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A meaningless win?
Amazed by John McCain’s primary win in South Carolina? Don’t be, says National Review contributor Michael Graham, because it means “almost nothing“:
Whether or not our nation’s screwy primary system is fixed in future election years, as many of us pray, the Palmetto State’s days of GOP glory are gone.
Florida is the new South Carolina.
Florida is the first level playing field of the 2008 GOP primaries. Iowa caucuses are like heaven (pardon the pun) to evangelicals; McCain was the unofficial “president of New Hampshire” and Mitt was a Michigan home boy.
South Carolina could have been a bellwether state yet again, but McCain simply has too much history there, and the conservative majority is far too divided. Florida will be the Rorschach Test of Republicans this year. Will it be a left-leaning mod like McCain or Giuliani? Or a GOP traditionalist like Thompson, Romney, or (sort of) Huckabee?
South Carolina won’t tell you. After an unbroken run of predicting winners, South Carolina in 2008 won’t tell us anything at all.
Graham says McCain may ultimately emerge as the front-runner, but it’s not going to happen in South Carolina where he “clearly doesn’t represent a majority of South Carolina Republicans, or Republicans anywhere, for that matter.”
back to top12 Comments to “A meaningless win?”
Better to read your David Brooks and recognize that the face of conservatism is more diverse. Also see Patrick Ruffini at Hugh Hewitt for sharper (i.e. more quantifiable) analysis.
The challenge for those who would term themselves Conservative is to translate Conservatism into a service to the general good, instead of a prescription. What has largely been missing from conservatism is this servant attitude. Instead we get another version of the liberal state, an “eat your broccoli because it’s good for you” attitude. The proof is that those who would move away from supposed orthodoxy — Messrs Huckabee and McCain — are also the most vilified among your kind (and the most embraced by the center).
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The virtual absense of Giuliani in the first five or six primaries was a boon for McCain. But now that Giuliani is more earnest in the Florida race, the moderate and Independent votes will be a bit more divided. And Thompson’s probable departure will clarify the more conservative (sort of) options.
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HARRIS wrote; “What has largely been missing from conservatism is this servant attitude.”
That’s a baseless myth, in my view. I see a strong “servant attitude” in the best of both the right and the left. With open eyes, I can see the good on both sides (though I come from the right by conviction and ideology). But those who fail to see a “servant attitude” in conservatism are simply being unfairly judgmental, in my view. It’s a mixed bag on both sides, but if anyone fails to see service, compassion, kindness, generosity and good intentions on the right, they just don’t have their eyes open.
And HARRIS, just maybe, we conservatives vote like conservatives mainly becasue we are conservative and we follow out convictions. This is by no means “proof” of less of a serving attitude. And I like broccholi.
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Actually, Joel, I was thinking of the policy positions that have often been (of late) a little too unilateral and so resistant to input from others of a more moderate or even liberal bent. And I would also note that I don’t consider dogmatism (the opp of a servant attitude) to be a characteristic of conservatism, per se. Nor for that matter, do I imagine that the same dogmatism is not found on the left.
A lack or failure of servant attitude is an affliction that comes to all entrusted with power, in business as well as in politics (or for that matter, even in the church).
And about Guiliani — I think that train has left the station. While he is moderate (of a sort) on social positions, he is pretty unflinching about security issues, this I think disturbs many in the moderate camp.
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Broccholi YUM!
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While McCain occasionally wanders off the reservation, he has an impressive lifetime rating from the Conservative Union of 82.3%.
McCain’s greatest appeal is his genuine integrity. He stuck by his unpopular view of the Iraq War during the nadir of the war, just as he held to an unpopular position on immigration.
Brett Stephen in a WSJ article today American Honor, argues that a McCain candidacy would be fundamentally about whether we should persevere in Iraq and win a victory with honor or follow the Democratic line of a precipitous withdrawal. He ends the article as follows:
These are some of the practical and ethical arguments for seeing the Iraq war through to a decent conclusion. But honor is a different, deeper matter. For the Democratic candidates in this race, it has only a conditional and tenuous relation to the word “victory” in its usual sense. If it means anything at all to them, it seems to be mainly in the sense of the good opinion of America’s traditional friends, many of whom opposed the Iraq venture from the start. This kind of honor, also known as ingratiation, is gained by improving America’s poll numbers in global opinion surveys.
There is another kind of honor, however, which is uniquely bestowed by one’s adversaries and enemies. It is the honor one acquires by defying temptations of popularity, by the acceptance of long odds, by suffering, by what is called the nobility of the last-ditch defense. It is the honor many Americans feel they lost in Vietnam, and which, through Mr. McCain’s not-so-improbable resurgence, they now seek to regain and make their own.
In my view in a national election McCain could decisively win on the issue of American honor alone.
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After getting Roved in SC eight years ago, it is a moral victory for McCain.
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Harris,
“Resistance to input” has long been a bipartisan problem. But I have seen a lot of exceptions to that on both sides during the current administration. A great example of listening to and working with the other side can be seen in the governor’s term of G. W. Bush in Texas.
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Joel
I would agree with you about then Gov. Bush. It was this history that recommended him to many in 2000. That he turned out to have — oh, what shall we call it?– a feisty stubborn streak came as something of a shock. At least for this Dem, there was a sense of a sort of “bait and switch” to it all.
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Thanks, Harris, for the David Brooks article.
I think that conservatives have appeared unified because the Dems have proffered such lousy candidates for the past two elections. We also must not forget that GWB ran as a moderate. It was only after he was elected that he became a tool of the religious right and their “manifest destiny” notions of foreign policy.
But we Eisenhower/Rockefeller/Ford Republicans have not disappeared from the GOP. And with John McCain, we see the return of common-sense conservatism after years of ideological/millenarian conservatism.
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#6 Peter,
I have no problem with McCain’s views on the war or his stand on Campaign finance reform where he took heat from the left on the war and the right on McCain Feingold. He is stellar on Opposing earmarks and cutting wasteful spending.
I have problems with McCain on Immigration, Torture, his opposition to the Bush tax cuts and Bush’s SC appointees and other more minor social issues issues as well as the his forming the gang of moderate 14.
All the Republican candidates are for prosecuting the war in Iraq – McCain is in a crowded field there and no different than the rest. He can’t win with his strength being the surge in Iraq.
He is seriously flawed and past his prime in age too.
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Harris,
There was no “bait & switch.’ Bush had every design and intention to work well with Democrats and made every legitiamte effort to. And Ted Kennedy did work with him on NCLB. But he has been pilloried, filibustered, loathed and obstructed at nearly every turn by far too many Democrats in congress. Meanwhile, trying to work with congress, he never even used a veto pen for his first six years. Maybe it was moreso the Washington Democrats (unlike the Texas Democrats) who did most of the stubborn stuff in refusing to work with the President.
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