Many conservatives realistic enough to know there will never be
“another Reagan” nevertheless wish at least for another Barry
Goldwater. They don’t realize that we already have one. His name is
John McCain.
Granted, McCain is more like the Goldwater of 1981 than like the
conservative standard bearer of 1964. At age 72, Goldwater was,
like the 72-year-old McCain today, a former conservative firebrand
who long since had become a source of frustration for many
conservatives. He actually started frustrating them during his
presidential campaign 17 years earlier when he summarily replaced
the mastermind who won him the nomination, Clif White, with an
entirely different campaign team for the fall — and then proceeded
to run a campaign as if he didn’t really care about winning, but
just about spouting off. He also never repaid Ronald Reagan’s great
support for his campaign with anything even approaching loyalty in
return, going so far as to support Gerald Ford against Reagan for
the Republican nomination in 1976 and again withholding his support
for Reagan in the primaries in 1980. In fact, he also had lost
touch with his own constituents. Goldwater survived his own Senate
re-election campaign in 1980 by the skin of his teeth, pulled
across the finish line almost despite himself by the strength of
the Reagan landslide at the top of the ticket along with a
determined effort on his behalf by pro-life voters.
At least Goldwater was still pro-life in 1981. And he never gave
up his small-government predilections, nor his support for a strong
defense and for meeting the needs of individual servicemen.
Irascible, iconoclastic, sometimes a bit profane, always his own
man and nobody else’s, the Goldwater of 1981 was a curmudgeon’s
curmudgeon — but he still had a lot to offer his country, working
ceaselessly with Alabama Rep. Bill Nichols during Goldwater’s final
term to re-organize the military command structure in a way that
succeeded tremendously well when first put to a real test during
the Gulf War of 1991.
AS WITH GOLDWATER, so with McCain. Irascible, iconoclastic,
sometimes a bit profane, always his own man and nobody else’s,
McCain is a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon — but still with much to offer
his country. We all know, of course, why so many of us are so often
so angry with McCain — his sometimes bizarre heresies from
conservatism, his insulting language and hair-trigger temper toward
conservatives who disagree with him — but we spend too little time
acknowledging the man’s strengths. On those issues on which
Goldwater was strongest, about which he cared most deeply and on
which he was most identifiably conservative, McCain is as strong or
stronger than any national leader in the past 20 years.
Consider the fight against outrageous government spending. No
major party nominee since Goldwater, Reagan included, has been as
consistently and bravely dedicated to fiscal discipline as has
McCain. Last week he both made a superb campaign speech and penned
a hard-hitting column for the Chicago Tribune blasting the
bloated, irresponsible Farm Bill for which 80 percent of his
colleagues were cravenly voting. Likewise, McCain’s longstanding
record of opposing purely local pork barrel projects — “earmarks”
— is well known, and utterly unmatched. McCain also consistently
has opposed expansion of entitlement programs, which of course are
the biggest long-term fiscal problems facing this nation. Indeed,
entitlements collectively represent an absolutely deadly time bomb,
and McCain might be the only man in American politics today with
the will power, the moral standing, and the sheer cussedness needed
to defuse it.
Similarly, McCain has proposed the most free-market-oriented
health care reforms imaginable from a national party nominee during
a contentious campaign. And on taxes, the fact remains that McCain
has never, not once, supported an income-tax rate hike. He calls
for corporate tax deductions and seems genuinely committed to
fighting, really fighting, to make most of President Bush’s tax
cuts permanent.
Now there may be a problem with McCain and judges; I, for one,
do not believe that he cares enough about textualist judges to make
appointing them a priority. But even here the choice is clear: With
McCain, if we are unlucky, we will get appeals court and Supreme
Court judges and justices of the Sandra Day O’Connor/Anthony
Kennedy variety, or maybe like uber-moderate Lewis Powell; better
still, we may get lucky and get an occasional Sam Alito through the
Senate gauntlet. With Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, though, the
best we’ll ever get is another Stephen Breyer — and that’s only if
Obama/Clinton makes a mistake. Most likely, we’ll get William
Brennans and Ruth Bader Ginsburgs aplenty. I’ll take an O’Connor
any day over a crafty, heavily politicized Brennan.
Finally, nobody can doubt McCain’s love of country, his
dedication to a strong defense, his concern for our military
personnel, or his bedrock belief in American exceptionalism and
commitment to victory for the United States over its many dangerous
enemies.
These conservative virtues of McCain are no mere projections of
our own hopes. Instead, McCain has proved his embodiment of these
virtues through a lifetime of service.
YES, WE ALL KNOW how when McCain does disagree with conservatives,
he has seemed to take great delight in not just abandoning
conservatives, but of rubbing our
faces in it. We know that even when he tries to make amends, he
does almost all the talking and very little listening. We know he
can be an SOB. But we also know that on those occasions in which he
is our SOB, he can be a tremendously effective one. And on
most of the day-to-day issues that have defined conservatism for
the past 60 years, he has indeed been our SOB.
Forget 1981: Re-read Goldwater’s Republican National Convention
speech of 1964, when he accepted the nomination,
and you can easily imagine John McCain speaking all but about two
or three lines of the speech with passion and utter sincerity. (He
might stumble on Goldwater’s warnings against excessive regulation,
unfortunately.)
Particularly, portions of these passages from Goldwater’s speech
[emphases added] sound like a back-to-the-future channeling of
McCain’s consistent message throughout this current decade:
Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers
understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative
differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in
our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to
resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce
such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the
cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of
the people. And, so help us God, that is exactly what a Republican
president will do with the help of a Republican Congress.
It is further the cause of Republicanism to restore a clear
understanding of the tyranny of man over man in the world at large.
It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard
decisions in the illusion that a world of conflict will somehow
mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony, if we just
don’t rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression — and
this is hogwash. It is further the cause of Republicanism to remind
ourselves, and the world, that only the strong can remain free,
that only the strong can keep the peace.
John McCain is not a conservative champion. But he deeply believes,
and strongly champions, many conservative principles, many
Goldwaterite principles. We certainly could do worse than to be
stuck with him as our own, infuriating, headstrong, bullying,
honor-obsessed, indefatigable, and sometimes downright
inspirational SOB.
