Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Murphy’s World?

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Feeling confident but not cocky about 11/4, and thinking about what a Mike Murphy campaign would have looked like …

If indeed Barack Obama becomes the next president, it's pretty clear that there will be a sizable minority of the population that sees his ascendancy as illegitimate. It simply does not seem to be very difficult for any journalist, amateur or pro, with a video camera or microphone, to hear some pretty raw racism, and general sentiment that Obama is a “terrorist”, “Muslim”, “Arab”, and so forth. (It goes without saying to these folks that those words are synonymous.) And witness the delusional foolishness that gets cranked out at major conservative publications online, every day — hey, did you hear Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams Of My Father”?

Now, the kinds of people who spew racist venom and loony conspiracy theories are not typical of McCain/Palin voters. Most of the far-right would probably have preferred to vote for just about anyone else on the GOP roster. they are the folks “left behind”; the ones who ingenuously absorb the messages of the conservative “alternative media”, which is, of course, quite broad and pervasive: Fox News, talk radio, etc. But as visible as the dead-enders have been in the GOP and in the campaign, they're a minority within an electoral minority.

Why, then, was this the population that John McCain has felt it necessary to pander to? Why stoke their particular passions and fevers? Why the Rovian red-meat rattle-the-base strategy and messaging?

Where was the opportunity for McCain's “Sistah Souljah” moment? With the nomination in hand, could he have cut the far right of his party loose, the better to move to the quite-new center? In doing so, he might have cut so much out of his coalition as to make victory impossible. After all, the Bush-Republicanism dead-enders would indeed resent being told that there was a new sheriff in town. On the other hand, he might have made a clearer break with a President who has a 24% approval rating (or thereabouts); and might have used his hard-won independent image to some good effect in attracting centrists, independents, and the generally unorthodox.

How? McCain might have picked someone more obviously qualified, and less obviously incurious, to be his VP. He might have taken the high road, doing his best to tamp down the doubly-bigoted Obama-as-Muslim rumors. He might not have bothered to revisit the politically-toothless Ayers connection. And so on.

Pundits like to wonder about the future of the Republican Party. To my mind, it could have looked a lot like the old John McCain:

  • Opposed to plutocratic, regressive tax policy;
  • In favor of a humane and workable immigration policy; (someday someone will tell Republicans this is actually a vote-winning position)
  • Aggressively dealing with the looming crisis of global warming and green energy, as opposed to “drill baby drill”.
  • etc.

But in order to win the nomination, McCain decided he couldn't be that guy anymore, so he doubled down on Bush-economics and Rove-politics to get the ticket to ride to November.

Now, it would have been a risky, even outrageous maneuver, to re-claim some of his former maverickiness, after his shotgun marriage to so much of the Bush record. But how bad would that have been? Flip-flopping, or even flip-flop-flipping, is a pretty ordinary and venal sin for a politician — particularly if you're flip-flopping back to a position in harmony with your constituency. Did liberals forgive John Edwards when he apologized for his Iraq War vote? Substantially. Were die-hard conservatives all that troubled by Mitt Romney's peregrinations around the political map? Not as long as he landed in their ideological real estate.

I'm not saying that the flip-flop-flip would have worked, or that he'd be leading. It's a perilous thing to do. But it's hard to imagine he'd be in any worse shape if he'd suddenly reverted to 2000-era McCain.

In the end, it's kind of sad he didn't go the flip-flop route. It might have actually demonstrated some integrity.

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Comments

  1. What if he had picked Olympia Snow and thus moved to the center in the general election?  The far right wasn’t going to go anywhere.  He might have won and done the right thing.  You know, Country First, and all that.

    • Had he picked Snowe, Obama still would have wrapped up most of the liberal and lib-mod vote and plenty of the moderate vote.  In the mean time, McCain’s campaign would have had a serious shortage of volunteers in places like OH, VA, NC, CO, and MO.

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      p>Olympia Snowe is a lot of things, but she would not inspire campaign volunteerism among conservatives [or moderates].  McCain’s volunteer offices were dead until he announced Palin, and then they surged.

      <

      p>McCain needed to pick a conservative with bona fides.  His mistake, I think, was limiting his search to females with those conservative credentials.  So far as I can tell, affirmative action sunk his campaign.

  2. Charley — you must have been reading the end of the NY Times’ endorsement of Obama http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10…

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    Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.

    He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform.

    Mr. McCain could have seized the high ground on energy and the environment. Earlier in his career, he offered the first plausible bill to control America’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Now his positions are a caricature of that record: think Ms. Palin leading chants of “drill, baby, drill.”

    <

    p>So, if we wake up on 11/5 to find that McCain did indeed drag a number of incumbent legislators down with him, the party is going to need to do some intensive soul-searching — but how much energy will be devoted to actually thinking and how much to internecine warfare will remain to be seen: http://www.politico.com/news/s…

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    Many conservative commentators likewise have been writing of McCain’s campaign in a valedictory tone. Among this group there is an emerging debate-one with the potential to last for a long time about the role of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

    One school-including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal-called her a drag on the ticket and implicitly rebuked McCain’s judgment in picking her. Another school believes she is the future of the party, a view backed by Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard: “Whether they know it or not, Republicans have a huge stake in Palin. If, after the election, they let her slip into political obscurity, they’ll be making a huge mistake.”

    In The Week, former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote of McCain’s travails in a way that seemed to take defeat for granted and warned the GOP faces a long road back. “That’s not a failure of campaign tactics. It’s not even a failure of strategy. It’s a failure of the Republican Party and conservative movement to adapt to the times.”

    While Frum was focused on the long view of history, many Republicans in Washington are much more in the moment-and much harsher in their denunciation of McCain and his team.

    A senior Republican strategist, speaking with authority about the view of the party’s establishment, issued a wide-ranging critique of the McCain high command: “Lashing out at past Republican Congresses, … echoing your opponent’s attacks on you instead of attacking your opponent, and spending 150,000 hard dollars on designer clothes when congressional Republicans are struggling for money, and when your senior campaign staff are blaming each other for the loss in The New York Times [Magazine] 10 days before the election, you’re not doing much to energize your supporters.

    “The fact is, when you’re the party standard-bearer, you have an obligation to fight to the finish,” this strategist continued. “I think they can still win. But if they don’t think that, they need to look at how Bob Dole finished out his campaign in 1996 and not try to take down as many Republicans with them as they can. Instead of campaigning in Electoral College states, Dole was campaigning in places he knew he didn’t have a chance to beat Clinton, but where he could energize key House and Senate races.”

    I wonder how many of the conservatives who have announced their support for Obama based on a principled assessment of the performances and values of the respective standard bearers will permanently leave the Republican Party — either of their own will or because they have been driven away by the hard-core true believers. Will this be like the peeling-off of the Rockefeller Republicans in the late ’60s and early ’70s? I suspect so — the hard-core right wing that has been on the verge of a complete take-over of the party clearly does not have room for dissent.  

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