John McCain & The Dinosaur Vote
Does John McCain need the Republican Party’s atrophied conservative base to win the nomination?
Wrong question. How about:
Is there anything that John McCain, who for my money has the best chance of winning in the fall of any Republican, can do to win over the party’s atrophied conservative base?
Short of pandering, which is something that has not come naturally to McCain over a long political career and five and a half years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton, the answer is a big fat “no.”
I ask these questions in the context of my continuing amazement (and amusement) with said conservative base, some if not much of which seems prepared to sit in their rooms scolding the rest of the party while the Republican house burns to the ground. You read that right (no pun intended): There are people in this crowd who would rather lose the election and the White House than call the Fire Department. The question is how many.
As David Brooks, The New York Times’ house moderate, notes:
“The definition of who was a true conservative [has] narrowed. It became necessary to pass certain purity tests — on immigration, abortion, taxes and Terri Schiavo.
“An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.
“Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed. Moderate Republicans were expelled for squishiness. Millions of coastal suburbanites left the party in disgust.
“And still the corset tightened. Many professional conservatives do not regard Mike Huckabee or John McCain as true conservatives. ‘I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party,’ Rush Limbaugh said recently on his radio show. ‘It’s going to change it forever, be the end of it.’ ”
The dinosaurs were unable to adapt; this crowd simply doesn’t want to, a frightening reality for any Republican with a sense of history and a pulse.
This is because in addition to all of the party’s myriad other problems, the specter of the conservative base not voting at all rather than voting for McCain is horrifying. As Ed Morrissey notes at Captain’s Quarters (while certainly not using, let alone agreeing with, my analogy), McCain can’t win without the dinosaur vote.
The Good Captain links to a maybe dinosaur by the name of Paul Mirengoff at Power Line. Mirengoff, riffing on the Brooks column, writes that:
“Brooks bristles with contempt for conservative intellectuals who read less than ‘pure’ conservatives out of the movement. I think I understand where he’s coming from. It is incorrect in my view to claim that, on balance, McCain and Huckabee are liberals. At worst, they are moderates who lean to the right. But conservatives certainly aren’t out-of-line to the extent that they criticize McCain or Huckabee for specific non-conservative positions they take on major issues. To borrow Brooks’ terms, it may be misguided for conservatives to ‘expel’ McCain and Huckabee, but it’s not necessarily inappropriate to ‘find them wanting.’ “
I am not a regular Power Line reader, although I did allow myself the guilty pleasure of stopping by a few times after John Hinderaker, the ultra-conservative blog’s T-Rex, won the Golden Wingnut Award in a landslide for his observation that “It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.”
I will assume that Mirengoff does not think that Limbaugh is an intellectual; about Hinderaker I’m not so sure. My question is whether either guy will get around to calling the Fire Department before it’s too late.
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8 Responses to “John McCain & The Dinosaur Vote”
John McCain has no more chance of winning in 2008 than Bob Dole has of winning in 1996. I believe the far right believes that if they wanted an open border, bigger government Republican they would just vote for the Democratic candidate.
I believe that the Repulblican base has come to realize how bad the Bush Administration has been for them, no conservative results while destroying the conservative party. However, they have no idea what direction to head into given the problems created by the stupidity and ineptness of Bush, Hastert, and Frist.
SD:
Other than your usual and reliably gratuitous racist swipe at immigrants, you are more or less correct in stating that the dinosaurs don't know where to turn.
Short of pandering, which is something that has not come naturally to McCain over a long political career and five and a half years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton, the answer is a big fat “no.”
McCain's problem is that he has pandered but no one believed it. He's firmly attached his lips to the behinds of Pat Robertson and George W. Bush in an attempt to appeal to the conservative base that didn't support him in 2000. And what was he doing when he caved to Bush on the issue of torture? McCain's maverick image may have been true at some point, but it's nothing but an illusion in 2008.
Correct me if this actual Republican has been wrong for the duration of my adult life, but isn't the essence of the Republican party one of “conservatism”? To now treat “conservatism” as some sort of fringe outlyer philosophy is for ALL these authors to define the party by some new set of rules that I did not get copied on.
As far as I thought, Rudi's Rethuglican Party has sought to be the result of building a stool of 3 legs, socons, ficons and defcons. All 3 legs absolutely have to come together to win an election…………what's so surprising about that?
I grant you eight years of GWB has badly alienated the socons (too light on ILLEGAL immigration), badly alienated the ficons (disregard for shrinking the government) and badly alienated the traditional defcons (abysmal EXECUTION in Iraq).
The fact that no candidate to date has sufficiently and convincingly addressed the entire stool seems to be the problem………not that “the Party” has morphed from its heritage.
Although, as usual, we appreciate the non-Republicans for giving us advice!
After all, they have found that a one-legged stool is much easier to build.
co,
Stool is the right word for it
Shaun,
The minority vote is one of the reasons that the Republicans do not know what to do. The only racial group that the Repubicans have a chance to get votes from are whites. so the Republicans have faced with the problem of trying to get a higher percentage of the white votes during each election cycle. I do not believe that it is possible. That is why doscussing a downcycle for the Republicans is laughable since in 8 to 12 years, the percentage of the white vote that Repulbicans would have to get to remain viable will be so high as to be unrealistic.
What the Bush Admnistration has done with its ineptness is to speed up the process of the Republican collapse by lowering the percentage of the white vote that the Republican Party will receive.
Given a Clinton White House and the chance of more than 60 Democratic seats in the Senate, the dying Republican Party will be lucky to have one third of the seats in Congress in 12 years.
Look at the inner cities like Philadelphia. Is there a single elected Republican? That is what the future of the U.S. will resemble in the near future. And just like Philadelphia, the only relevant election will be the Democratic Primary. Even the media will have to give up covering the Republican primary when the Republican nominee has no chance of winning.
“Although, as usual, we appreciate the non-Republicans for giving us advice!”
Well, I can't speak for other Republicans, but this Republican took Shaun's essay as an “observation,” not “advice.”
Furthermore, I think he's spot on the money.
Well, Republicans have a choice. We can vote for a very flawed candidate who is a national hero, widely admired across the political spectrum, who will fight and fight hard on the issues of the war and fiscal discipline, and who will have one or two policies which will drive the base of the party absolutely nuts (and who can win) — or we can prepare for four or eight years of President Hillary Rodham Clinton.
If McCain is so terrible a candidate that Republicans are willing to concede an election to Clinton, so be it. But people should be aware of what they are doing.