Strange green John McCain
June 1, 2004

The EU official who was the keynoter at a Brussels conference I attended last year spoke for the organizers of the conference by listing the major threats to the "global community." They were "global warming, HIV/AIDS and George W. Bush."

Besides a few of us Americans and one Russian, who was delighted to have like-minded capitalistic company, the attendees were almost as upset with our president as Al Gore, Ben & Jerry and the organizers of MoveOn.org. Indeed, if our keynoter happened to be one of the European leaders Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) ran into in a Manhattan restaurant, I have no doubt he endorsed Kerry on the spot in the hope of beating Bush and saving the planet.

Of course, Kerry's name never came up because he hadn't yet backed into his party's presidential nomination, but there were U.S. politicians the attendees seemed to like. They loved Al Gore, of course, for his good sense, if not for his political prowess, and they admired Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), both for his effort to derail Bush in 2000 and for rising above his Republican background and "the narrow interests of his own country" in the fight against global warming.

Like Gore, McCain failed to keep Bush away from the White House, where he threatens the planet, but McCain was with them on global warming and fighting to get his colleagues to join him. He even had his own bill, S. 139, which would force U.S. domestic energy, transportation and manufacturing companies to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to year 2000 levels by 2010. It wasn't Kyoto, but it would, they thought, be a step in the right direction and it certainly made McCain one of the good guys.

Unfortunately, when the bill came to a vote late last year, 10 Democrats joined most of McCain's GOP colleagues to defeat it. But he's vowed to bring it up again for a vote before the Senate adjourns for the 2004 elections, this time as a freestanding amendment to target legislation he has yet to identify.

McCain is admittedly pinning his hopes on pressure that he expects will be generated by the publicity surrounding "The Day After Tomorrow," the just-released disaster movie based on a book by a Whitley Strieber, who has said he was warned of what is going to happen "by aliens." The movie posits a future in which hell freezes over as a direct result of our failure to do what the McCains of the world want.

Most of the commentary examines the "science" on which the movie is allegedly based as if its producers are in the documentary rather than disaster-flick business. Anyone who takes it seriously must still be wondering when the real Godzilla will surface to ravage our coastal cities, and when Fay Wray can come down from the ice-encrusted Empire State Building.

The scary question is: Why is a supposedly serious person like McCain relying on something as absurd as this movie to garner votes for his bill? One can understand Gore's fascination with such foolishness, but bringing up a bill in the hope that the hoopla surrounding a science-fiction disaster film will change the votes of men and women entrusted by voters to sit in the U.S. Senate has to mean he thinks his colleagues don't have the sense to come in out of the rain.

If The Coming Global Superstorm, the book on which the movie is based, passes for public-policy debate these days, we are in real trouble. One can't blame the movie's producers or publicists because they are part of the Hollywood culture and probably do get their inspiration from space aliens. But one ought to wonder what's going through the mind of McCain or anyone who joins him on this one.

Of course, McCain does have a secret weapon. MoveOn.org has promised that thousands of anti-Bush volunteers will be in front of the nation's theaters to ask moviegoers to write and call their senators on behalf of the McCain bill.

If they do and if anyone responds, the nation will pay the tab for legislation that couldn't pass on its merits and the moviegoers who join the bandwagon will get something free -- Ben & Jerry's ice-cream cones.

Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm (www.carmengrouplobbying.com).