A Clear Perspective on McCain

The conservative base is up in arms over the McCain ascendency, but there's a bit of hypocrisy in all the outrage.

The fact is John McCain's the Republican best qualified to lead the party in the November general election, and Victor Hanson puts things in perspective in a post this morning

It is understandable to lament the absence of conservative purity, but ahistorical to suggest that any recent Republican president would have met any of the litmus tests now demanded, given the dependency of the middle class on entitlements and its touchy-feely worldview.

Reagan, and Bush I and II all adjusted to that unfortunate reality. A Democrat did not appoint Souter, O’Connor, or Kennedy, nor raise payroll and gas taxes in the 1980s, nor sign amnesty and de facto open-border legislation in 1986, nor, later, increase federal spending well past the rate of inflation, or offer amnesty again in 2007. Tax cuts were great, but without caps on spending they were unfairly slurred as revenue reducers once deficits soared. Recent Republican congressional scandals mirror-imaged some of the Clinton-era roguery.

Reagan’s pragmatism on taxes, amnesty, new federal programs and government expansion, was continued by both Bush I and II. In that regard, McCain seems a continuum, not an abject disconnect. His problem is mostly temperament — when he strayed he was blunt about what he was doing and sometimes gratuitously offended his base in a way that neither Reagan nor the Bushes dared. That is a legitimate concern of tactical aptitude, but not one so much of ideology.

He also never was a conservative idealist that voiced conservative themes on the campaign trail which he could not enact once elected. But in terms of judicial appointments, foreign policy and the war, and federal spending, he is not much different from any of the prior three Republican presidents, and might well prove tougher, given his age and occasional contrarianism. We worry over his immigration stance, but his former mistaken position was Reaganite to the core and reflected the Bush consensus. His new stance of closing the borders first would be a radical departure, and a conservative remedy.

In short, anyone who saw the Democratic debate Thursday night can envision the new future on their horizon: identity politics and self-congratulation over race and gender; tax increases (back to estate tax hikes, income tax rates go up, payroll tax caps lifted, etc); internationalism for the sake of internationalism (defer to the U.N., E.U., apologies for past conduct, contextualizing terrorism), more government (teachers, the poor, the middle class, etc. all need new government programs to add to those we have), and legislating judges (more Ginsburgs and Breyers).

Given all of the above, I don’t think it’s in the interest of conservatives for much longer to worry about McCain’s class ranking at Annapolis or how many planes he was nearly killed in.

This logic is going to be hard to swallow for those afficted with McCain Derangement Syndrome, but at some point it needs to sink in.

As I've blogged a couple of times now, the military situation has reemerged as a top campaign issue (here and here).

I hope events on the ground will work to clarify minds on the right, for the left-wing is wasting no time is exploiting new bombings in Iraq for political purposes.