Wes Riddle's Horse Sense Column #371

McCain’s Loss Republicans’ Gain
Wes Riddle

Senator John McCain ran a good race in a year that, by all accounts and historic markers, was going to be for the Democrats. When the economy tanked, there was no hope left in numbers. Having said that, his accomplishment as a campaigner was quite remarkable for his having been an agent of Republican disunity through much of the race and for years before. Everyone knows McCain was the dead last choice for a nominee in Texas, and the base still rallied to him! His choice of Governor Palin helped, as did the emerging and stark contrast to the Democrat opponent. Today voters set aside their lingering questions of patriotism, about origins, Marxist ideology and plain bad associations, to give the president-elect our benefit of doubt, well earned and deserved. The electoral landslide and corresponding gains in Congress are such that they give him a political mandate if indeed any president should have one. Moreover, Obama said that he hears the voices of those who did not elect him, that he will be their president too. Expectations and hope are coming from all directions. Virtually everyone wishes him well and to tell the truth, it might just be the best thing for Republicans.

Obama is already being called the black Kennedy. That means a lot to liberals in this country: a personification of hope, a promise of equal justice, and the spreading of wealth around. His triumph is akin to Reagan in key respects. Only a few years after Watergate, President Carter had become so unpopular in office that it gave rise to the Reagan Revolution. President George W. Bush’s tenure, his second term in particular, were so unpopular it gave rise to an Obama Revolution. If Obama doesn’t overplay his mandate or try to enact extreme radical policies, he could very well consolidate the Democratic majority for twenty years to come—and diffuse potential political backlash. Meantime, Republicans will have time to think, as well as for inevitable political infighting. They are going to seek internal scapegoats and factions to blame for defeat. The ins will be outs, and the Republican Party that emerges four years from now is likely to be different in important respects from what went into the 2008 election cycle.
Not only will it not resemble the neoconservative faction leading Bush to ruin, it is doubtful it will resemble McCain very much either. Remember McCain came to national prominence as a “maverick” Republican, meaning he championed controversial causes and policies affronting many parts of the Republican coalition. Indeed, he was one of two GOP senators, who voted against the 2001 Bush tax cuts and one of three who opposed reductions in 2003. Senator McCain co-authored legislation for extensive regulations related to the environment. In 2001 he and Senators Ted Kennedy and John Edwards introduced the Patient’s Bill of Rights that included expensive mandates for health coverage. Overall the Senator from Arizona has shown little respect for the free market and had little appeal to economic conservatives. Social and religious conservatives too, who remember the 2000 primaries warmed up to him even less, remembering that he called them “agents of intolerance” and suggested their religious leaders had no place in American politics. McCain also co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which passed over the opposition of 80 percent of congressional Republicans! The reason is that law was designed to restrict political speech of groups at the core of the Republican Party coalition: the National Rifle Association, as well as anti-abortion organizations and businesses. Few in the Republican Party on the right will mourn McCain’s loss this past November 4th.

A prominent McCain sympathizer, The New York Times’ David Brooks, had predicted a President McCain would change not only the nation but also the GOP. He felt people and groups who worked for the Reagan victories and also 1994 Republican return to power would find themselves exiled. McCain’s loss has given them a new lease as it were. McCain styled himself a maverick, whose appeal to independents and Democrats this season would make up lost GOP votes. Except for pressure from the base and strong advice to sidestep outright political suicide, his inclination had actually been to choose his close friend Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a former Democrat to be his running mate! Independents and Democrats this year wanted change, however, and sixty percent of independents voted for Obama.

McCain wasn’t about change, and the voters saw through the smoke and mirrors. Senator McCain was just as much a hawk on Iraq as President Bush. Of course the irony is that the military surge worked so well there were no U.S. casualties for the entire month before the election. The issue receded entirely from people’s minds. The economy took its place, and McCain had as much principled opposition to government spending as President Bush, which is to say none at all. McCain never did answer Obama’s query: “Name one economic policy of President Bush you weren’t for!” McCain differed from the status quo only in his willingness to tax more. Indeed, McCain was the standard bearer of big-government conservatism: taxing and spending us into the drink at home and crusading stupidly for democracy in foreign lands, while reinvigorating the imperial presidency that brought Republicans low once before during the Nixon Era. This kind of faux conservatism deserved electoral defeat to match its abject political failure. The situation is grim short-term for Republicans, but the election defeat also opens a sorely needed debate about the principles of the Republican Party.