Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

The usually excellent Amity Shlaes recently wrote an opinion piece arguing that Republicans are making a mistake by dropping support for John McCain. Here is my note to Ms. Shlaes in which a disagree with just about every point she made in her article.

re "If McCain Is Trash, So Is His Party" (Amity Shlaes, Bloomberg News, 7/25/07)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aEY3idqnZjKs

Dear Amity,

I strongly disagree with your July 25th Bloomberg opinion piece about John McCain and the Republican Party.

[For the record, I am a registered Republican, but I tend far more libertarian than the GOP does and I have been highly critical of the GOP on my own blog at www.rossputin.com.]

McCain’s decreased popularity comes from a widening realization that he is a political opportunist, basically a statist, and despite his “war hero” status he is no better than any other politician and in many ways worse.

You are correct that McCain has taken a strong stand against pork, but that doesn’t make him unique among current Republican presidential hopefuls, and many of the others have actually done more to trim budgets than McCain has.

On immigration, you may want to argue that McCain’s position was brave, but as I often say “there’s a fine line between brave and stupid” and he (with the President) was clearly on the wrong side of that line. It was not simply far-right isolationist xenophobes who killed that bill. It offended many people’s sense of justice and good government, and like it or not the claims that it was “amnesty” were closer to true than false. I am all for immigration. I think we should add a zero…or two zeroes…to the number of visas available to immigrants or migrant workers in all skill categories. But simply giving millions of people a pass for breaking our laws was a stupid thing for anyone to propose. Then you add:

• giving in-state tuition for colleges so that someone from Wyoming has to pay $25,000 (tuition only!) to go to the University of Colorado whereas an illegal from Oaxaca could go for $6,600
• Democrats (such as Colorado’s own Ken Salazar) making it clear that they want the make it as easy as possible for current illegals to gain the right to vote
• Xenophobes on one side and union lackeys on the other working to prevent any increase in the number of visas available for workers who want to come here legally
• Economic idiots (such as Colorado’s own Ken Salazar) who will try to keep family-based immigration instead of moving toward skills-based immigration (primarily because they assume that the lower-income people who come on family-based immigration will eventually vote Democrat)

And you have a bill that nobody except Ken Salazar, Ted Kennedy, and several million non-citizens should support. Why did McCain go so far out on a limb with these socialists to support the Immigration Bill? So he could say he got something done.

Speaking of saying “at least he got something done”, you present that argument as a case in favor of McCain-Feingold. That’s the silliest argument I’ve ever heard from you. Would you say “at least Pol Pot got something done” when he outlawed people from wearing glasses? McCain-Feingold is a direct and clearly unconstitutional assault on the First Amendment. When the Founders wrote about Freedom of Speech, they were primarily referring to political speech. Now, because of McCain-Feingold and lesser similar laws, political speech is the least free and most regulated type of speech in our nation. That is not lost on Americans, or at least not on Republicans. I don’t give credit to McCain for not complaining that Obama has benefited from the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Act any more than I give Bill Clinton credit for not complaining that his policies allowed North Korea to develop a nuclear weapon program. In both cases, making the complaint would simply highlight a massive failure.

Politically speaking, your claim that “McCain has the advantage of Senate incumbency” over Romney and Giuliani turns political history on its head. There is no political advantage to being able to say you wrote laws in the Senate versus managing governments as governor or mayor, especially since the job they are going for is an executive, not legislative, position. But beyond that, think about recent political history, starting with the current President and going back in time:
• George W. Bush, former governor
• Bill Clinton, former governor
• George H. W. Bush, former Vice President, CIA Director, and Ambassador, Congressman from 1967-71
• Ronald Reagan, former governor
• Jimmy Carter, former governor
• Gerald Ford, former Vice President, Congressman from 1949-1973
• Richard Nixon, former Vice President, Senator from 1950-52, Congressman from 1946-1950
• Lyndon Johnson, former Vice President, Senator from 1948-1960, Congressman from 1937-1948
• John F. Kennedy, Senator from 1952-1960, Congressman from 1946-1952

In other words, not since Richard Nixon have Americans elected to the presidency anyone who served in the Senate, and not since John F. Kennedy have we elected someone to the presidency who did not serve as Vice President after serving in the Senate. There is simply no way to argue that McCain’s being a Senator is to his advantage. Writing a law is no more likely to have McCain being held accountable than running a state or the world’s most important city. Indeed Giuliani’s job as mayor as well as Romney’s position as governor were both positions far more “accountable” than just being one of 100 senators. Basically, I think your argument about McCain’s position helping him and causing him to be accountable is about as mistaken as a political analysis could be.

Also, in terms of policy, you neglect to mention that only recently did McCain reverse his opposition to the Bush tax cuts, arguably the best, most important and most beneficial domestic policy achievement of the Bush presidency. People are skeptical of that last-minute conversion just as they are of all other politicians’ flip-flops, whether of Democrats like John Kerry or Republicans like Mitt Romney. Republicans are particularly skeptical of people who are not clearly committed to low taxes. As Robert Novak rightly put it, “I have said many times that God put the Republicans on Earth to cut taxes. If they don't cut taxes, they have no overriding rationale for existence.” In that framework, it’s not clear that there is an overriding rationale for John McCain’s political existence.

Given all this, your conclusion that the evaporating support for McCain is a sign of Republican madness is backward. What was madness was that he ever had any serious support. I suppose a first clue should have been how much mainstream media liked McCain in years past. If the New York Times likes a Republican candidate, that should be a strong warning sign, if not an outright disqualification.

Another minor point against McCain is his age. Were he to become President, he would be the oldest President ever at the time of taking office. Especially these days, the presidency is not a job to start in your seventies. It makes young men old…what would it do to an old man?

And finally, I would like to address your characterization of Republicans as “crazed to stay on top in Washington that this time”. Please keep in mind that I have not voted for a Republican candidate for President since Ronald Reagan. (Since then, I have consistently voted Libertarian.) But in 2008, I will be casting my vote for the Republican nominee because while I am not crazed to have the Republicans “stay on top”, I am terrified of the Democratic candidates, particularly given what I expect will be continued Democrat control of both houses of Congress at least through 2010. In a field of Democrats where Hillary Clinton (who wants to socialize medicine, take oil company profits, and have a village raise my children) is the conservative, the country should be very afraid. Anybody who does not want to see us adopt the failed leftist policies that countries all across Europe are abandoning after seeing their disastrous consequences should be “crazed”, if not to have a Republican in the White House, at least to keep a Democrat out..

However, just “not being a Democrat” is not enough to get a Republican elected in a political environment this unfriendly to the GOP. It takes a candidate with a real message and with a history that will not only get the vast majority of Republican voters actually motivated enough to go to the polls, but also to get the majority of independent voters because they are really the people deciding American elections now. McCain does not satisfy both of these conditions. He could be one of the few politicians out there likely to do better among independents than among his own party, but that is not enough to win the election and it is definitely not a winning position for the fund-raising race, as McCain’s recent numbers have shown.

In closing, although it may be redundant at this point, I’d just say that I disagree with your premise, your analysis, and your conclusion about John McCain and the GOP. It is a sign of “wising up”, not madness, that Republicans have realized the folly of supporting him. Rather than dumping McCain presaging the GOP as being “history” in 2008, it is probably the move with the best chance of allowing GOP success in 2008.