Only McCain…
Posted on October 31st, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Reihan has taken up the thankless task of making the argument for why McCain should be elected. It is an interesting short read, but I think he goes a bit awry when he says this:
The past seven years have been a time of extraordinary tumult in international affairs, and the world badly needs a period of consolidation and sweeping reform. Our diplomatic and economic institutions are ill suited to tackling the diffuse threats posed by climate change, financial contagion, mass epidemics and catastrophic terrorism. Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps the US will have to take [bold mine-DL].
Let us suppose that the “real” McCain has indeed been hidden, perhaps having been locked away in a dungeon (or at Guantanamo!) Man In the Iron Mask-style while his doppelgaenger roams free working his mischief on the campaign trail. After the election, the double will be slapped back into chains and the “real” McCain will emerge to govern, and perhaps at that point the “real” McCain’s real VP selection will also be presented to us. Regardless, this is the same “real” McCain conservatives cannot stand. They support him primarily because of his hawkishness and his embrace of the war in Iraq, but their enthusiasm for him becomes even more tepid each time he mentions climate change, to take one issue where he commands no loyalty from the right. Should he pursue the kind of institution-building agenda that I think Reihan has in mind, which will include more than a little international institution-building, he would run straight into a brick wall of opposition from the same populist and nationalist forces that rebelled against Bush the Elder in the early ’90s. The reason why it was claimed that only Nixon could go to China, as I’m sure Reihan knows, was that he was a zealous anticommunist throughout his career, so he was immunized against the charge of being soft on communism.
By the “only Nixon” logic, only McCain can end the Iraq war, even though he has no intention of doing so, and only McCain could improve relations with Russia, which he wishes to isolate, demonize and harrass. The trouble with the “only Nixon” dynamic is that those who are given the most flexibility to take the necessary or prudent move in a given situation are those least likely to make that move. Indeed, their unwillingness to make that move 99 out of 100 times is the source of the credibility that allows them to make that move that one other time. This is clearly a crazy way to approach things, but this seems to be the way the world works. However, note that no one ever applies the reverse logic that only a friend of Islamists can wage the “war on terror” or that only a communist can de-nationalize industries.
This is why the pleasant story that the “real” McCain has gone missing, but will be back any moment now, is so pernicious and misleading. The reason McCain could not “bring along” conservatives were he to be the next President is the same reason he performed so poorly in the campaign. The “real” McCain was forced to woo the right in the general election because he had never won them over in the primaries. Never fully trusted by conservatives, he was constantly appealing to the core of the party down to the very last week of the campaign. Even as he engaged in one pander after another, conservatives still found him lacking and thought that he was just going through the motions. Even as he took the recommended Ayers-ACORN-Khalidi route to failure, conservatives thought he was not aggressive enough. Nothing he could have ever done would have satisfied them, because most conservatives wanted anyone other than McCain as their nominee and were never fully reconciled to him. If he became President, we would see the same response time and again, so that McCain would either give up trying to appease the base and become politically weakened or he would find himself constrained to go through the motions once again. Either way, conservatives would be unsatisfied with him, because they know, as we all know, that the “real” McCain has not gone anywhere, and they also know, as we should know by now, he is quite willing to do whatever he thinks is necessary to advance his career.
Filed under: politics
All true, but especially the climate change part. If McCain was an overwhelmingly popular figure in his party who had a change of heart, as Reagan did on Russian nukes, that would be one thing. But when a high percentage of McCain supporters consider global warming a hoax, and are voting for him only because he is the standard-bearer, there is no reason to think his advocacy would have any effect whatsoever.
Another point: most likely the Democrats will have comfortable majorities in the House and the Senate. So a President McCain could get a lot done by working with Democrats in Congress, pursuing slightly left-of-center goals that would win the support of liberal Republicans and most Democrats, etc. I’m not sure, as a President McCain prepared to govern, that he’d be too worried about “reconciling conservatives” to anything. He has little in common with conservatives politically and clearly despises many of them personally.
I think Mickey Kaus has pointed out that a President McCain and a Democratic legislature might be the combination most likely to produce higher taxes, more regulation, inaction or amnesty on immigration, etc. In exchange for cutting those deals with Democrats on domestic policy McCain would want a free hand in foreign policy. Presumably the Democrats would be happy to grant him that, so they could use the ensuing disasters to argue against a second McCain term. And, in any case, when it comes to foreign policy and espionage the US president is an elected tyrant, so it won’t really matter what Congress thinks of those issues.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I’m not convinced by pro-McCain arguments along the lines of, “Yeah, examined in isolation McCain is terrible, but imagine all the wonderful things that will happen when we release this creature back into its natural Beltway habitat.”
Re the “only Nixon” argument: assuming I understand what you mean by “the reverse logic”, reversing the issue means reversing the constituency, so you’d need to look at liberal concerns instead, and I think that sort of logic has been applied often enough. Certainly the theory has been advanced that only Democrats can roll back popular and/or established social programs.
The example of Clinton and welfare reform is interesting in this regard — even though he wasn’t particularly loved or trusted by the activist left and didn’t get their support, he was able to pull in enough Dems to make it happen. My sense is that a Republican president, even a centrist one, would’ve had a more difficult time getting it through.
That’s a fair point about Clinton. What I was trying to get at is that this argument is always used when it involves making concessions and the credibility needed to make concessions. It is not usually the way we talk about advancing a policy agenda or a specific course of action, or else we would wind up saying preposterous things like, “Only Mondale could have cut your taxes” or “Only Ron Paul could bomb Iran.” Maybe that’s beside the point, but it is curious to me that we don’t apply the “only Nixon” logic to areas other than these sorts of concessions.
Along the lines of Charlie’s comment, a McCain presidency will face something very close to “super-majorities” in Congress. Therefore his constitutional power will be nearly zip. He will also have almost no moral authority whatsoever as 50% of the electorate will be quite pissed off. His budgets therefore die the death of a thousand cuts (or, more likely, a thousand earmarks) right from Day One, His requests for military funding….gosh, I don’t think you even need to be filibuster-proof to kill those. Congress just fails to act. He can scold, of course. The point I am trying to make is that McCain will have a challenging time even appearing to be relevant, at least in the absence of an attack.
As to the “only Nixon” rap, it seems to me that McCain, or any President, is going to have to get out of Iraq “purty ban soon”. So I can certainly see McCain giving a Peace With Honor speech as he heads for the exit.