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I can respect conservatives who go down the checklist of issues and find John McCain preferable to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. That's a perfectly fine reason to vote for him rather than a liberal Democrat in the general election. But the fact that "Mac Changed Minds" is less a reflection of his underwhelming, patronizing speech -- Reagan, blah blah, Burke, blah blah, did I mention Reagan? -- than their desire to be convinced now that he is the certain nominee.

Conservatives are like Charlie Brown and Republicans are like Lucy with the football. Too often we accept soothing rhetoric and get bigger government, cultural drift, and a politics continually moving to the left. That's certainly what we got from a president who spoke conservative lingo more comfortably than McCain in the past decade.

Sure, politics is the art of the possible. It's important to oppose Hillary or Obama. I respect McCain supporters like Tom Coburn. I even like John McCain himself on a personal level. But why do we have to delude ourselves that the lesser evil is anything other than that? Conservatism is indeed the realm of ideas, not just electoral politics. Let's allow 2008 to sort itself out and get on with the task of reinvigorating conservative policy ideas for the next few decades. The next president, whoever he or she is, will not be of much help in that area. Neither will we if we ignore ideas and instead focus entirely on elections.

topics:
John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Conservatism