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McCain Is Not Ike

Instead of battling the corporate wing of his party, McCain has decided that it’s the isolationists—a group that he defines broadly, and which includes the left and the right—who are the real threat. ~Ryan Lizza  One of the more remarkable things about this is that McCain seems to have no intention of governing as Eisenhower […]

Instead of battling the corporate wing of his party, McCain has decided that it’s the isolationists—a group that he defines broadly, and which includes the left and the right—who are the real threat. ~Ryan Lizza 

One of the more remarkable things about this is that McCain seems to have no intention of governing as Eisenhower did.  Unlike Eisenhower, he is decidedly not going to settle for an end to the war in Iraq.  He wants to play Eisenhower since that would mean that he wins the election, but politically he is in the unhappy position of Stevenson, saddled with the legacy of a corrupt administration and an unpopular war.  If this is the equivalent of 1952, McCain is on the wrong side of the major foreign policy issue of the day and in the wrong party.  Regardless, can you see McCain acting to stop an allied war effort as Eisenhower did in the Suez crisis?  Of course you can’t, because McCain is certainly no Eisenhower.   

Ross discusses McCain’s apparent fixation with Republican “isolationists” and notes that this is a rather, shall we say, eccentric assessment of the state of the GOP.  This is right–speaking as an “isolationist,” if we must use that word, I’m afraid I don’t see the great political power we are supposed to wield.  In the young cohorts of Ron Paul supporters, I see some potential for the future, but in the here and now it’s just silly.  This reminds me of the buzz from a couple of years ago about a so-called “paleo moment,” which was correct in the sense that public opinion was swinging in a paleo direction on trade and immigration and completely ridiculous as a description of the actual state of play in Washington. 

Swatting at “isolationists” and “protectionists” is what proponents of unpopular and/or discredited foreign and trade policies are often reduced to doing, since their arguments are usually otherwise pretty shaky and because it offers the public the choice of either enduring the status quo or adopting the most radical critiques of the establishment.  Confronted with this choice, the public will tend to stick with the horrible policies they know than take a chance on what is supposed to be the only alternative, which represents too much of a sudden change for most people to want to support.  (People who prattle about how they want “change” don’t really want that much change–they want modest tweaking of the system that exists, and style themselves visionary because of this.)  But, in fact, the actual, electorally viable alternatives on offer are anything but “isolationist” and “protectionist,” much to the dismay of those of us sympathetic to one or both of these views.  

I have a couple of ideas about what McCain is doing here: he could be, like Bush, recklessly tarring his opposition, any opposition, as “isolationist” as a way of undermining them, or possibly conjuring up a mythical political foe that he can then easily overcome (since it barely exists) and claim credit for “saving” the party from what he is portraying as a dangerous resurgence of Taftism.  But this is where I am at a loss–what prominent figures in the GOP or in the Democratic Party actually represent anything that could reasonably be defined as “isolationism”?  I understand that the key to McCain’s position here is to define “isolationism” unreasonably, but even so the entire thing seems untenable, and more to the point unnecessary.  It’s as if the Tories ran an election campaign declaring their firm opposition to nationalising industry, when no one who is likely to be elected is going to do any such thing.  For his next trick, McCain can take a bold stand against the powerful forces that are trying to abolish the Federal Reserve.

P.S. This makes clear that Ron Paul’s decision not to run on a third party ticket is a wise one, since McCain and his supporters would be able to explain away any loss in November as the product of Paul’s presence in the race and would not have to be held to account for the role their own disastrous foreign policy has played in wrecking the GOP.  Perversely, a Paul third party run at this point would feed into McCain’s delusions about the “isolationist threat” and ensure that the GOP binds itself ever more closely to reckless interventionism in the future.  The GOP may remain hitched to these terrible ideas for many years to come, but it is unfortunately more likely to remain so if it can scapegoat its electoral defeat in November on the “isolationists” who regrettably do not pose much of a political threat.

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