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You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2008 / Why Not McCain

Why Not McCain

by John Cole|  February 12, 20089:28 am| 27 Comments

This post is in: Election 2008, Excellent Links, Politics

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Jon Henke has a interesting piece up about the freak-out over McCain, and points out exactly what has confused me the last couple of weeks:

So, why is the Right so angry about McCain? I understand the vehemence of the disagreements, but the anger – including my own, in the past – is disproportionate.

For instance, McCain is perceived as an almost wholly unacceptable Republican (primarily) for his positions on immigration and campaign finance reform, with additional anger directed at him over a few other issues. Yet, President Bush presided over/supported, e.g., No Child Left Behind, the immigration reform bill, McCain-Feingold, the Medicare Drug Bill, a massive expansion of federal spending, egregious agriculture and energy bills, a badly conceived and conducted war in Iraq, and myriad other anti-limited government positions. And he did most of that with a Republican Congress.

Bush is worse in almost every respect – having actively introduced and supported outrageous violations of the putative ideals of the Right – but he is not regarded with the same anger. Why?

Years from now, when people look back at this administration, Bush will have turned out to be less conservative than Bill Clinton in almost every regard, yet he gets a pass. Not only that, his most ardent supporters, people who absolutely refuse to say a bad word about Bush are the same folks who reject McCain.

Go read the whole thing.

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27Comments

  1. 1.

    LiberalTarian

    February 12, 2008 at 9:31 am

    The sliver in someone else’s eye is a whole lot more fascinating than the log in your own.

  2. 2.

    cleek

    February 12, 2008 at 9:37 am

    why? because Republicans are stupid.

    does anyone here really think that someone who still approves of Bush (as 70+% of Republicans still do) is capable of rational thought?

  3. 3.

    Wilfred

    February 12, 2008 at 9:37 am

    George Bush, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney John McCain is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

  4. 4.

    Fe E

    February 12, 2008 at 9:39 am

    John, just remember, being a wingnut is its own reward–what you believe or do doesn’t need to make a lick of sense. Does the Right’s freakout hatred on McCain make any sense, or even show any consistency of thought? No.

    But since when did that matter to them?

  5. 5.

    GSD

    February 12, 2008 at 9:40 am

    All of those issues don’t matter. The ultimate aphrodesiac for the authoritarian rightists is military power and that trumps all else.

    On that front, there has never been a more bellicose and power wielding leader in US history.

    Barring the series of nations that Roosevelt engaged in WWI Bush has romped the US military all over the planet more than anyone.

    In his 7 years Bush has used direct US military action/intervention in:

    *Afghanistan.

    *Iraq

    *Somalia

    *Haiti

    *Pakistan

    *Yemen

    *Philipines

    *Liberia

    Bush has threatened military action in:

    *Iran

    *Syria

    Bush has offered military assistance in:

    *Thailand

    Bush has supported Israeli military action in:

    *Syria

    *Lebanon

    *Palestine

    Bush has pushed the Russians back into a defensive Cold War mode by advocating the placement of missile batteries on *Russia’s doorstep in *Poland.

    US foreign policy mavens close to Bush have placed *Cuba and *Venezuela on a short list of governments to overthrow.

    In the heat of the run up to war, Bush surrogates were advocating that *France be treated as an enemy.

    It will be John McCain’s bellicosity that wins over the GOP.

    -GSD

  6. 6.

    phein

    February 12, 2008 at 9:42 am

    Um, are you really this obtuse?

    Bush looted the treasury on behalf of people who own and front for the media, which controls the political discourse in this country. Therefore, he is a noble, gallant, principled, valiant, you pick’em.

    Has McCain promised to loot the treasury some more for them? He would not only have to repeal estate taxes, capital gains taxes, progressive taxation, and luxury taxes, but he’d have to give a rebate to anyone who makes over $1M per year. Pretty tall order for the next Republican hero.

  7. 7.

    Face

    February 12, 2008 at 9:42 am

    Years from now, when people look back at this administration, Bush will have turned out to be less conservative than Bill Clinton in almost every regard, yet he gets a pass.

    Years from now, he will certainly NOT get a pass. Historians will be brutal to this man. Any objective synopsis of his 8 years will be rife with examples of incompetence, law-breaking, secrecy, and arrogance.

    While no one says much now, just wait until after Bush no longer owns the ability to tap your phone or send in the FBI. People will speak and write much more freely about just how horrible a person and leader he was. His post-pres speaking circuit will be sparse and full of protests.

  8. 8.

    PK

    February 12, 2008 at 9:43 am

    The reason they hate McCain is because they simply hate! There is never a logic in their positions. When you are used to hating people you don’t really need reasons any more, you just need targets. They loved Giuliani because he was as vicious and unprincipled as themselves. They loved Romney because he was willing to become as vicious and unprincipled as themselves. Give it time! McCain will become what they want and then they will have their hero.

  9. 9.

    Xenos

    February 12, 2008 at 9:48 am

    Bush gets a pass from the CPAC crowd because he gives them all jobs. No matter how uneducated and unprepared someone might be, if they are ideologically pure, the get employed. It is all a matter of the spoils system. Follow the money.

    For all of McCain’s faults (and they are legion), he is not going to put the CPAC assholes in charge. Then, since the consumers of CPAC orthodox ideology (eg, the Fox News watchers) are authoritarian sheep, they hate McCain because they are told to, the same way they hate liberals without realizing that, by CPAC standards, Eisenhower and Reagan wopuld count as liberals.

  10. 10.

    Zifnab

    February 12, 2008 at 9:49 am

    That, at least, explains how we are hemorrhaging half our damned discretionary budget on military spending. What is it now? $600 billion/year before war supplementals?

    I think its encapsulated best in John Stewart’s America To The Rescue!

    Seriously, a Dem is going to step into office and have our budget balanced inside three weeks assuming he/she has the balls to cut off this ridiculous war spending. Republicans will have a pants-shitting fit when we pull our troops out of Nicaragua or close a base in Mozambique or cut funding to ICBMs in Poland, I’m sure, but it’ll be amazing to watch how fast our foreign policy and spending come around when guided by someone who isn’t a complete jackhole moron.

  11. 11.

    Dennis - SGMM

    February 12, 2008 at 9:53 am

    It may be that most Republicans, if they were honest with themselves, are furious with Bush for turning the Republican brand into a joke and for utterly destroying any chance of a Permanent Republican Majority(Remember that one?). Republicans habitually blame some “other”; the press, bad luck (Katrina), faulty intelligence, ad nauseum, when things go wrong for them. Maybe McCain is the “other” who is taking the heat for Bush.

  12. 12.

    Billy K

    February 12, 2008 at 10:03 am

    It is all a matter of the spoils system. Follow the money.

    This makes as much sense as anything. When all is said and done, the knoitted mess we call wingnuttery is really just a front for making the rich richer. McCain hasn’t shown enough fealty to that truth.

  13. 13.

    wvng

    February 12, 2008 at 10:06 am

    The Carpetbagger has a nice companion post on ‘Mitt Romney as the new ‘face of conservatism.’ The two, taken together, simply prove beyond doubt that this bunch is driven by pack driven “beliefs” and not the plain truth staring them in the face. Congrats to John C. for shaking this burden off – you must look back in utter disbelief that you were once one of them.

    Quite remarkable.

  14. 14.

    Ron Beasley

    February 12, 2008 at 10:08 am

    As I said over at My place

    The conservatives give specific reasons why they dislike John McCain – campaign finance, immigration and voting against tax cuts, but the real reason, McCain’s ultimate sin is that he has never acknowledged their relevance or recognized their power.

    Maverick = refusal to suck up.

  15. 15.

    Z

    February 12, 2008 at 10:21 am

    Its all about torture, and then there is something about him ACTUALLY being a war hero that makes the little pansy’s look bad.

  16. 16.

    cleek

    February 12, 2008 at 10:24 am

    happy Amnesty Day, all y’all!

  17. 17.

    Doug

    February 12, 2008 at 10:30 am

    It’s a loyalty thing. In a cult, fealty to the leader is far more important than adherence to any particular bit of dogma. The various heresies will be used as pretexts for the hate, but the disloyalty is the real reason.

  18. 18.

    Califlander

    February 12, 2008 at 10:46 am

    McCain actually seems to get along with, and occasionally work with, liberal Democrats. That makes him a traitor to conservatism.

    True conservatism nowadays is epitomized by Ann Coulter, who advocates killing people in order to intimidate liberals.

  19. 19.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    February 12, 2008 at 10:58 am

    In a cult, fealty to the leader is far more important than adherence to any particular bit of dogma.

    Nail, meet hammer. The post-modern GOP is little more than a religious cult at this point.

  20. 20.

    RSA

    February 12, 2008 at 11:22 am

    Years from now, when people look back at this administration, Bush will have turned out to be less conservative than Bill Clinton in almost every regard, yet he gets a pass.

    I wouldn’t have put it this way, because it buys into the rightwing fantasy that Bush has been a miserable failure less successful than he might have been because he’s too liberal. He’s not; it’s hard for me to say what he is without descending into BDS.

  21. 21.

    libarbarian

    February 12, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Bush showed them “respect”. McCain does not.

    They don’t deserve any, but they sure as hell want it.

  22. 22.

    mark

    February 12, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    Bush will have turned out to be less conservative than Bill Clinton in almost every regard, yet he gets a pass.

    Bush isn’t a republican or even a conservative in the Eisenhower sense of the word. He is a right wing authoritarian. He’s what republicanism/conservativism has evolved into since Goldwater, pushed by “intellectuals” like William F. Buckley. These are the same people that Eisenhower referred to as a “fringe element” of the party when he was president. They have taken over the republican party and that is why Bush gets a pass. He’s one of them. You just haven’t been paying attention.

  23. 23.

    jenniebee

    February 12, 2008 at 2:12 pm

    He really does answer his own question. McCain is either a Roosevelt or a Goldwater Republican, depending on who you ask. Those kinds of conservatives have largely disappeared among Republican activists, and only their rhetoric survives to cover the actions of the Reagan/Bush devotees.

    So here’s the breakdown of Republicans:

    * Rank and file social conservatives, who want prayer in schools and everybody speaking with the same accent
    * Rank and file limited-government conservatives, who want limited government and thought that was what they were voting for all along (wtf?)
    * Actual movement conservatives, who are machiavellian to the core and who view the first two kinds as “dupes” and “tools,” to quote the very first movement conservative I ever met, back in the day when they were a rare breed. These people believe that actual power is derived from the perception of power and that actual reality is created out of the perception of reality, which is to say that there is no moral restriction on lying because every lie is an incipient truth. I’d kind of like to take these people, give them all cardboard “guns” and push them into some of the war zones they’ve created. Just, you know, to test the limits of that “power of perception” thing.

    The third kind is upset now because they couldn’t pull together a decent candidate who could act like all things to all conservative men, and so the dupes and tools have nominated two of their own instead. The natives are getting uppity and don’t know their place anymore… what ruling class in history hasn’t freaked out over that? How much worse when the elites exert control through nothing more substantial than… the perception that they’re in control?

  24. 24.

    Aaron

    February 12, 2008 at 2:38 pm

    My comment on the q and o post:

    Always interesting to come see the freak show on the right….
    Limited government delusionists.
    How many years of republican government have we just had. And what have they cut? What have they even tried to cut? What government programs and agencies get cut under the Republicans delusional belief in ’limited government’.
    Face facts: Big government works. big government defeated the Nazis, Big government defeated the soviet union.
    Big government is so efficient that not even republicans who have campaigned for years on ’smaller government’ b.s. can find something to cut.
    Of course, Republicans really hate our country and our government and support filling our government with incompetents, cronies and industry lobbyists.
    Oh look, over there, the people who were in charge of our nation security in 2001. In September. On the 11th. Bang up job they did.
    And they are still in government. Still with the support of the people who hate America- the Republican party.

  25. 25.

    gypsy howell

    February 12, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    Bush will have turned out to be less conservative than Bill Clinton in almost every regard

    Sorry conservatives, Bush is all yours. He’s the perfect embodiment of what the principles of conservatism devolve into once given enough power in government. Reagan started it, Bush is just perfecting it. He’s one of you. Deal with it.

  26. 26.

    maxbaer (not the original)

    February 12, 2008 at 6:32 pm

    It’s all appearance for these guys. Reagan looked presidential. If you squint, Romney looks a little like Reagan. Bush looks good in a flight suit and codpiece. McCain, despite actually having walked the walk, wouldn’t look good.

  27. 27.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    February 13, 2008 at 1:41 am

    There is a very good reason why the tangled up mess of hypocrisy and contradictions that is the modern GOP cannot be explained in any logical fashion. It is because ideology (by this I mean policy oriented issues like tax rates, limited or expansive govt., states rights, etc.) doesn’t matter any more – we just stll think it does because we haven’t yet figured out that we are entering a different era.

    Trying to understand 21st century US politics through the lens of 20th century ideology is a fool’s errand. It isn’t about ideology anymore – it is about tribalism pure and simple. Red team vs. Blue team. The Old Confederacy and its cultural outliers vs. the Union. NASCAR vs. Mountain biking.

    We are accustomed to making sense of the Democrats and Republicans using terms like liberal and conservative because that’s how things worked for most of the 20th Century, but the 20th Century may turn out to have been a very unusual time in US politics compared with what came before it, and poor guide for what lies ahead.

    John, if you want to get a better handle on this please run, don’t walk, to the nearest bookstore, and get your hands on a copy of the book The Cousins’ War by Kevin Phillips. That’s the same Kevin Phillips who authored Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1972 and since then has repented of his handywork, flipped over into raving moonbat territory, and now cranks out a seemingly never ending series of increasingly shrill books laying down teh hate on the Bush family.

    The Cousins’ War is an older (publ. in 1999) and more serious work of his that concentrates on his real area of expertise – political demographics. I can’t do justice to a 600+ page book here, but the short and relevant summary would be that according to Phillips a large chunk of American political history has been Red team vs. Blue team, for almost 400 years now, and this conflict has outlived a whole series of different ideological battles over the issues of the day, during the 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The ideologies change, but the players remain the same.

    Starting with Charles I and the Parliamentarians in the 1630’s, we’ve had these two teams (really broad groupings of loosely affiliated and overlapping cultural, ethnic and religious groups) at each other’s throats: one of them (the Red team) tends to be elitist, aristocratic, traditionalist, and favors a strong monarch (can you say “unitary executive”), the other (Blue team) tends to be populist, anti-traditional in some respects, most notably with regard to nonconformist religious beliefs (today that would include atheism), and favors a strong legislature (hello “congressional oversight”).

    Not content with spending much of the mid-17th century turning Merrie Olde England into a smoking charnel house (since the Germans were having so much fun with the 30 Years War, why not us?), people from both sides migrated across the Atlantic bringing their quarrels and hatreds along with them. During and after the English Civil War these groups settled in different parts of the American colonies – basically Red team took the southern colonies, Blue team took New England, while the mid-Atlantic colonies and Pennsylvania were a mixed up mess. The baggage they unpacked here in the New World included very large doses of political paranoia based on religious differences, which were bound to lead to trouble sooner or later, and perhaps a wee bit o’ ethnic cleansing just for fun (and not just against the Native Americans, either).

    The most eye opening part of Phillip’s book is where he puts the American Revolution of the 1760’s – 1780’s under his microscope, and shows that if you pay very close attention (by state, county and district, by ethnicity, religion, and a host of other demographic factors) to exactly who was a revolutionary patriot and who remained loyal to the British, it looks an awful lot like an American Civil War, with the British on the Red team side of the conflict.

    The strange thing is that if Phillips (and the historians he cites) is to be believed, America in the 1780’s resembles Iraq today (with multiple competing groups engaged in vicious reprisals against each other, plus a side of mayhem against the occupying power every now-n-then just to keep the pot boiling – see especially what it was like in the Carolinas) a lot more closely than what you were probably taught about the Revolutionary War back in high school history. Don’t think “Tories tarred-n-feathered and sent packing to Canada” – instead think more like Bosnia in the 1990’s, only with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to redeem it all in the end.

    So anyway, it was Red team vs. Blue team again, only this time on our side of the Atlantic (Blue team won of course). Fast forward another 120 years and you have basically the exact same conflict (in terms of who fought whom) breaking out again in 1860, this time over a different set of issues. As we know, by 1865 the Blue team had stomped the Red team yet again (they never seem to learn). Phillips then goes on to trace the Red vs. Blue struggle all the way through the remainder of the 19th century and up through the traces they left behind in US voting patterns as recently as the 1930’s.

    What does that have to do with our politics today? Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the American Century (the 20th). In the late 1800’s, the Republican Party was the Blue team party – they dominated the North, the Upper Midwest and parts of the Far West. The Democrats were the Red team party, dominating the states of the Old Confederacy. Now fast forward to 2008. WTF? Somehow the two parties have exchanged places with each other, to the point where today a New England Republican is an endangered species and the GOP’s last bastion is the solid South. What the heck happened?

    Political ideology is how they swapped places. FDR used class warfare to stick the knife into the GOP, leveraging away large chunks of formerly solid GOP territory, especially in New England, New York and the West. 40 years later first Nixon, then Reagan returned the favor, peeling the South away from the Democrats. During this time political ideology was very important to both parties, both as a weapon against the other party to break down their coalition, and also in a defensive sense, since they could no longer fall back on a stable regional base for support. The two parties have spent the last 80 years in a state of motion, changing their regional and cultural identities as they swapped punches, but now that process has more or less gone to completion.

    Ideology was a tool for carrying out a task which is now largely finished. There isn’t much left to iron out between the Dems and the Reps, they’ve basically returned to the regional Red team / Blue team patterns that held for most of the 18th and 19th centuries. That is why the GOP’s ideology doesn’t make any sense – they do not need it any more. The Democrats seem to be headed in the general direction of ideological incoherence as well, they just haven’t gone quite as far down that path as the GOP (probably because the Dems haven’t had a leader as “gifted” as GWB, if you know what I mean).

    If Phillips is correct in his interpretation of Anglo-American political history, then it seems reasonable to predict that the Democrats and Republicans will now settle down into a pattern of competition on the basis of regional and cultural identity politics, rather than the starkly ideological contests that dominated most of the 20th Century. If there is a resurgence in ideological conflicts between the parties, it will probably come from the populist wing of the GOP, trying to use class warfare to break out of their southeastern regional ghetto, replicating what FDR accomplished for the Democrats in the 1930’s. Huckabee’s rhetoric about actually caring about the poor is a better indicator of how the GOP might break out of this trap, than any of claptrap the corporate tools at CPAC were bleating and mooing about this year.

    So it makes a whole lot more sense if, when you hear a GOPer today call themselves a “Conservative”, just translate that in your head to “Confederate”. Lincoln would be so proud.

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