Midday: The McCain Surge
What is it with John McCain and surges? Democrats hated his Iraq surge. Now Republicans hate his campaign surge. Meanwhile, Iraq is looking better and better, and so are McCain’s chances for winning the Republican nomination. And in a race whose mantra seems to be “Change,” the candidate who talks least about it seems to be its strongest catalyst. Could it be that the oldest person running is the one who drags his party, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century?
In his Washington Post column today, Robert Novak posed the existential question: “Is McCain a Conservative?” and one wonders if the crippling internet failures that struck two continents this morning are the result of the right leaning blogosphere’s resounding screams of “NO,” or at least of Michelle Malkin’s confession to fellow McCain hater Glenn Beck that she’ll be staying home with Rush on election night if McCain’s the nominee.
As Riehl World View, Hugh Hewitt, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, PoliPundit et al rail against the “liberal wolf in conservative clothing” who they fear is destroying the Reagan coalition, the “Straight Talk Express” picks up one high profile endorsement after another. Last night, Rudy.
Today, Arnold.
Not real Republicans either, claim the purists, but what can they say about the Drudge Report’s latest exclusive except “Et tu, Nancy?”
The ‘purists’ have led the Party into an intellectual / moral cul-de-sac and are seemingly intent upon keeping them there. No matter what. Losers but PURE.
It would be useful to track the future Republican death spiral by State as one by one the Party is driven out of marginal areas into its Southern base. Losing Senators, Congresspeople and Presidential Elections along the way.
With any luck the ‘purists’ can eventually restore the Party to its 1930′s – 1950′s strength. Wouldn’t that be wonderful.
dougf, what you said.
Yeah Arnold’s promise of free health care for all Californians is so pure it passed the most Socialist Democrat of legislators. Not.
How’s that for reaching across the aisle hand-in-hand in bipartisan politics.
I’m grateful country-club Repoublican Arnold has endorsed McCain, adding to the long list of such fine endorsments as the NY Times and Mel Martinez.
I really don’t mind at all the country-club Republican Party dissolving while the Democrats spend their time over four years leading the country towards a high Misery Index.
Americans will yet again be reminded why Conservativism is an innate system which advocates the indomitable American spirt’s rugged Individualism.
Everytime Collectivist rule people suffer and when they feel the pain they revert back to what works.
I’m not a purist, just an ordinary rugged individual who loves America.
And yes I think Al Gore’s Greenie movement is an insanely stupid fad.
“I really don’t mind at all the country-club Republican Party dissolving while the Democrats spend their time over four years leading the country towards a high Misery Index.”
The United States does not have the luxury to waste four years while the Islamic nihilism threat continues to grow. Try imagining our country taking a vacation during WWII. This is what will happen if either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama get into the White House.
If you want to see how the GOP dies, look to Massachusetts and Mitt Romney. Oddly, Arnold’s Health Care scheme was based upon Mitt’s scheme.
Politics is very odd.
After ages in DC McPain has endeared himself to the DC establishment.
So sure, they’re all coming out for their boy, and perhaps also a job in his administration.
This whole “purist” business is crap, intended to make people who take principles seriously seem fanatical.
Very few large scale human undertakings succeed without considerable discipline in the matter of implementing and sticking consistently to principles of one sort or another.
And some of the principles that Mr. McCain seems to be rather casual about, for example freedom of speech (McCain/Feingold) are far too basic to the health of this country to allow him any wiggle-room about.
The Republican purists like Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, etc. did not like Dole in 96′ or GW Bush in 2000. Frankly if Reagan were running today I doubt they would like him!
Having the likes of Limbaugh, Coulter and Hannity really like a candidate in the presidential election is the kiss of defeat and death for the candidate and Republican party!
John McCain entertained the idea of joining the Kerry ’04 campaign. See http://www.lauraingraham.com/ also reported in The Hill today. He was so small and petty loosing to GW in 04 that he wanted to stab the entire Republican Party in the back. Frankly, John McCain is no friend to the Republican Party. Wake up people and vote for the only true conservative left – Mitt Romney!
Clarity has never been so far;
the spiral of control so near.
Rally for Romney
Conservatives need to act now, before it is too late.
By Mark R. Levin
I have spent nearly four decades in the conservative movement – from precinct worker to the Reagan White House. I campaigned for Reagan in 1976 and 1980. I served in several top positions during the Reagan administration, including chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese. I have been an active conservative when conservatism was not in high favor.
I remember in 1976, as a 19-year-old in Pennsylvania working the polls for Reagan against the sitting Republican president, Gerald Ford, I was demeaned for supporting a candidate who was said to be an extremist B-actor who couldn’t win a general election, and opposing a sitting president. And at the time Reagan wasn’t even on the ballot in Pennsylvania because he decided to focus his limited resources on other states. I tried to convince voter after voter to write-in Reagan’s name on the ballot. In the end, Reagan received about five percent of the Republican vote as a write-in candidate.
Of course, Reagan lost the nomination to Ford by the narrowest of margins. Ford went on to lose to a little-known ex-governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. But the Reagan Revolution became stronger, not weaker, as a result. And the rest is history.
I don’t pretend to speak for President Reagan or all conservatives. I speak for myself. But I watched the Republican debate last night, which was held at the Reagan library, and I have to say that I fear a McCain candidacy. He would be an exceedingly poor choice as the Republican nominee for president.
Let’s get the largely unspoken part of this out the way first. McCain is an intemperate, stubborn individual, much like Hillary Clinton. These are not good qualities to have in a president. As I watched him last night, I could see his personal contempt for Mitt Romney roiling under the surface. And why? Because Romney ran campaign ads that challenged McCain’s record? Is this the first campaign in which an opponent has run ads questioning another candidate’s record? That’s par for the course. To the best of my knowledge, Romney’s ads have not been personal. He has not even mentioned the Keating-Five to counter McCain’s cheap shots. But the same cannot be said of McCain’s comments about Romney.
Last night McCain, who is the putative frontrunner, resorted to a barrage of personal assaults on Romney that reflect more on the man making them than the target of the attacks. McCain now has a habit of describing Romney as a “manager for profit” and someone who has “laid-off” people, implying that Romney is both unpatriotic and uncaring. Moreover, he complains that Romney is using his “millions” or “fortune” to underwrite his campaign. This is a crass appeal to class warfare. McCain is extremely wealthy through marriage. Romney has never denigrated McCain for his wealth or the manner in which he acquired it. Evidently Romney’s character doesn’t let him to cross certain boundaries of decorum and decency, but McCain’s does. And what of managing for profit? When did free enterprise become evil? This is liberal pablum which, once again, could have been uttered by Hillary Clinton.
And there is the open secret of McCain losing control of his temper and behaving in a highly inappropriate fashion with prominent Republicans, including Thad Cochran, John Cornyn, Strom Thurmond, Donald Rumsfeld, Bradley Smith, and a list of others. Does anyone honestly believe that the Clintons or the Democrat party would give McCain a pass on this kind of behavior?
As for McCain “the straight-talker,” how can anyone explain his abrupt about-face on two of his signature issues: immigration and tax cuts? As everyone knows, McCain led the battle not once but twice against the border-security-first approach to illegal immigration as co-author of the McCain-Kennedy bill. He disparaged the motives of the millions of people who objected to his legislation. He fought all amendments that would limit the general amnesty provisions of the bill. This controversy raged for weeks. Only now he says he’s gotten the message. Yet, when asked last night if he would sign the McCain-Kennedy bill as president, he dissembles, arguing that it’s a hypothetical question. Last Sunday on Meet the Press, he said he would sign the bill. There’s nothing straight about this talk. Now, I understand that politicians tap dance during the course of a campaign, but this was a defining moment for McCain. And another defining moment was his very public opposition to the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. He was the media’s favorite Republican in opposition to Bush. At the time his primary reason for opposing the cuts was because they favored the rich (and, by the way, they did not). Now he says he opposed them because they weren’t accompanied by spending cuts. That’s simply not correct.
Even worse than denying his own record, McCain is flatly lying about Romney’s position on Iraq . As has been discussed for nearly a week now, Romney did not support a specific date to withdraw our forces from Iraq . The evidence is irrefutable. And it’s also irrefutable that McCain is abusing the English language (Romney’s statements) the way Bill Clinton did in front of a grand jury. The problem is that once called on it by everyone from the New York Times to me, he obstinately refuses to admit the truth. So, last night, he lied about it again. This isn’t open to interpretation. But it does give us a window into who he is.
Of course, it’s one thing to overlook one or two issues where a candidate seeking the Republican nomination as a conservative might depart from conservative orthodoxy. But in McCain’s case, adherence is the exception to the rule – McCain-Feingold (restrictions on political speech), McCain-Kennedy (amnesty for illegal aliens), McCain-Kennedy-Edwards (trial lawyers’ bill of rights), McCain-Lieberman (global warming legislation), Gang of 14 (obstructing change to the filibuster rule for judicial nominations), the Bush tax cuts, and so forth. This is a record any liberal Democrat would proudly run on. Are we to overlook this record when selecting a Republican nominee to carry our message in the general election?
But what about his national security record? It’s a mixed bag. McCain is rightly credited with being an early voice for changing tactics in Iraq . He was a vocal supporter of the surge, even when many were not. But he does not have a record of being a vocal advocate for defense spending when Bill Clinton was slashing it. And he has been on the wrong side of the debate on homeland security. He supports closing Guantanamo Bay , which would result in granting an array of constitutional protections to al-Qaeda detainees, and limiting legitimate interrogation techniques that have, in fact, saved American lives. Combined with his (past) de-emphasis on border-security, I think it’s fair to say that McCain’s positions are more in line with the ACLU than most conservatives.
Why recite this record? Well, if conservatives don’t act now to stop McCain, he will become the Republican nominee and he will lose the general election. He is simply flawed on too many levels. He is a Republican Hillary Clinton in many ways. Many McCain supporters insist he is the only Republican who can beat Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama. And they point to certain polls. The polls are meaningless this far from November. Six months ago, the polls had Rudy winning the Republican nomination. In October 1980, the polls had Jimmy Carter defeating Ronald Reagan. This is no more than spin.
But wouldn’t the prospect of a Clinton or Obama presidency drive enough of the grassroots to the polls for McCain? It wasn’t enough to motivate the base to vote in November 2006 to stop Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker or the Democrats from taking Congress. My sense is it won’t be enough to carry McCain to victory, either. And McCain has done more to build animus among the people whose votes he will need than Denny Hastert or Bill Frist. And there won’t be enough Democrats voting for McCain to offset the electorate McCain has alienated (and is likely to continue to alienate, as best as I can tell).
McCain has not won overwhelming pluralities, let alone majorities, in any of the primaries. A thirty-six-percent win in Florida doesn’t make a juggernaut. But the liberal media are promoting him now as the presumptive nominee. More and more establishment Republican officials are jumping on McCain’s bandwagon – the latest being Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has all but destroyed California ‘s Republican party.
Let’s face it, none of the candidates are perfect. They never are. But McCain is the least perfect of the viable candidates. The only one left standing who can honestly be said to share most of our conservative principles is Mitt Romney. I say this as someone who has not been an active Romney supporter. If conservatives don’t unite behind Romney at this stage, and become vocal in their support for him, then they will get McCain as their Republican nominee and probably a Democrat president. And in either case, we will have a deeply flawed president.
- Mark Levin, a former senior Reagan Justice Department official, is a nationally syndicated radio-talk-show host.
>The only one left standing who can honestly be said to share most of our conservative principles is Mitt Romney.>The only one left standing who can honestly be said to share most of our conservative principles is Mitt Romney.<
So Ted Olson and Jack Kemp, among many others, aren’t true conservatives, but Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are. I see. And the fact that Romney didn’t campaign for Governor or govern Mass with these conservative principles is insignificant. He is the honest true conservative because he now says what Levin wants him to say. So Levin will vote for him. Wow! I understand why many conservatives don’t like McCain but they completely undercut their own credibility when they champion Romney.
McVain is simply not a man to be trusted with the Presidency.
He’s power mad.
And he’s a guy, I predict, who will take great pleasure in ‘sticking-it-to’ conservatives – like appointing liberal judges if elected.
I can already visualize his sick chuckle as he asks Sen. Kennedy for few names.
I think cutting and pasting a lengthy piece into a forum like this is poor form. If the initial post can not inspire you to put a few coherent sententeces of your own together then don’t bother taking up band width. Btw mark Levin is flat out annoying and lacks originality.