Splintered conservatives hurt McCain
By ALLAN J. LICHTMAN | 6/24/08 4:49 AM EST
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With America’s attention riveted on the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, few noticed that presumptive Republican nominee John McCain limped through his party’s late primaries. McCain won 73 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, 72 percent in Kentucky, 70 percent in Idaho and 70 percent in South Dakota.
McCain’s problem with the Republican base is not his lack of conservative credentials. The Arizona senator’s 82 percent lifetime rating from The American Conservative Union is roughly comparable to the 86 percent rating for former Tennessee senator and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, once the object of conservative dreams. Barack Obama’s rating during his brief Senate tenure is 8 percent.
But conservatives ultimately found Thompson and every other Republican candidate wanting. They have even turned on their onetime hero President Bush, a sure sign of a movement in disarray. In the unkindest cut of all, the late patriarch William F. Buckley said of Bush in 2006, “If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced, it would be expected that he would retire or resign.”
The problem for conservatives, as I explain in my new book, “White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement” (Grove/Atlantic, 2008), is more fundamental than failed leadership. Rather, the conservative era that began in 1980 is coming to an end, the victim not of liberal pounding but of contradictions from within.
Conservatives triumphed in 1980 in the wake of the liberal failure to meet the challenges of a declining economy and heightened threats from abroad. But conservatives also won the battle of ideas. They called for a “colorblind society” to replace the liberals’ racial spoils system of quotas and special privileges for minorities. They proposed market solutions to social and economic problems and promised to ease taxes and regulations that discouraged working and investing. Conservatives pledged to rebuild America’s defenses and confront foreign enemies from a position of strength.
The movement conservatives of the Reagan era rejected gradual change and sought to smash the liberal order and restore America’s commitment to traditional moral values, private enterprise and robust anti-communism. In their pursuit of power, conservatives could count on the resources of business and a coordinated movement of intellectuals, publicists, lobbyists, educators, business leaders, journalists, preachers, talk show hosts and grass-roots activists. During the 1970s, conservatives built the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Caucus, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Free Congress Foundation, Concerned Women for America, the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family.
McCain is not a phony or apostate conservative. Rather, he is the heir to contradictions that have now splintered the once vibrant conservative movement beyond easy repair. McCain’s backing for nation building in Iraq — arguably the largest federal social engineering project in U.S. history — the Bush tax cuts and a robust national bureaucracy for homeland security undercuts his rhetorical support for limited government, fiscal responsibility and states’ rights.
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Lots of splinters.
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Originally Posted by Maggie_T
