Do You Feel Lucky?
Kristol re McCain, the griping, the past, the future and what he’s done for the GOP lately, counsels that once the party pulls the trigger … well, here it is. NYT, briefly:
The prospect of John McCain as the likely Republican presidential nominee has produced a squall of anger on the right.
…
But American politics tends to be unkind to movements that dwell in anger and relish their unhappiness. In the era from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, liberals tended to be happy warriors — and that helped their cause. The original civil rights movement succeeded in part because it worked hard to transcend a justifiable bitterness. Liberalism faltered when it became endlessly aggrieved and visibly churlish.
No kidding.
One reason conservatives have been able to navigate the rapids of modern America is that they’ve often gone out of their way to make their case with good cheer. William F. Buckley, the father of the conservative movement, skewered liberals, but always with wit and élan. By 1980, bolstered by the growth-oriented doctrine of supply-side economics, and speaking the language of American uplift more than that of conservative despair, Ronald Reagan won the presidency.
Since then we conservatives have had a pretty good run. We had a chance to implement a fair share of our ideas, and they worked. In the 1980s and 90s, conservative policies helped win the cold war, revive the economy and reduce crime and welfare dependency. American conservatism’s ascendancy has benefited this country — and much of the world — over the last quarter-century.
This is an important moment for the conservative movement. Not because conservatives have some sort of obligation to fall in behind John McCain. They don’t. Those conservatives who can’t abide McCain are free to rally around Mitt Romney. And if McCain does prevail for the nomination, conservatives are free to sit out the election.
But I’d say this to them: When the primaries are over, if McCain has won the day, don’t sulk and don’t sit it out. Don’t pretend there’s no difference between a candidate who’s committed to winning in Iraq and a Democratic nominee who embraces defeat.
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If a Democrat wins the presidency, he or she will almost certainly have a Democratic Congress to work with. That Congress will not impede a course of dishonorable retreat abroad. It won’t balk at liberal Supreme Court nominees at home. It won’t save the economy from tax hikes.
If, by contrast, McCain wins the presidency — and all the polls suggest he’d be the best G.O.P. bet to do so — he’ll be able to shape a strong American foreign policy, nominate sound justices and fight for parts of the conservative domestic agenda.
One might add a special reason that conservatives — and the nation — owe John McCain at least a respectful hearing. Only a year ago, we were headed toward defeat in Iraq. Without McCain’s public advocacy and private lobbying, President Bush might not have reversed strategy and announced the surge of troops in January 2007. Without McCain’s vigorous leadership, support for the surge in Congress would not have been sustained in the first few months of 2007. So: No McCain, no surge. No surge, failure in Iraq, a terrible setback for America — and, as it happens, no chance for a G.O.P. victory in 2008.
Some conservatives can close their eyes to all this. They can choose to stand aside from history while having a temper tantrum. But they should consider that the American people might then choose not to invite them back into a position of responsibility for quite a while to come.
Smart guy. A lot smarter than, say, this dingbat.
Zogby’s got McCain on a roll everywhere but California, where the Governator apparently did him little good.
Here we go, another voice in the Blue Beantown wilderness, token Globe con ex-Heraldo Jacoby, weighs in for McCain:
Conservatives bristle at the thought of a Republican president who might raise income and payroll taxes. Or enlarge the federal government instead of shrinking it. Or appoint Supreme Court justices who are anything but strict constructionists. Or grant a blanket amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.
Now, I don’t believe that a President McCain would do any of those things. But President Reagan did all of them. Reagan also provided arms to the Khomeini theocracy in Iran, presided over skyrocketing budget deficits, and ordered US troops to cut and run in the face of Islamist terror in the Middle East. McCain would be unlikely to commit any of those sins, either.
Does this mean that Reagan was not, in fact, a great conservative? Of course not. Nor does it mean that McCain has not given his critics on the right legitimate reasons to be disconcerted. My point is simply that the immaculate conservative leader for whom so many on the right yearn to vote is a fantasy. Conservatives who say that McCain is no Ronald Reagan are right, but Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan either. Neither is Mike Huckabee. And neither was the real - as opposed to the mythic - Ronald Reagan.
Ha. Good one, Jeff.
The conservative case against McCain is clear enough; I made it myself in some of these columns when he first ran for president eight years ago. The issues that have earned McCain the label of “maverick” - campaign-finance restrictions, global warming, the Bush tax cuts, immigration, judicial filibusters - are precisely what stick in the craw of the GOP conservative base.
But this year, the conservative case for McCain is vastly more compelling.
You know, I think I’m pretty much going to steal the rest of this thing from my enemies at the Globe. Hoist the Jolly Roger, lads!
On the surpassing national-security issues of the day - confronting the threat from radical Islam and winning the war in Iraq - no one is more stalwart. Even McCain’s fiercest critics, such as conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, will say so. “The world’s bad guys,” Hewitt writes, “would never for a moment think he would blink in any showdown, or hesitate to strike back at any enemy with the audacity to try again to cripple the US through terror.”
McCain was never an agenda-driven movement conservative, but he “entered public life as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” as he puts it, and on the whole his record has been that of a robust and committed conservative. He is a spending hawk and an enemy of pork and earmarks. He has never voted to increase taxes, and wants the Bush tax cuts made permanent for the best of reasons: “They worked.” He is a staunch free-trader and a champion of school choice. He is unabashedly prolife and pro-Second Amendment. He opposes same-sex marriage. He wants entitlements reined in and personal retirement accounts expanded.
McCain’s conservatism has usually been more a matter of gut instinct than of a rigorous intellectual worldview, and he has certainly deviated from Republican orthodoxy on some serious issues. For all that, his ratings from conservative watchdog groups have always been high. “Even with all the blemishes,” notes National Review, a leading journal on the right (and a backer of Romney), “McCain has a more consistent conservative record than Giuliani or Romney. . . . This is an abiding strength of his candidacy.”
As a lifelong conservative, I wish McCain evinced a greater understanding that limited government is indispensable to individual liberty. Yet there is no candidate in either party who so thoroughly embodies the conservatism of American honor and tradition as McCain, nor any with greater moral authority to invoke it. For all his transgressions and backsliding, McCain radiates integrity and steadfastness, and if his heterodox stands have at times been infuriating, they also attest to his resolve. Time and again he has taken an unpopular stand and stuck with it, putting his career on the line when it would have been easier to go along with the crowd.
A perfect conservative he isn’t. But he is courageous and steady, a man of character and high standards, a genuine hero. If “the House that Reagan Built” is to be true to its best and highest ideals, it will unite behind John McCain.
Well, there you have it. Like I said, there isn’t anyone who isn’t guzzling Obama Koolaid who isn’t going to have to hold his nose in the ballot box. So you have to ask yourself, to quote another imperfect conservative, do you feel lucky?
Well, do you, punk?
Karl at Protein Wisdom is incensed that anyone would dare to put some lipstick on the pig also known as McCain by pointing out that Reagan was less than perfectly Reaganic. Downright Clintonian. This thing is starting to go in circles. Face it, there’s no one in the race without warts.
Topics: pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:52 am on Monday, February 4, 2008
3 Responses to “Do You Feel Lucky?”
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February 4th, 2008 at 11:52 am
To tell you the truth, I never really understood the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He didn’t “uplift” my patriotism, because I had never lost it anyway. And no single man destroys a movement as monolithic as communism without the efforts of a vast army of opponents in every arena.
As for this McCain flap, I’m asking myself “Are people frickin’ crazy?” Do they honestly want Neville Obama or Cruella Clinton in the White House?
February 5th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Amnesty. Sorry, I still could not pull the lever for McCain. Why? Amnesty.
February 6th, 2008 at 1:18 am
Actually, the Governator did lotta good!
McCain/Huckabee ‘08!!