Posted on 02/26/2006 1:00:12 PM PST by Theodore R.
McCain Holds the Cards Paul Weyrich Saturday, Feb. 25, 2006
It is always difficult to handicap the next presidential election before the midterm elections. So I will not go through the litany of the half-dozen Democrats, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may contest for the nomination. The views range from "Hillary has got it in the bag" to "Hillary won't run."
Democratic Party sentiment is said to range from "ready for another Clinton Era" to "fear of another Clinton Era"; from "the Party wants a familiar face" (Hillary) to "the Party seeks a totally new face" (former Governor Mark R. Warner of Virginia).
Hillary is a polarizing figure, no doubt. In the end, however, the nomination seems almost certain to be hers if she pursues it. If she is the nominee, Republicans either are scared to death of her and don't know to how to run against her or they can't wait for the chance to take her on, pointing to the considerable political baggage she has inherited. One clearly hears both views.
On the Republican side there are no fewer than thirteen candidates who think they have a chance. These include sitting and retiring governors, sitting and retiring senators and maybe even a general. The Democrats have a general, too. He is Wesley Clark, but he went nowhere in 2004.
Some of these candidates, such as Governor Michael Huckabee, of Hope, Arkansas, in fact may be running for vice president without saying so. In fact, I only recall one candidate who openly ran and campaigned for the vice presidency. He was an obscure Alaska Democratic senator who got absolutely nowhere with his effort to win the vice presidency.
While Democrats have an obvious front-runner with Hillary, Republicans have none. Florida Governor Jeb Bush would be the front-runner if he had not all but absolutely ruled out running. No senator or governor is a hot ticket right now, except for one, John S. McCain III.
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McCain is consolidating his position in a way reminiscent of Richard M. Nixon in 1968. He is collecting due bills. He campaigned for all sorts of congressmen and senators in 2002 and 2004. He is letting them know that now is the time to express their gratitude.
Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's strategist, who is pushing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for president, had an on-the-air colloquy with Sean Hannity the other day that most of the audience didn't understand. Morris was telling Hannity that he knew of a certain senator who was very close to endorsing McCain. Hannity asked Morris if it was the senator he had in mind. Morris said it was. Hannity said he didn't believe it.
The colloquy was about former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. Lott, who is a values-oriented conservative, is about ready to support McCain as the one senator who can defeat Hillary in the South. He is not sure any other candidates can do so.
Some of that may be personal. Senator Lott was ousted as majority leader by Senator William H. ("Bill") Frist, M.D., R-Tenn., after the media blew way out of proportion a silly remark Lott made about Senator Strom Thurmond on the occasion of Thurmond's 100th birthday party. Senator George Allen, R-Va., also was involved in the coup, which could be why Lott finds neither Frist nor Allen viable in the South.
Whatever the reason, friends of Lott from the South say he is determined to support a candidate who can defeat Hillary in that region of the country. McCain is saleable, Lott is telling friends.
The real shocker is that McCain is close to picking up support from former Senator Daniel R. Coats, R-Ind. Coats, who took Senator James Danforth ("Dan") Quayle's place in the Senate after Quayle was elected vice president with President George Herbert Walker Bush, did not run for re-election after 10 years in that body. He subsequently became U.S. ambassador to Germany when George W. Bush was elected and more recently guided Supreme Court Justice Samuel J. Alito Jr. through the confirmation process in the Senate.
When he was in the Senate, Coats was especially close to the Religious Right. One of his longtime staffers is Timothy Goeglein, a key White House operative. Coats was thought to be supporting Senator Sam D. Brownback, R-Kan., the only overtly Religious Right candidate of the lot. That McCain may well pick up Coats is a measure of how far McCain has come.
McCain is seen as the one Republican candidate who scores well with independents and Democrats. He is a darling of the media. Instead of the usual hostility a Republican gets from the media, he is seen as someone who would play ball with the old media and thus could be elected. McCain has kept his right-to-life credentials, for the most part. He has been loyal to the president regarding the Iraq War, for the most part.
With Hillary looming large in the background and with almost any Democrat seen as capable of defeating any Republican, McCain – in typical conservative Republican circles – is seen as the savior of the GOP.
That is a long way for McCain to have come since the bitter primary with President George W. Bush in 2000. He patched things up with Bush and campaigned for him in the autumn of 2000. But it was never a happy relationship. Bush and McCain have tangled over a whole raft of issues, ranging from spending (McCain is a sort of deficit hawk) to the conduct of the Iraqi War but these disputes have been more intense behind the scenes than seen in public.
The one group McCain does not have in his camp is the social-issue conservative group. They view McCain as wanting to revert to a GOP before 1980, when Ronald W. Reagan successfully grafted social conservatives onto the other pillars of conservatism – namely, limited government, free enterprise and a strong national defense. Reagan, at the urging of the Religious Right, which had emerged politically beginning in 1977, added traditional moral values to those other pillars of conservatism.
Republicans, who composed a clearly minority party after 1930 even when they held the presidency, then began to elect senators and congressmen, governors and state legislatures, and have been electing them ever since.
McCain does not believe that the Republican Party should be advocating traditional moral values. He hopes to so co-opt mainline conservatism, while also gaining acceptance from liberals in the party – such as former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Governor George E. Pataki and former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman – that he can afford to lose the Religious Right. Besides, the McCain camp reasons that if Hillary is indeed the Democratic nominee, social conservatives would be so alarmed about her becoming president that they likely would vote for McCain anyway.
It is a bold strategy, yet given the fact that the values voters do not have a candidate around whom they have thus far rallied, McCain's view of the world may indeed prevail. Social conservatives presently enjoy unprecedented influence in the White House and most especially on Capitol Hill, where the leadership in both the House and the Senate is very sympathetic to them and their issues. A McCain presidency likely would change all that.
Shortly before he died in 1998 and after he left the Senate in 1986, Barry M. Goldwater, the father of modern conservatism, denounced social conservatives, saying they had no business trying, as he put it, to make the Republican Party into a church. McCain took the Goldwater seat. He is out of the same mold. Goldwater all but broke with his party, mainly over moral issues.
Perhaps at last, through John McCain, the party will be remade in Goldwater's image. It is happening and happening fast. McCain now holds all the cards.
Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
MaCain is the "Wild Card"
Place me in the not interested column as well.
He's still better than that anti-Semite Pat Buchanan.
Maybe McCain will self-destruct, but the party wants a winner and someone that the members have heard of. Most Republicans couldn't pick out Dr. Frist or Senator Allen from a police lineup.
Some new faces and ideas might be nice.
When McCain ran in 2000, I was taken by the 20 minute infomercials the ran about his life. So I watched what he was DOING, not what he DID.
The guys is a kook.
Paul Weyrich has gotten awfully pessimistic these days.
I wouldn't touch McCain with a ten foot pole. Or even a twenty foot pole. He belongs in a loony bin.
I won't vote for McCain, no matter what.
Do you think the Media will give him the 15% they gave Kerry?
If, and it's a BIG if, he gets the nomination, He'll find out how few friends he has OUTSIDE the Washington Press Corps
This way if it ends up being Hillary vs. McCain, they will win either way.
or in it
If mcPAIN gets in your gun rights are toast. He is as ant-gun as a schuumer~~!
I won't support McCain, and you can bet that the liberals in the media who love him now would destroy him if he got the Republican nomination. When it comes to the general election, the media will support the Democrat, not a cheap imitation.
He may be a kook, but he can fool the majority of his party voters and probably the electorate as a whole. People think he is a hero, and nothing will change their mind about that.
I don't put stock in ANY election punditry this far out because it is ALWAYS wrong! In 1998, McCain was supposed to beat out that national novice George W. Bush in the 2000 primary wasn't he?
I agree: the Democrats won't vote for McCain, but many Republicans incorrectly think that many Democrats will swing to McCain because of McCain's "hero" status.
In 1998, McCain was not well known, but now he is known by nearly all. Name ID means a lot among ignorant voters.
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