McCain and His Friends - John McCain

National Review, March 20, 2000

John McCain, like George W. Bush, is a moderately conservative Republican. A reasonable case can be made that McCain would be the stronger candidate in the fall, and that this consideration outweighs his recent irregularities. Some McCain supporters, however, are making rather more grandiose claims for him than merely his prospective strength against Gore.

William Kristol and David Brooks of The Weekly Standard argue that McCain is an avatar of a new kind of politics that will revitalize or even replace a moribund Republican establishment and a decrepit conservative movement. Euthanizing the existing party and movement, they seem to be saying, would be a good thing.

Now, one might think that McCain would shrink from the politics of parricide, and he is careful to provide himself rhetorical cover by his regular obeisances to the blood of Reagan, which runs rich in his own veins. Yet he travels in the direction of the freshly baptized leader. The day after he denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, one of his lieutenants told the story in so many words to the New York Times. McCain's campaign is creating a new party, he confirmed-a party that will give less precedence to conservative ideals, more to those put forth by Ross Perot's secularist supporters. It's easy to see the appeal of this transformation to such as the editors of The New Republic. They have endorsed McCain because, "if his crusade succeeds, America will have two parties advocating some reasonable approximation of the public good rather than one." Exit the private good. McCain's appeal, for them, is his rejection of substantial tax cuts. That departure from Republican orthodoxy alone slides leftward the political playing field. One doubts that this is the objective Messrs. Kristol and Brooks have in mind.

Yet it is difficult to know what they do have in mind. Kristol and Brooks do acknowledge, parenthetically, that McCain's rhetoric is sometimes "hyperbolic and demagogic." They concede that his campaign's "themes and principles" are not yet "fully developed into a governing agenda." But the imperative is to get rid of a conservative movement that, writes Kristol, "in many ways has become an obstacle to achieving conservative goals." In what ways? What goals would McCain make achievable? McCain's "themes and principles" turn out to be patriotism and reform. Under such flags, any agenda is imaginable. In their vagueness, these "themes" bring to mind the earlier call attempted by Kristol and Brooks, to construct something dubbed "national-greatness conservatism." That's different from the grand old flag in being less moralistic, less apprehensive about the growth of the public sector; and then there are traces of green in the dream, right down to the public parks.

Kristol and Brooks tell us that in breaking away from the Republican establishment McCain is merely following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. But defying the establishment isn't an ontological good. Opposing Tom DeLay, with the motive of passing McCain's campaign-finance reforms, is not the same as opposing Bob Michel's tax hikes, or opposing Gerald Ford's sometime appeasement of the Soviet Union. It is not a serious argument, though it can be made to sound persuasive, to call for destroying an institution on the assumption that a better institution will arise from the ashes. An anarchic passion to smash is not a conservative impulse. Since most conservatives have declined to take this leap in the dark, Kristol and Brooks are now criticizing them as shortsighted and even stupid. Here's Brooks, in Newsweek, on conservatives who support Bush: "They look out over that GOP coalition-the gun lovers, the religious conservatives, the free marketeers-and they think that adds up to 51 percent of the electorate. . . . These people detest McCain because liberals don't hate him." McCain supporters, by contrast, know that "it's just a fact that the old GOP coalition no longer commands a majority."

But these are straw men. Defined as Brooks defines it, the GOP coalition never added up to 51 percent of the electorate, even under Reagan. Nobody denies that in order to win an election a Republican presidential candidate has to appeal to millions of people who do not consider themselves conservatives, let alone part of a movement. Nor do conservatives want liberals to hate their champions. The concern about McCain is that he seems afraid to risk irritating liberals, who have generated so much of the support for his candidacy.

The New York Post makes a different argument for McCain: that he would restore the nation's sense of honor. But McCain has vitiated that credential, by encouraging the preposterous insinuation that because Bush spoke at Bob Jones University he is furtively anti-Catholic. McCain has compounded the offense, first by denying that he had anything to do with the famous calls and then denying that that was the image the callers were attempting to convey.

McCain's denunciation of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, meanwhile, was both deceitful and opportunistic. Opportunistic because McCain was obviously trying to curry favor with liberals by trashing two religious conservatives long past their peaks of influence. Deceitful because he affected to be concerned only with Robertson and Falwell. They are guilty of "political tactics of division and slander" that "shame our faith, our party, and our country." But what have they done that sharply distinguishes them from Gary Bauer, who stood with McCain during his speech? The only distinction McCain drew was that Robertson and Falwell oppose him and his campaign-finance plan, while Bauer supports both. The difference hardly justifies McCain's likening of Falwell and Robertson to Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton.