The McCain animus apparently transcends ideology. He has admitted his mistakes on immigration, and would not raise taxes, while his ACU ratings are good, and his ADA/ACLU scores are lousy – nearly the exact opposite of those of Obama and Clinton.
That’s Victor Davis Hanson, [1] this morning, making the usual, and fruitless arguments in support of John McCain.
Hanson, as long time readers of this blog will know very well indeed, has a very special place on my reading list… But this morning, I can’t help but think that Hanson’s own statements about preferring McCain aren’t backing him into a logical corner from which he cannot even attempt to break free. Example:
Again, the anger apparently derives from his gratuitous past snubbing of prominent conservatives (especially the notion that a rude McCain didn’t need them then, but a conciliatory one does now) and can’t be assuaged. At this point, I take the base’s claims they will sit out – or that Hillary or Obama is no worse than McCain-as genuine.
And given their furor expressed so far on the record, it would be almost impossible for them to recant, and they shouldn’t be defamed or coerced to try. No doubt they will lead the charge in a year or two against the liberal Supreme Court nominations of a President Obama or Clinton, or payroll and income tax increases, or a timetable withdrawal from Iraq. Just as McCain is trying to win them back now, they will try to win back then those who are turned off by the venom expressed against the likely Republican candidate. In either case, it will be nearly impossible to do so.
Given that situation, it seems unlikely that McCain will be elected. Someone as smart and experienced as Hanson will see this with a even little self-honesty applied.
Look; the last several cycles have been hair’s width close, close enough that nobody… and I mean nobody… is going to win without the full support of the base. Sorry, it’s just not going to happen. Since we appear to be moving in the direction of a brokered convention anyway, Republicans would seem to have a viable way to reverse the self-destructive trend the Rockefeller wing of the Republican party seems to have us set on, toward McCain.
Such a smart individual will also see, particularly given the statement…
Like many I prefer McCain but will gladly support Romney if he wins the nomination.
… that Romney is by far the better candidate in the general election, given those conditions, since even by Hanson’s lights, Romney is far more likely to pick up the support of the whole of the Republican party in a general election, than the candidate picked for us by the Democrats, the RINOS and the press. I submit that the number of McCain supporters who would vote Romney in the general election is far higher than the number of Romney supporters who would vote for McCain in the general election.
However, I note with interest Hanson is unwilling to directly SAY that. I can only attribute it to a degree of “He’s my guy” that is so deeply ingrained as to transcend logic.
And frankly, I’m getting more than a little tired of being told that those objections to McCain are illogical and deranged… a ploy which several, Hanson, Joyner [2]and a few others have been floating. So you can understand that I note with interest, Andy McCarthy’s reply to Hanson: [3]
McCain has not “admitted his mistakes on immigration.” He has not abandoned the goal of legalizing the status of illegal aliens (his biggest mistake since it incentivizes them to wait it out in the U.S. rather than go home and try to immigrate legally); and he refuses to say he would not sign his disastrous comprehensive reform if it crossed his desk as president.Sen. McCain says he won’t raise taxes, but he also says he opposed the Bush tax cuts because they were not matched by spending cuts – a claim that is demonstrably false (he opposed them on class-warfare grounds – because they benefited “the rich”).
Finally, Dr. Hanson’s point about judges may be the least persuasive of all.
Sen. McCain’s two major legal issues over the past decade have been the suppression of political speech (aka campaign finance reform) and the aforementioned extension of Geneva Convention and other legal protections to alien terrorists. Since 2002, these issues have been the subject of several Supreme Court decisions, most notably McConnell and Wisconsin Right to Life on campaign finance and Rasul and Hamdan on rights for enemy combatants. In each of those cases, McCain’s ardent position was the polar opposite of what he refers to as “strict construction” of the law. In each of those cases, McCain’s positions were adopted by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer – the liberal wing of the court (Justice Souter, by the way, is the gift that keeps on giving whose nomination was championed by Warren Rudman -a top McCain adviser previously floated by the senator as a potential Attorney General in a McCain administration.) The conservative justices the senator claims to regard as models roundly rejected McCain’s legal theories.
So, not only is there a deeply ingrained objection to McCain, but there’s very logical, and very reasonable objections to McCain… reasons and objections which have yet to be answered at all, much less factually. It amazes me that the normally quite logical Hanson isn’t seeing this.
Related: Dr. Sanity [4], TBogg [5] and Classical Values [6]