The McCain imperative
L. Brent Bozell argues in the Washington Post that John McCain should not count on “real conservatives” voting for him. I don’t know the extent to which conservatives will work and vote for McCain in November, but Bozell inadvertently proves that conservatives should support the Senator lavishly and, within reason, unconditionally.
Much of Bozell’s piece consists of a skewed, self-serving political history of the post-Reagan years, about which more in a moment. Having shown to his satisfaction that conservatives have regularly supported “moderate” Republican nominees only to experience betrayal, Bozell provides his list of things conservatives should call on McCain commit to do. A review of these agenda items should be more than sufficient to persuade conservatives to support McCain without reservation.
For example, Bozell wants McCain to present a strategy to defeat the threat of radical Islam. There would be no harm in drafting a white paper on the subject, but McCain’s commitment to defeating radical Islam is beyond question. He’s the one, remember, who went against the grain to present and insist upon on a strategy for defeating radical Islamists in Iraq. McCain’s unwillingness to accept defeat at the hands of al Qaeda, and his leadership in pushing for a strategy to avoid such defeat, tells us more about his readiness to deal with the threat of Islamofascism than any strategy paper could. No hard-line conservative could reasonably conclude that McCain is not vastly better than Obama and Clinton on this absolutely vital issue.
Bozell also wants McCain to call on the U.S. to rebuild its military infrastructure. I assume that McCain will address this issue during his campaign. In any case, McCain has been committed for decades to increasing the strength of the military. For like-minded conservatives, this issue overwhelmingly favors McCain.
Bozell says “the federal government is out of control” and calls on McCain to commit to a series of measures to slash “the federal leviathan.” McCain has long been a champion of federalism and an enemy of out-of-control spending. Obama and Clinton are big spending liberals who have no time for federalism.
It’s true that conservatives probably cannot count on McCain to eliminate federal agencies or to become a champion of wide-scale economic deregulation. Yet it would be a shocking abdication of small government principles for conservatives to use this as a basis for indifference about electing Obama or Clinton. Democratic control of Congress all but ensures that, with either Obama or Clinton in the White House, we’ll experience a rise in the power of the federal government unlike anything we’ve witnessed in more than 40 years. In this profoundly threatening environment, no conservative should condition support for McCain on a pledge to push for a massive roll-back of the federal government. Retaining the Department of Education is a small price to pay for avoiding a federal takeover of the health care system.
Against all of this, Bozell would probably argue that conservatives have compromised their political principles for too long with insufficient reward. This brings us back to his political history of the post-Reagan years. In Bozell’s account, “the GOP establishment along with the professional political class” has foisted “moderate” candidates upon the Republican Party. This, in turn, has led either to defeat, because conservatives stayed home, or to betrayal of the conservative agenda.
There’s an element of paranoia in this narrative. Republicans didn’t nominate George Bush in 1988 because the “political class” wouldn’t abide the selection of Pete DuPont, Jack Kemp, Paul Laxalt, or Pat Robertson. It nominated Bush because most Republican voters thought he would make a better president than any of these conservatives. In fact, that same year they thought that Bob Dole, also dismissed by Bozell as a moderate, would make a better president than the the members of the more right-wing cohort identified by Bozell. So too with Dole’s nomination in 1996. Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes didn’t lose due to some conspiracy; they lost because they couldn’t come close to making their case to Republican voters.
If anything, McCain’s nomination owes less to the party establishment than that of other post-Reagan nominees. Though McCain picked up a few nice endorsements early on, he was far from the clear pick of the Republican political class until primary voters made him their clear pick. To be sure, many of those primary voters were not Republicans. But McCain was as popular with Republicans as any other candidate, and more popular with independents. Faced with the threat of energized, unabashed liberals gaining of control all branches of the federal government, conservatives should not feel too aggrieved that their nominee appeals to independent voters. These voters are really the only present obstacle to liberal control.
In this context, frustration over the inability or unwillingness of post-Reagan Republican presidents to push for everything conservatives wanted is, or should be, beside the point. In any case, there is little merit to the idea that conservatives have been stabbed in the back by the presidents they worked so hard to elect. The full conservative agenda has never had the support of a majority of voters for any sustained period of time. Thus, conservatives cannot cry foul over the fact that their full agenda has not been enacted. Conservatives certainly worked hard to elect George W. Bush twice. But they would not have succeeded if Bush had not worked hard to cultivate non-conservative voters.
It’s understandable that conservatives would attempt to leverage their power (and to overstate its extent) by making threats and demands on candidate McCain. But McCain can’t win the presidency with conservative support alone, no matter how ardent. McCain surely is mindful of that fact, and conservatives should be too.
JOHN adds: I have zero patience with conservatives who try to impose some kind of purity test on John McCain. McCain won the Republican nomination fair and square by getting more votes than his opponents. If he is not a thorough-going conservative ideologue, that should be no surprise: since Calvin Coolidge, the American people have elected exactly one President who conceivably could be so described, Ronald Reagan. But, hey, don't cry for us conservatives; since Franklin Roosevelt, the American people have elected exactly one President who could possibly be called a liberal ideologue, Lyndon Johnson, and that was under unique circumstances. The message that Americans don't generally choose ideologically "pure" candidates is pretty clear.
If there are conservatives who sincerely believe that it makes little difference whether the Executive Branch is run by John McCain or Barack Obama, they are entitled to sit out the election. And if they're going to sit it out, I'd appreciate it if they would sit it out entirely; in other words, stop attacking McCain for his "impurities."
To comment on this post, go here.
