Uncharitably, we might conclude as many posters already have that McConnell is doing his moderate dance because nothing would please this self-centered elitist more than a return to the post-1995 Bill Clinton administration model (but without an out-of-control Speaker of the House like Newt Gingrich who actually meant what he said about shutting the government down) in which the Republican Majority Leader cuts a sensible deal with a constrained Democrat Presiden and the Republic is ruled from within the bipartisan club at the expense of the country folk.
Under this uncharitable view, McConnell wants no ultimate Republican victories and certainly no Sarah Palin striving for the restoration of a constitutionally governed republic. He wants an orderly society managed by elitists who share a common understanding of the limits, left and right, of government power but that understanding has nothing to do with words written down in a Constitution. It comes from an elitist consensus. It is all about the game. And the game is played by rules made up by the players. The rules are designed to keep the game going which we readily can recognize in the rulemaking which we call gerrymandering.
So under the uncharitable view McConnell is speaking truth as he knows it. He honestly wants to moderate a Democrat president to bring him back into the boundaries of fair play. He wants business as usual.
Under the charitable view, McConnell is speaking as boldly as he dares. He knows he is constrained by the realities of a media driven culture in which to call for a conservative vision is to invite a media swarm which will gin up a reaction that says that all Republicans are extremists and cruel etc. etc. One is reminded of the campaign of John McCain for president, standing as it did in contradistinction to the instincts of his running mate which were to go for the jugular. McCain told the world that Obama was a fine man. Palin wanted to tell the world that it was a crazed Marxist who palled around with terrorists. Again, using a charitable view, candidate McCain might have rationally taken the position that to attack Obama personally was to open himself to charges of racism and his campaign would be finished. At the time I among others on these threads had written countless explicit warning after warning that the McCain campaign was finished if he did not expose Obama as a radical Marxist until he was destroyed as a moral force.
The problem is that in the normal course of events McCain and McConnell are right, or I should say correct, the get along go along approach advances one's career within the elitist circle and putting one's head above the parapet to lead the charge for true conservative and constitutional change only makes you a target like Sarah Palin. So if one accepts this model, one will not succeed in restoring the Republic to constitutional government, one succeeds only in building huge Liberal majorities as was done by savvy politicians like Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
A stark choice was presented by a conservative of conscience, Barry Goldwater, and in the media storm to his stark message, we were simply overwhelmed. I can remember how the media distorted Barry Goldwater's message. We were simply buried in a shit storm but out of the wreckage eventually emerged the Reagan presidency. But in between we had to endure Nixon and Ford and Ford made Mitch McConnell look like a firebrand.
I do not honestly know what motivates Mitch McConnell but I do know that he is out of sync with the times. We are, I think, at an inflection point reminiscent of the civil rights struggle. One can see the civil rights struggle from a bean counter's point of view as a struggle for one political party or the other to gain the mantle of righteousness which the Democrats won. That result so shaped the American culture with political correctness concerning race that John McCain, nearly half a century later, felt that he was handcuffed in his contest against an African-American.
Today, the struggle is for the ownership of independents, perhaps for a generation. The issue is the engrossment of government through spending and the inevitable slide into socialism which it causes. This is not a struggle to move the budget deficit down a half a point. This is a struggle over the whole constitutional fabric of the nation. McConnell cannot win such a struggle if he will not fight it. He might not be willing to fight it because he doesn't recognize it. Or, it might be he doesn't want to recognize it because he liked business as usual. Finally, it might be that he is behaving like John McCain did in keeping his head down while honestly believing that this is smart strategy.
But it is not strategy, it is a tactic. It is a tactic that works very well if your strategy is to keep the game going. It is a tactic that works very well if you seek only to advance your personal position in the game. But in a turning point of history it is no strategy at all.
Establishment Republican politicians like Mitch McConnell must lift their timeline. The idea is not to shape the Congress in this midterm election, the idea to dismantle socialism. The strategy is to strip Obama and his regime of all its legitimacy. This is not to play the tactical game concerning issues served up by the Democrats and the media, this is a strategy that calls up the people to save their country for their children.
