Let’s get the two defensible things Walter Shapiro says in his
latest Salon column
out of the way. Yes, there is a contradiction between trying to
replicate George W. Bush’s campaigns and the John McCain 2000
campaign, and it’s one McCain has even at this late date failed
to resolve. Yes, there is a strong conservative case to be made
against many of the Bush administration’s policies, including
some that are popular among self-described conservatives. The
rest of Shapiro’s piece is utter nonsense.
Shapiro recycles the conventional wisdom that McCain “decided
from the outset that he would get right — very right-wing —
with the Republican base.” Let’s unpack this extreme swing to the
right. McCain gave the commencement address at Liberty
University, making nice with “agent of intolerance” Jerry Falwell
— but also gave the exact same speech at the far-left New School
for Social Research. It’s true that McCain didn’t want the
religious right’s active opposition in the primaries. Neither did
Rudy “Meet My New Friend Pat Robertson” Giuliani. But there was
no major shift in either his policies or his rhetoric that
accompanied his trip to Liberty. This is akin to saying that
Barack Obama turned into a right-wing Christianist by virtue of
appearing at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, an argument no one
this side of Andrew Sullivan would take seriously.
Then there is the problem of the tax cuts. It’s true that it is
difficult to campaign on making tax cuts permanent when you voted
against them in the first place, but this is hardly the stuff of
right-wing extremism. The 2001 Bush tax cuts were supported by no
fewer than 12 Democratic senators as well as liberal
Republican-turned-independent Jim Jeffords. Only McCain, then
functionally a hawkish moderate Democrat, and Lincoln Chafee, the
most liberal Republican in the Senate, joined a majority of
Democrats in voting no. If McCain had supported these tax cuts,
along with the much more pro-growth 2003 tax cuts, he would have
had an easier time distinguishing himself from Obama on the tax
issue. But if he was openly calling for the tax cuts to expire,
as Shapiro implies he should be doing, McCain’s task would have
been even harder.
Shapiro similarly misreads McCain’s path to the nomination. It’s
true that McCain held on to anti-Bush Republicans — including,
implausibly, Republicans and independents who oppose the Iraq war
— and that he benefited from the Bush coalition being split
three ways by Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Mike Huckabee. But
McCain got just enough of the voters who opposed him in 2000 to
make a difference. He improved among conservative Christians, won
self-described Republicans in Florida, and was able to knock out
enough of his stronger opponents before he could be clobbered in
the closed primaries. He was able to avoid antagonizing
economic/social conservatives while holding onto his coalition of
hawks and moderates at the same time.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that McCain could have won
the nomination by running the anti-Republican campaign that
Shapiro recommends. Who would be voting for McCain now? The fact
is, the strongest McCain has ever been in the national polls was
when he picked Sarah Palin and united the base around him. Some
of this was convention bounce. The base isn’t sufficient to win
an election. But neither can you count on swing voters to deliver
victory if you don’t first secure the base. Instead Shapiro says
that McCain should have turned his convention into a debacle by
picking Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge and forcing a conservative
walkout. That might have won the crucial Walter Shapiro vote, but
it would have lost McCain the election just as surely as talking
about nothing other than Bill Ayers for three months would have.
Lieberman is a pro-choice liberal hawk. Ridge isn’t even much of
a hawk — in Congress in the 1980s, he supported nulcear freeze,
opposed aid to the Contras, opposed the MX missile, and opposed
much of the Reagan defense buildup. Either choice would have made
Bob Barr a factor in this race. In 1948, Harry Truman was staring
down a minority regional faction of his party over civil rights.
Sixty years later, McCain would have been picking a fight with a
majority of his party.
Finally, the notion McCain would be better off as a deficit hawk
is absurd. Obama only mentions the deficit to criticize the Bush
tax cuts and is not running on a deficit-reduction platform.
McCain, by contrast, talks about earmarks and excessive spending
where ever he goes. Should he have doubled down on this message?
A serious deficit hawk would reduce entitlement spending. Shapiro
presumably also wants McCain to talk about higher taxes. What is
Obama hitting McCain for in his ads right now? Supposedly cutting
Medicare and taxing health care benefits.
But if McCain had run the kind of campaign Shapiro suggests, I
suppose Salon could have run some nice pieces on what a
good loser he is.
