Conservatives: Make peace with McCain
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Outside observers have to be scratching their heads -- or snorting with delight -- as they watch so many conservatives lash out at presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
They must be wondering why the critics who give President Bush a pass for his frequent lapses from conservatism aren't willing to do the same for the Vietnam prison camp survivor who stood firm with the president on the Iraq war.
What's the conservatives' beef? Now that the Iraq surge is working, why are they beating their swords into POW-snares?
Well, it's a class thing. It's that simple, and it's that visceral.
In modern America -- and specifically in the case of Sen. John McCain, George W. Bush and the conservatives they exasperate -- "class" is defined not by birth but by philosophical and religious inclinations. Conservatives feel that George W. Bush, despite his patrician birth and big-spending ways, is one of them. John McCain is not.
And it's not just that Mr. McCain isn't "one of them"; it's that he disdains them. In the short run, they're probably right, but in the long run -- the only race that counts -- they may have missed something far more important.
BothMr. McCain and Mr. Bush have centrist tendencies. Most presidential aspirants must, unless they possess Ronald Reagan-esque charisma.
Mr. Bush's early political career was on the Texas stage, where, as governor, he worked quite well with a Democratic legislature to create, among other things, a Children's Health Insurance Program. Not long later, he was running for president as a "compassionate conservative."
Longtime conservatives would be justified in feeling the sting of the new terminology, as if neither their political philosophy nor their personal practice was kind.
Perhaps Mr. Bush was trying to distinguish himself either from the more aggressive ideology that drove the "Contract With America" congressional class or from the caricature of hard-hearted conservatism long at play in mass media. "I'm a conservative," he was saying, "but I'm not one of them."
And many of his policies as president have carried the same message. Whether it's the vast expansion of Medicare, huge new benefits for farmers, the new prescription drug program or pork-laden highway bill, Mr. Bush seemingly seeks to prove his personal goodness by spending federal money we don't have.
That's normally a big conservative no-no, but with the war on terror crowding out all other considerations, conservatives have stood by their man.
So why not the same treatment for Mr. McCain? While Republicans as a whole have made him their choice, the party's conservatives, right up till last Thursday, were splitting their primary votes between Mitt Romney, an uneasy conservative convert, and Mike Huckabee, a non-convert.
Unlike these two former governors, Mr. McCain has been a Washington politician from the get-go and has a long record. Though he has a lifetime rating of 83 percent from the American Conservative Union, he has veered from conservative orthodoxy on high-profile issues -- tax cuts, immigration and campaign finance reform, -- to make common cause with leftists.
On some of these issues, he and Mr. Huckabee have similar positions. But where the Arkansas novice gets to come off as a free-thinking, Jesus-quoting iconoclast, conservatives think the critical Mr. McCain -- the media's beloved and profane "maverick" -- cares more about Washington liberals' approval than his party's grass-roots, like he's trying to say: "I'm a Republican, but I'm not one of them."
As a conservative, you could overlook the disdain and argue that Mr. McCain has seen the light on tax cuts, that the misguided McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform was his mea culpa for the late 1980s' Keating Five scandal and that having so alienated conservatives, he'll have to dance to their tune to win and govern.
But instead of that intellectual exercise, just consider the one issue on which he's never wavered, the main reason that Mr. McCain is a Republican and not a Democrat: He's a conservative on defense.
Just as George W. Bush has risked his presidential legacy to wage the war on terror as he thought best, so John McCain risked his last feasible bid for the White House to stand with Mr. Bush on the Iraq surge. He said he'd rather lose a campaign than lose a war, and last summer Mr. McCain was losing badly. History has honored his choice.
Some conservative pundits have said they'd rather see a Democrat win than watch the country, and thus the Republican Party, sink under the "liberal" Mr. McCain's leadership.
But the primary battle of our time is not the one we're waging amongst ourselves; it is being waged against us from outside. For this great challenge, John McCain put his country's best interests ahead of his own. His critics should do the same.
First Published February 11, 2008 12:00 am
