taxes.
Now there are two camps about what to do about global warming. There is the voluntary-action camp headed by President Bush, Big Oil, and other polluters, and then there is the "we need mandatory caps on how much carbon we spew out" symbolized by Vice President Gore. John McCain had long put himself in the mandatory cap camp. He wrote legislation, the McCain-Lieberman bill, whose crucial sentence says that all major emitters of greenhouse gasses "shall submit to the Administrator one tradeable allowance for every metric ton of greenhouse gases, measured in units of carbon dioxide equivalents, that it emits from stationary sources."
That sounds pretty mandatory to me.
When the bill was defeated on the Senate floor, Lieberman and McCain put out a press release saying that their bill, "would require [italics mine] a reduction in carbon dioxide emission levels to 2000 levels by the year 2010 by capping the overall greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity generation, transportation, industrial, and commercial economic sectors." Just last December, he described it as "a market-based approach that would set reasonable caps [italics mine] on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions, and provide industries with tradeable credits."
When the Orlando Sentinel endorsed McCain, it cited, among other reasons, that "In this primary campaign, Mr. McCain has stuck by politically risky positions in favor of immigration reform and mandatory steps to fight global warming." McCain counted on support from Florida Governor Charles Crist, a powerful advocate of mandatory action, to win that primary, and then teamed with California Governor Schwarzenegger to take the Golden State.
From the voluntarism camp, Mitt Romney made McCain's support of mandatory curbs on greenhouse pollution a centerpiece of his attack on McCain as a closet Democrat.
Or as Ron Paul puts it, "Now our leading candidate -- guess whose position he holds on global warming? Al Gore, he supports the Al Gore bill on global warming."
Just yesterday McCain claimed the leadership mantle on climate change, saying that his opponents, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, "never proposed any legislation....They've never been involved in any discussion or debate on that issue that I know of. I've been in a leadership role. That's dramatically different."
But at the same time that he is reminding voters of his past Senatorial leadership on the issue, McCain is claiming that, well, really, while his proposal is not voluntary like Bush's, it isn't really mandatory either. It's something else.
This began in the Florida debate. Challenged by Rudy Giuliani, McCain claimed he was not for a mandatory cap at all. When Tim Russert persisted, saying "Senator McCain, you are in favor of mandatory caps," McCain responded, "No, I'm in favor of cap-and-trade, all we are saying is, 'Look, if you can reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, you earn a credit. If somebody else is going to increase theirs, you can sell it to them.' And, meanwhile, we have a gradual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions."
Now we learn that this kind of double talk was not a one-shot deal. In the same interview yesterday where he said he was the true global warming leader. McCain again asserted: "It's not quote mandatory caps. It's cap-and-trade, OK. It's not mandatory caps to start with. It's cap-and-trade. That's very different. OK, because that's a gradual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. So please portray it as cap-and-trade."
But how is it different?
I cannot find a middle ground -- emissions caps are either mandatory or they are not. You either must have a permit to emit greenhouse pollution or you can skip the bother and just pollute. Yes, a carbon cap can be flexible -- you can buy your permits from someone else -- but you still have to get a permit, just as you must pay your taxes however you come up with the money. You are either in the Bush/Big Oil voluntarism camp or you are not. What is McCain trying to say?
And what's peculiar is that McCain is feigning confusion about what his bill does at the very moment in the race when the major candidates who tried to sink him with the issue -- Romney, Thompson, Giuliani -- are rallying around his candidacy as loyal also-rans. In naval terms, McCain is running up false colors as he sails into a friendly port -- an electoral bloc of independents and moderate Democrats he wants to win over, and for whom his (former?) leadership on global warming was a major plus.
This isn't just inconsistent -- it's downright erratic. I can't believe he is really confused. Is John McCain losing his vaunted ability to take the heat?