20 May 2008
Nomination…Then Betrayal!
Posted by Joy Bischoff under: Constitution in Peril; Presidential Election 2008 .
There is a great deal of pressure on Senator McCain to hold to his moderate leanings. The following column is a good example of those expectations. The left takes it for granted that conservatives will fall in line with McCain and that disgusts me. We are supposed to support him no matter how much he betrays those who gave him the nomination. I know many of you will vote for him and I will continue to support your decision and will also continue to ask you to hold his feet to the fire on issues.
Obama Has the Upper Hand. But McCain Can Still Take Him
By Dick Morris
John McCain is America’s favorite kind of candidate. With his record of extraordinary patriotism and his distinctive Senate tenure, McCain is a nominee whom voters from both parties — and independents, too — could easily support.
But he has been dealt a terrible hand: a tanking economy, an unpopular war, a Republican incumbent whose approval ratings are at their all-time low and a gloomy national mood, with 82 percent of Americans saying in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week that the country is on the wrong track. Political scientists add all that up and predict that the Democrats are destined to win the White House. But I don’t do political science; I do politics, and I’m convinced that McCain can still win — if he’s willing to follow the road map below.
McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he’s not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive? Simple: The GOP electorate, along with the rest of the country, has moved somewhat to the left. (In Florida, for example, exit polls showed that only 27 percent of Republican primary voters described themselves as “very conservative,” while 28 percent said they were “moderate” and 2 percent said they were “very liberal.”)
Meanwhile, McCain’s likely rival, Barack Obama, has raised such doubts among voters that their concerns momentarily energized even Hillary Rodham Clinton’s sagging campaign. With the help of the incendiary comments of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Obama’s negatives have been rising even as he nears the finish line.
Still, voters are tending heavily toward the Democratic Party. Normally, party preferences are about even, but recent national polls give Democrats a decided edge. In last week’s Post-ABC poll, 53 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats or leaned toward the party, compared with 39 percent who were Republicans or tilted to the GOP.
To sum it up: A candidate who cannot get elected is being nominated by a party that cannot be defeated, while a candidate who is eminently electable is running as the nominee of a party doomed to defeat.
In this environment, McCain can win by running to the center.
His base will be there for him; indeed, it will turn out in massive numbers. Wright has become the honorary chairman of McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts. It would be nice to think that race isn’t a factor in American politics anymore, but it is. The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.
So McCain doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.
If the GOP nominee were Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, independents and Democrats might not vote Republican even if they became convinced that Obama is some kind of sleeper agent sent to charm and conquer our democracy. Even Rudy Giuliani with his penchant for confrontation, might have elicited sufficient doubts among Democrats to hold them in line for Obama. But McCain doesn’t threaten anyone. Everyone can appreciate the ordeal that tested his courage in Vietnam, and independents and Democrats can celebrate much of his legislative record. Voting for McCain is an easy sell. . .
McCain need not depart from long-held principles to wage any of these battles. He has always embraced these causes as a senator, and he needs to do so ever more forcefully as a candidate for president. The danger for McCain is that he will forget that he has already won the Republican nomination and retreat to safe GOP positions, which will alienate precisely the Democrats and independents whom he is uniquely positioned to attract.
Meanwhile, the right wing will carry the attack against Obama. McCain is not a mudslinging politician by nature, but he doesn’t need to be. The collected quotes of Rev. Wright will be a bestseller this summer. Obama once had to prove to us that he was not a Muslim; now he must convince us that he never really went to church much. Just as Sen. John F. Kerry was buffeted by veterans who had less than heroic memories of their service with him in Vietnam, so Obama will have to weather the recollections of his fellow parishioners. Count on several to surface and claim that they sat next to him during some particularly incendiary sermon.
The American public will not ultimately doubt Obama’s patriotism; that is a bridge too far. But we will come to think less of his credibility and strength as he fumbles his way through awkward denials. Obama’s ex-pastor may have faded in the primary fight with Clinton, but Wright will loom larger in the general election. McCain is in an excellent position to exploit the openings that Obama will offer — if, and only if, he moves to the center.
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6 Comments so far...
Cameron Says:
20 May 2008 at 8:08 am.
This is long but if someone just skimmed it and reads the bolded parts they will get the idea. And the idea stinks to high heaven.
Angela Rogin Says:
20 May 2008 at 8:26 am.
I’ll hold feet to the fire by my vote against McCain. I will write in Romney to hold the RNC’s feet to the fire for forcing their liberal candidate on us. No way will I meekly get in line and be good while watching our party go left. I’m not wishy washy.
Mac Says:
20 May 2008 at 10:54 am.
I’ll work from inside the ranks to try and let McCain know he can’t take the base for granted.
CindyL. Says:
20 May 2008 at 12:24 pm.
People are going to fall for this. They will figure McCain has no choice because he has to beat Obama no matter what. The end justifies the means. They will think that if McCain keeps his promise to pick conservative judges then it will be worth it. The fact that conservatism will be betrayed and changed and weakened so that in the future we can’t get back to solid ground, won’t seem real or important enough to people to stand up against the slide to center.
Peter Says:
20 May 2008 at 2:32 pm.
You can’t call it a betrayal when McCain is being consistent with what he has always believed. He never pretended to be far right but he is a lot better than Obama.
Concerned American Says:
20 May 2008 at 5:04 pm.
This guy writes that the GOP has already moved to the left. Apparently a lot have but that doesn’t mean to rest of us have to join them. We are all that’s left who are trying to uphold the Constitution. If we don’t stand strong where will people look when things get crazier? If we don’t try to educate ourselves and our kids about the principles of freedom, who is going to be the keeper of those principles?
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