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Enough Already

I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. ~Thomas Friedman This is a view so completely detached from reality that I’m not sure what there is to say in response to it.  The people McCain was most in danger of alienating […]

I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. ~Thomas Friedman

This is a view so completely detached from reality that I’m not sure what there is to say in response to it.  The people McCain was most in danger of alienating with his bittereinder approach to Iraq were the columnists and journalists who had built him up as the “maverick,” and somehow they took it as proof of his profound political courage and integrity to run on a policy that was overwhelmingly popular in his party and to endorse a tactical plan that became the only relevant litmus test in Republican politics.  In the GOP in 2007, questioning the “surge” was the path to political doom.  Today, it is even more dangerous, since the mainstream consensus is that the “surge” has “worked,” provided that you redefine what it was supposed to have accomplished and significantly lower the standards for what constitutes success.  In any case, the real risk for a Republican presidential candidate in early 2007, as Sam Brownback learned to his chagrin, was to raise questions and suggest modifications to the plan.  Outright opposition was limited, of course, to Ron Paul, who was never a remotely realistic contender for the nomination in large part because of his positions on the war and foreign policy.  Frankly, McCain taking a prominent pro-“surge” position last year was every bit as courageous and daring as Obama taking an antiwar position when he was a state senator from Hyde Park–it wasn’t.  Whatever else you want to say about these positions, they were not examples of lonely resistance against a party that was determined to take a different view.  That pundits who have lost patience with McCain cannot grasp this basic truth about the political expediency of McCain’s position on the “surge” during the primaries reflects the degree to which these pundits started believing the myth that they helped to weave about McCain.  It no longer mattered what McCain did–if McCain did anything, whatever it was had to be proof of his “maverick” status.   

McCain likes to trade on a reputation of breaking with his own party, but each time he has broken with his leadership it has been to curry favor with the Washington establishment or the press (or both), and now that he has apparently opted for an electiral strategy that hinges on energizing and mobilizing party regulars members of the Washington establishment and the press are crying about how he has sold out.  Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that he sold out to them years ago, and they lavished him with praise and helped to make him the national figure that he has become, and now they are furious that he is two-timing them.  What all these pundits refuse to face, or will not admit, is that the noble, reform-minded McCain was their creation–they imputed to him virtues and consistency he did not possess, ignored all of his bad instincts, excused his awful foreign policy views, dismissed his pandering and lies on the grounds that he didn’t enjoy doing it, and most of all pretended that the McCain they have been watching for the last two years is some radical break from the McCain of old.  No doubt it is more comforting to believe this than acknowledge that their enthusiasm in backing him was always as opportunistic as McCain’s pursuit of their admiration was or that the Republican nominee they find so terrible today is a creature that they foisted upon the country.  Working together, McCain and the press have insulated the GOP nominee from the fierce anti-GOP mood in the country, and all of their praise helped to make McCain into the “maverick” whom independent and moderate voters continue to find appealing.  Now, remarkably, in their hostility to Palin they have given McCain one last gift by making her the tribune of conservative America and also making McCain conservatives’ new favorite because he chose her.  Having made him a viable “centrist,” they have been working overtime in the last few months, and especially the last two weeks, to rebuild his shredded credibility with an alarmingly large number of conservatives who should know better.

It is important to remember that on most major policy questions he never challenges his own party, and the “surge” is the most famous example of how he both conforms to and creates the party line.  The issue that very nearly ended McCain’s campaign was immigration, and after the immigration legislation failed last year he has temporarily buckled to pressure from within the party and from the grassroots, and you will notice that he has said next to nothing about this subject for months.  As a matter of policy, I think it was good that McCain’s preferred legislation failed and that he and Bush were brought to heel, but if you want a good example of how McCain almost lost the nomination while binding himself ever more closely to the establishment the fight over immigration is where to look. 

P.S.  The lingering effects of media adoration of McCain could be one reason why the Obama campaign may be having trouble gaining any traction with its efforts to link McCain to Bush.  These efforts are quite reasonable given how indistinguishable the two are on most things, and you’d think that being closely tied to one of the most unpopular Presidents in history would be a problem, but when Obama’s cheerleaders in the press have spent years insisting how independent and different McCain is they are going to have difficulty insisting that he represents Bush’s third term.  Even though this claim is absolutely right, it is a message that contradicts years of gushing press coverage of McCain.  If they say that McCain used to be independent-minded and noble (translation: “he used to agree with us in the media more often”), as most of them keep repeating, they are playing into McCain’s hands by emphasizing that the overwhelming majority of McCain’s political career has been nothing like Bush’s.  Unless you can make the case, as I think you can, that McCain has always been as shameless, opportunistic and self-serving (yes, that’s right) in his political career as he is now the attacks on his campaign tactics end up coming off as little more than expressions of frustration that the media and their preferred candidate are currently losing.  Having granted him the status of a reforming paladin with extensive foreign policy expertise, it is a bit late for most of these people to discover that he is an opportunist who does not understand policy detail.   

That frustration is made even more acute by the mistaken belief on the left that culture war politics was not going to dominate this cycle, which many liberals assumed would have to be decided on the basis of serious policy questions, and by the partly mistaken assessment that things are so objectively horrible that the people have no choice but to vote against the GOP.  To listen to some pundits on the left tell it earlier this year, this was supposed to be another 1932 election.  Even now, there are pundits on left and right who assume that this is will end up being a 1980-style victory for Democrats on the assumption that 80% wrong track numbers must mean an incumbent party’s defeat.  This is why the griping about Obama’s underperformance has been as loud as it has–if you wake up every day assuming that a Democratic landslide is the appropriate electoral outcome in November the evenly-divided electorate must be maddening.

Update: This Telegraph story on Democratic complaints about the Obama campaign has some interesting quotes related to this point about unrealistic expectations meeting disappointing reality:

A senior Democratic strategist, who has played a prominent role in two presidential campaigns, told The Sunday Telegraph: “These guys are on the verge of blowing the greatest gimme in the history of American politics. They’re the most arrogant bunch Ive ever seen. They won’t accept that they are losing and they won’t listen.”

The strategist seems right to me, but no doubt this strategist completely misses the arrogance of his own statement.  The greatest gimme in the history of American politics?  Let’s try to have some perspective, shall we?  Just looking at postwar elections, 1952, 1976, 1980 and 1984 were all in their own ways much more lopsided in terms of the alienation from the incumbent President and party and economic conditions (and antiwar sentiment shaping things in 1952 and possibly a bit in 1976).  Part of the problem that the Obama campaign has been having in responding to Palin and to McCain’s attacks over the last three months is that this idea that the ’08 election is the “greatest gimme in the history of American politics” has infected the entire Democratic Party.  Months ago Obama declared that this was not going to be a 47%-47% split electorate with the campaigns fighting over a few swing states, and this presumption informed the decision to launch a 50-state presidential election strategy and start running ads in Georgia and Montana, among other implausible target states, to “expand the map.”  At present, the map may well be expanding for the Republicans, which seems (and is) crazy, but the refusal to recognize that this was even possible helps explain part of the flailing, confused response of recent weeks.  This arrogance was evident again in a less-noticed part of Obama’s “dollar bills” line when he said, “No one thinks that they [the Republicans] have answers to any of our challenges,” or words to that effect.  Even if I agreed with such a blanket statement, I would understand how absurd it would seem to voters who are torn between the candidates for whatever reason.  The electorate remains structurally very much like the electorate in 2004, and if recent Republican party ID and generic ballot numbers are right it seems that the toxicity of the GOP label has started magically vanishing with the nomination of Palin.  This is not the “greatest gimme” election ever, and as in so many other kinds of competitions the side that assumes all it has to do is show up is the side that gets outplayed and outscored.

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