Bush tries to help McCain

Washington Post:

President Bush waded directly into the presidential campaign in an interview broadcast yesterday, defending Sen. John McCain as a "true conservative" but warning that his onetime rival needs to shore up relations with the Republican Party's base to take the fight into the general election this fall.

"If John is the nominee, he has got some convincing to do to convince people that he is a solid conservative, and I'll be glad to help him if he is the nominee," Bush said on "Fox News Sunday." "But he is a conservative. Look, he is very strong on national defense. He is tough fiscally. He believes the tax cuts ought to be permanent. He is pro-life. His principles are sound and solid, as far as I'm concerned."

In his first expansive public discussion of the 2008 election, the president also depicted Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as a political mystery whose muddled foreign policy would have the United States attack an ally and coddle an enemy. But Bush came to the defense of his Democratic predecessor, rejecting charges that former president Bill Clinton's campaign comments on behalf of his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), have been racially tinged.

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Bush brushed off their high-profile disagreements over the years on issues such as taxes and interrogation policies, depicting them as natural for any senator. "The question I asked myself, and I hope voters ask, [is] what are the principles by which this person will be making decisions?" As for conservatives who doubt McCain, he said, "If you're seeking, looking for perfection, you'll never find that person. I certainly wasn't a perfect candidate for a lot of folks."

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Bush has a knack for framing the debate in ways that drive Democrats to distraction. He has certainly done that with Obama, who sputtered his typical response about the Iraq war bragging about how he has been wrong about from the beginning. Obama's ignorance of warfare continues to be displayed as an asset in his campaign, but his willing to embrace an enemy while attacking an ally is something that should embarrass Democrats if they were capable of that emotion.