An Internet hub for moderates, centrists, and independents, with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, and right

« Guest Voice: Understand Us U.S.

The Democrats: 48 Years and a Lifetime Later, In the Presence of Greatness. Again »

The Republicans: 8 Years and One Tar Baby Later, a Comic Soap Opera Prevails

Posted by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist in Economy.
Feb 4th, 2008 | Comments

If the Democratic race heading into Super Tuesday is high drama, the Republican race is comic soap opera.

The number of emergency room admissions following right-wing harpie Ann Coulter’s announcement that she will back Hillary Clinton if John McCain is the nominee seem to have tapered off, but a goodly number of inmates in the conservative asylum are still locked in the rubber room.

I never was any good at calculus, which might explain why I have trouble understanding why conservatives are so horrified at a McCain candidacy and stranger still is that a goodly number of them are fleeing into Mitt Romney’s wet but welcoming grasp.

McCain on his most unconservative day has been more conservative than Romney ever was before he took a secret trip to Sweden to have that operation.

No, not a sex-change operation, Silly, but a procedure that enables Romney to look into conservative eyes and say “I . . . am . . one . . . of . . . your . . . own” with a Borg-like intensity that turns people who haven’t changed their minds about anything, let alone politics, since forever into gelid supplicants.

At least you don’t hear much anymore about Romney’s religion, which is a good thing, but I have the impression that at this point conservatives would go for the guy even if he was a Wiccan.

Conservative pundit “Baghdad Hugh” Hewitt’s tenuous grip on reality slipped a finger or two over the Coulter outburst and he’s so desperate for his tribe to rendezvous with Romney, if not destiny, that he actually wrote that people should support Romney because he has more money than McCain:

“Which is why Rush, Sean, and Laura, Beck, Levin and Hewitt are right, and Arnold, Rudy, and Rick Perry are wrong: Conservatives have to decide right now if they will fight for Romney and the party of Reagan against the MSM-generated McCain resurrection. I think they will, and that Super Tuesday will be one for the books with surprises as great as the chattering class has had to digest in a long, long time.”

Memo to Hugh: The only thing that Romney and Reagan have in common is they both have six-letter last names.

Flip-flopping is, of course, a frequently used tactic from the American political playbook. Nevertheless, with one exception I have never seen a flip-flopper as crass as Romney during the eight presidential campaigns I covered as a reporter and editor and now a ninth as a blogger.

The one exception is, or rather was, Rudy “$60 Million For a Single Delegate” Giuliani, an in-your-face New York liberal who found out that changing his stripes and having an ego as large as the Twin Towers was not nearly enough.

As Joe Carter notes in a devastating critique of Romney, in order to become more attractive to that shrunken Republican base he has reversed field on abortion, stem cell research, gun control, the minimum wage, gay marriage and gays in the military, and nowhere more so than on health care where his views were a carbon copy of Clinton’s until he got the presidential itch.

So conservatives have themselves in quite a tizzy, made worse because they only have themselves to blame.

They knew in 2000 that George Bush was no more one of them than Romney is in 2008, but they understood that they could pour their own agenda in this empty vessel of a man and if things broke the right way, the payback would be aces and he’d start a war or two, to boot.

Well, they got a war, but now their party is a shambles because they also got runaway spending, crap, corruption, a recession and a failed foreign policy that has made America alternately feared and a global laughingstock.

Meanwhile, a war that was going to be over in no time at all will be over no time soon at all.

Bush is sticking to conservatives like a tar baby, which may not be the most apt analogy since one of the mantras of the about-to-be defunct Republican hegemony in Washington was that blacks and other people of color were welcome, but only if they used the servants’ entrance.

What makes the comic soap opera of the GOP’s Super Tuesday run-up so antic is that conservatives need to shed Bush and by all rights McCain should be the port in their storm. He has conservative credentials and has been the un-Bush in important respects. But he is unpopular precisely because of those important respects, which reveals both the conservatives’ dilemma and their schizophrenic symtomology.

John McCain will outgun Mitt Romney tomorrow by a comfortable margin while Mike Huckabee will do better than expected. McCain will widen his lead in subsequent primaries, capture the nomination and have the hands down best chance against the Democratic nominee, in all likelihood Hillary Clinton.

This will leave conservatives with a stark choice: Either beat a retreat from the Mittster and vote for McCain in November or hope that their health insurance plans cover treatment for schizophrenia. If they don’t, at least Clinton’s will.

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad here, right now: $0

Dave_Schuler

I never was any good at calculus, which might explain why I have trouble understanding why conservatives are so horrified at a McCain candidacy and stranger still is that a goodly number of them are fleeing into Mitt Romney’s wet but welcoming grasp.

While I won't deny that McCain isn't a perfect candidate from the standpoint of some Republicans, particularly those with libertarian leanings (who are disproportionately represented in the blogosphere), I think that a good proportion of the reaction against is because they've been sold a bill of goods.

I haven't done the research so I may well be wrong but I don't remember these charges, i.e. that McCain “isn't a real conservative” or is a RINO, before he ran against GWB, the anointed candidate of the party establishment, in 2000. If that's true there are really only three likely explanations, that they're reacting to things he's done since 2000, that the party has changed since 2000, or that my speculation is correct and they're buying a load of propaganda.

Support for the latter is that McCain's voting record post-2000 is virtually identical to Fred Thompson's and we're not hearing these same charges made against Thompson.

It also may be personal. McCain can be cantankerous and that may have made some enemies within his own party.

However, as I've been saying for some time, the future of the White House may depend on Republicans' survival instinct. If national Republicans have the same lemming-like urge to self-destruction that Illinois Republican patently have, they'll nominate Mitt Romney, who'll be handily defeated by either Clinton or Obama.

kritt11

I agree with Shaun.
McCain has made some enemies among Conservatives by openly spurning them. He called fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance", which no doubt helped Bush with evangelicals in 2000. Before the party allined with the Christian right, McCain would have been seen as conservative enough.

His stands on immigration haven't helped him, altho he seems to get more blame for this than George Bush, who, after all, made all of those speeches about a "comprehensive" immigration plan last year.

Conservatives hate him because he sponsored McCain-Feingold and because he worked with Teddy Kennedy on the immigration bill. That is selling out to them. Thompson may have the same voting record, but he doesn't have pictures of himself with Kennedy or Feingold-his style is much more low-key.
But that really is what makes McCain a leader. He's willing to do what it takes to get his agenda through, and is able to break the deadlock in Congress. If 25% of the time he discards conservative ideology or works with a liberal- well its nothing that GW himself hasn't done. I haven't seen him castrated for it to the degree that McCain was. Bush was reelected in 2004 after pushing NCLB and the Medicare drug program- both big government programs.

Its a mix of personality and policy differences, but I have no doubt that these same conservatives who are squawking about McCain now, will mysteriously "reevaluate" him by November, especially if Hillary Clinton is the Democrats' nominee, despite Ann Coulter's ridiculous comments.

DLS

Actually, people are avoiding Romney as much as if not more than McCain.

Meanwhile, evil, penurious Bush wants to spend like a Democrat more than ever:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120213421088140...

DLS

Hewitt (Romney cheerleader) is a critic of McCain -- draws plenty of reader remarks.

http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/6fcd0c45-3467-42...

DLS

More on Bush budget(s) --

"The Bush administration would cut roughly $560 billion from Medicare over the next decade but would leave intact program subsidies to insurers worth an estimated $150 billion over the same period."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120213824163840...

DLS

And last but not least,

"President Bush's new budget plan calls for $2.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, chiefly by renewing his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. ...

Such a renewal, however, is dead on arrival in a Congress controlled by Democrats..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120213798729240...

kritt11

DLS- Of course he wouldn't have needed to cut Medicare if he hadn't pushed through the prescription plan. The affect of the cuts will be that fewer and fewer practicioners will accept it, leaving an aging population virtually under or uninsured.

DLS

If they keep reducing payments to doctors and other providers, something will break soon. Obviously we could save a lot of costs by ending Medicare, but that's not what's sought, but future cost containment. The problem with underpayment to providers is, it's no laughing matter, especially for the providers and patients. Some services that currently lose money or come close to it will be subject to cost and likely quality cuts by the providers themselves (when they don't simply refuse to accept Medicare payments or patients any more, instead).

This is separate from the specific arguments that can be made in many instances where the cost of providing drugs (or extending the payment for immunosuppressants for transplant recipients beyond the current max of three years for people who otherwise don't qualify for Medicare), or other treatment, may cost more up front, but in the long term are less costly than status quo practices.

blog comments powered by Disqus