As truly horrific as it would be for the liberal and unethical
Mike Huckabee to win the Republican presidential nomination, many
Republicans still believe it would be almost as difficult to
stomach the nomination of John McCain.
Huckabee, of course, would utterly destroy the old Reagan
coalition, as even his campaign chief Ed Rollins has acknowledged. Huckabee’s bizarre propensity for
letting criminals return early to freedom, combined with his utter
cluelessness about foreign policy, also means that he would get
absolutely crushed by the Democrats in a general election
contest.
But McCain’s problems are almost as great, which is why reports
of a comeback by the Arizona senator have so many conservatives
scratching their heads.
McCain is, and looks, more than two years older than Ronald
Reagan was when Reagan was elected president, and a poll last year
showed that 42 percent of respondents said they would not vote for
somebody who is 72 years old. That is a far higher percentage than
that of people who would not vote for a Mormon (24 percent), a
woman (11 percent), or a black person (5 percent).
McCain is not a tax cutter in a party that has made tax cuts one
of its most basic tenets for nearly 30 years. Not only did he vote
against President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 —
cuts that clearly are responsible for the booming economy of the
past four-plus years — but just last week he told National
Review’s Rich Lowry that he was correct not to vote for those
tax cuts.
Then, of course, there is the large and passionate segment of
the Republican electorate that wants to get tough against illegal
immigration, and they have good reason to consider John McAmnesty
to be not just against them but a highly disagreeable
archenemy.
And speaking of which, McCain seems almost constitutionally
unable to disagree without being disagreeable. When he disagrees
with somebody on just about any issue, he gives the sense of being
so angry that he is having trouble not jumping out of his own skin
to wring the other person’s neck.
Witness his politically effective but completely cheap shot at
Mitt Romney a couple of debates back when Romney made what actually
was a reasonable point about the dangers of discussing the specific
procedures used in various forms of “waterboarding” terrorist
suspects.
In the same debate, McCain vociferously attacked Rudy Giuliani
for supposedly being against the line item veto. McCain was wrong
and Giuliani right that the form of item-veto at issue was
dangerously unconstitutional legislation. (I write this as somebody
who has been writing columns in favor of line item vetoes for a
full quarter century. Even I, an item-veto supporter, saw from the
start that the version supported by McCain was unconstitutional.)
But right or wrong, McCain’s demeanor was far too aggressive for
the case at issue.
In short, McCain is an angry old man.
THEN THERE ARE McCain’s weaknesses (from a conservative standpoint)
on government regulation and on judges. On the first topic, what it
pretty much boils down to is that if something moves, McCain wants
to regulate it. He wants to regulate campaign speech, anything
having to do with the environment, smoking, the price of medicines
(interfering with free-market savings), oil drilling in Alaska,
securities trading, and other things.
On judges, McCain repeatedly boasts about being a main mover
behind the “Gang of 14” that supposedly helped garner approval for
President Bush’s nominees. The numbers say otherwise.
With a tiny Republican Senate majority in 2003 and 2004, the
Senate approved 19 of Bush’s appeals court nominees while blocking
12. But with the Gang of 14 operating in 2005 and 2006, the Senate
approved only 16 appeals court nominees (plus two Supreme Court
nominees) while again blocking 12 — even though the party’s Senate
majority was much bigger, with 55 seats versus just 51 seats in the
previous Congress.
What’s worse, other than the three nominees immediately approved
through the Gang’s deal, the few other post-Gang nominees who were
approved tended to be less solidly conservative than the ones
approved in the previous Congress.
The simple fact is that the Gang of 14 “saved” a “right” to
filibuster judicial nominations to death that Republicans have
never, ever used, while the alternative to the Gang would
have been to deny the Democrats the unconstitutional filibuster
option they had grievously abused.
Conservatives were not helped by the Gang. We were mugged.
SUCH REGULAR MUGGINGS of conservatives by McCain helps explain why
so many in the conservative movement are unmoved by McCain’s story
of personal heroism, his stances against wasteful pork barrel
spending, and his undeniable leadership on matters of defense.
In contrast to McCain and Huckabee, the three other “major” GOP
candidates — Giuliani, Romney, and Fred Thompson — all actually
governed very much as conservatives when they had the chance. And
Thompson has a record of both talking and walking the solid
conservative line that is almost entirely unblemished by any
heresies against the most basic of conservative issue stances.
(Long-shot Duncan Hunter, meanwhile, has a quarter-century record
as a conservative leader on taxes, defense, and immigration.)
Iowans in their caucuses and New Hampsherites in their primary
have the first chances to winnow the Republican field. They would
be doing the whole country a great disservice if they winnow one or
more of the real conservatives out of the race, while boosting the
chances of the two candidates who have done the most to poke the
eyes of the Reaganites.
