His lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is 86%; and McCain says if you took out campaign finance reform and and tobacco laws, he'd be closer to 95%. It's true, on all the "big" conservative issues -- abortion (#1), school prayer, school vouchers, flag burning, guns, gays, Iraq -- McCain votes the "right" way.
And unlike Giuliani and Romney, he's been consistently pro-life. He's almost as enthusiastic about the Iraq war as Bush & Cheney.
So why don't Republicans trust him? Because, at one time, some Democrats and the media fancied McCain as a "maverick" who thought for himself. His foray into campaign finance reform with liberal Democrat Russ Feingold, and his attempt to ban soft money issue advertising, doomed him to dreaded "moderate conservative" status for eternity (or until the Rapture).
His "sins" against conservatism, whether real or imagined, will never be forgiven by the Republican rank-and-file. Too bad. It couldn't have happened to a more ambitious guy....
A one-man crackup
Matthew Continetti
Monday, March 19, 2007 | International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON: Call me crazy, but I wasn't expecting the crowd at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference here to devote its most passionate boos to Senator John McCain of Arizona, a conservative himself and the Republican establishment's choice for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. But boo it did.
The right's ambivalence, even antagonism, toward the McCain candidacy is stunning. And it is responsible for all the talk these days of a looming conservative crisis.
Last week's New York Times/CBS News poll of Republicans seemed to portray a party in disarray. Most Republicans are social conservatives, yet the poll found they embraced Rudolph Giuliani, the pro-choice former mayor of New York, over McCain, who is pro- life. Most Republicans are hawks who support President George W. Bush's new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, but the poll also found that they want a candidate in 2008 who will demonstrate a flexibility in policymaking that this notoriously stubborn White House lacked for the first three and a half years of the war. And almost two-thirds of respondents want more choices for president.
It's McCain's transformation from insurgent to semi-favorite son that has unsettled the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
In past years, the Republicans nominated the man who had patiently waited his "turn": Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996. The man who ought to benefit from the machine this time around is McCain, whose insurgent campaign against George W. Bush came close to winning the nomination eight years ago. And sure enough, large portions of the party establishment have embraced him.
But there's a problem. While McCain and the conservative activists who compose the Republican grassroots share many positions — pro- war, pro-life, against waste in government and for low taxes — a significant portion of those grassroots just doesn't like him.
For some, the animosity is issue- based. Conservatives recall that during the 2000 primary campaign, McCain adopted some of the left's pet issues and flirted with the idea of a party switch. Others have become First Amendment absolutists with respect to campaign finance reform legislation, which McCain champions. Many refuse to accept the scientific consensus on global climate change and recoil at McCain's attempts to find a free-market solution to the problem. Others cannot forgive the senator for his votes against the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.
Another reason for the animosity is personal. Ideologues have long memories. There are Republicans who haven't forgiven McCain for labeling the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance" back in 2000. There are others who bought into the story that McCain's temperament made him unfit for America's highest office.
More important than ideology or personality is culture. For years conservatives have cast a suspicious eye on McCain because non-conservatives find him appealing. They distrust the institutions of liberal culture — the news media in particular — to such a degree that a politician those institutions embrace must be suspect. They grow furious when they hear McCain on Don Imus' radio show but not Rush Limbaugh's. The politics of polarization militate against a McCain candidacy. The man transcends the partisan divide — but what partisans want above all is a fellow partisan.
So the Republican Party is left at an impasse. The unsettling effect the McCain candidacy has had on the party is one reason so many Republicans are chomping at the bit to enter the presidential race. It's come to the point where two of the handful of Republican senators who supported McCain in 2000 — Chuck Hagel and Fred Thompson — are positioning themselves for a late entry into the campaign.
Call it poetic justice, tragedy or farce: McCain's quest to become the establishment candidate has jeopardized his candidacy and exposed deep fissures within the conservative movement. A true reckoning will be had only if McCain revives the authentic, conservative, reform-oriented insurgent spirit that motivated his 2000 candidacy. Let McCain be McCain, as the saying goes. Then the fissures will be healed, for better (from McCain's point of view) or worse.
The 1988 Democrats had seven dwarfs. The 2008 Republicans may have as many as 10 — possibly more. That's a sign of weakness and confusion. And until the McCain campaign corrects course, it will have only itself to blame.
Matthew Continetti is the associate editor of The Weekly Standard and the author of "The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine."
No comments:
Post a Comment