Des Moines Register - McCotter: Downgrade a Criticism of Democracy

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By Josh Hafner

When Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. credit rating, they weren't just making a doubtful statement about America's debt, but about democracy in today's world, said GOP presidential candidate Thad McCotter to The Des Moines Register.

"(T)hey criticized our process and used it as a rationale for downgrading the United States," said the Michigan congressman. "Now, we might not have enjoyed the process, but the strength of the United States is that you have people who passionately believe something on either side. They go into a heavy, heated discourse, but eventually a resolution is found. That's called free speech. It's called the political process.

"For Stand & Poor's to use that as a rationale, to me, was telling me that they believe that a government that does not allow that type of free and full and fair debate to get to a broadly bipartisan resolution, is the preferred model of government -- there's communist China."

Ideas on global policy, often regarding China, made up the bulk of McCotter's hour-long discussion with the Register's editorial board.

"I think that the communist China is a strategic threat and rival model of governance for this generation the same way the Soviet Union was and in many ways it's a much more subtle strategic problem," he said.

Parallels between Soviet Russia and China don't weigh heavily in other candidate's stump speeches, and that's part of why McCotter said he's running.

The little-known candidate entered the race, he said, because he sees America at "a transformational time" in which rapid globalization threatens the American government -- and America's way of life -- unless the nation scales back and returns to what he called the United States' founding ideas.

"I have a vision of the future," said McCotter on why he should be president. "We live in a period where there's great, massive change. But the principles remain the same."

McCotter lists his "Five Core Principles" on his website, number one of which says, "Our liberty is from God not the government."

McCotter said self-evident truths have fallen to moral relativism at an important time in which the U.S. is moving toward "an entrepreneurial creative economy that is horizontal. A Federal, vertical, integrated, bureaucratic, centralized welfare state is no longer operative in the 21st century and everybody knows it."

McCotter spoke fluidly about America's place in global history, with his concerns set firmly on the future. He's concerned, he said, with how the nation must adapt and change in response to foreign challenges, including China. That's why McCotter said he rejects Standard & Poor's use of democratic debate as rationale for the downgrade:

"(I)n the entire legacy of the United States I don't want anybody to be able to look at us and point and say, "We told you: Liberty, self-government -- it's anarchy. It doesn't work. They can't even pay their bills.'

"Because that will have consequences internationally, not just economically, but strategically when the communist Chinese come and tell Chavez "You're right… Democracy is done in the 21st century.' "

McCotter also commented on his low name recognition among voters, which he said was due to a "Catch-22" that prevents him from appearing in debates and on polls.

The candidate said he couldn't meet debate criteria because he didn't meet polling standards, and that he didn't meet polling standards because he didn't receive the high media coverage at debates necessary to appear on well-known polls.

"So what happens is the D.C./national media filters you, because if they can't understand the premise of your candidacy, they write you off," he said. "They do not cover you and then you can't make their criteria in the debates because the pollsters don't put you on."

While McCotter won't be able to debate Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, two front running candidates, at the next debate in September, he did share an argument against them with the Register.

"I think if you look at Mr. Perry or Mr. Romney and me, they're 20 years older than me, but there's an interesting dichotomy at work here," McCotter said. "I have something that I can say that they can't: I was a Republican during the Reagan administration. Neither one of them was. My question is why? Why was I at the age of 21 able to join the Republican party as a precinct delegate? And yet there was something about the Reagan agenda that they found to be particularly off-putting, so they didn't bother to join that party that they now seek to be the standard-bearer of."

Perry's communications director, Mark Miner, said McCotter's argument is flawed.

"President Reagan was also a Democrat before he switched parties to become a Republican," said Miner in an e-mail. "Governor Perry was a conservative Democrat before switching parties to become a Republican. He has always been a conservative."

McCotter said Romney and Perry don't touch the issues he talks about ("Maybe they're right not to," he said. "They're certainly doing much better than I am."). But he claimed young Republicans he's spoken to in Iowa and New Hampshire "get it."

"But if I represent the next Republican party," McCotter said, "that doesn't mean the current Republican party's happy about it."

McCotter in his own words

Social issues: "I'm pro-life, no exceptions except (for the) life of the mother, always have been. On marriage, in Michigan I voted to protect traditional marriage, but I believe that absent the Federal judiciary trying to ram it on the rest of the country, it should be determined by the states. Also, on prayer in school, I believe education … is best handled at the local level … It should not be subsumed or usurped by the larger entity, which will be less responsive and less able to get it right.

Medicare: "I support the Ryan House budget where we allow individual patients to receive more control over their own decisions, have more plans put in front of them and competition for their entitlement benefit… So that, to me, is again toward the path of self-government."

Libya: "I supported the no-fly zone, as long as there were no boots on the ground and it we did it in conjunction with our NATO partners, preferably in a support role, because we didn't want another Guernica."

Afghanistan: "You cannot have the neoconservative mindset that we're going to impose a democracy. You can't. What you can do … is work from the family, the community, the individual to start building sustainable democratic institutions. To me, the goal has always been, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to leave in place people who have the reasonably fair opportunity to be able to defend their own freedom when we leave."

Manufacturing: "We have to avoid imposing any more government mandates, especially cap and trade, which is being done to the E.P.A., without, I believe, statutory authority from the congress to do it. You shouldn't make it harder for manufacturing to do its job."

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