Conservatives and John McCain dept

Positive new--today Senator McCain expounded, with regard to judicial appointments, on his support for Roberts and Alito, and his belief in judicial restraint.

It will be interesting to see how much of this kind of conservatism will be in the Senator's acceptance speech at the Republican convention this fall. Conservatives need to be watching carefully.

What really bothers many conservatives about John McCain

Originally from Congressional Quarterly, via NRO.
Would a President McCain fall into the "we must get things done" (meaning: activist, interventionist government) trap?
Quote:

But the positions McCain has taken are only part of the problem for conservatives.

As president, with a Democratic Congress, it is the other part — the stylistic part — that will prove to be a much greater problem for conservatives.

When McCain has been on the conservative side, as he has been on the vast majority of issues, he gives it full-throated support. He is not afraid of giving offense to appropriators when he sticks up for cutting spending, and he has not been shy about deriding Democrats who oppose the war in Iraq, to cite two potent examples.

But when he is with the Democrats, he is really with them. McCain is not someone who simply reaches across the aisle to form coalitions with the other side. He walks across the aisle, puts on the other team’s uniform and sings the other team’s fight song.

[snip]

Between now and November, John McCain can make all the speeches and do all the reaching out he deems necessary to assuage the concerns of the conservative base of the Republican Party. He can even turn his considerable skills at political combat against the Democrats. It might help get him elected, or it might not. If it does, come next January he still will have to begin governing in the face of wider Democratic majorities in Congress, and he still will have to choose between success and failure.

In that instance, he will choose success. And it will be an easy choice for him to make because on a whole range of issues, both substantively and stylistically, he and the Democrats will measure success in the same way.

When that happens, the conservatives in the Republican Party will really have something to be mad about.

A lesson in reaching out to the Right

Ramesh Ponnuru over at NRO tries to pass along a lesson to the McCain camp:

"I had a similar reaction to Phil Gramm's comments in the Washington Post today. He suggested that McCain's critics are in it as much for their "ego and power" as their "principles." They're "going to hurt the party for a long time." Well, look, senator, your team has been saying for weeks that the critics are big nothings with no followings. You can't then turn around and appeal for their help on the theory that the fate of the republic hangs in the balance. Especially when your appeal for help is couched in insults."

More evidence of what a tough road Mr. McCain has in front of him.
Hey, don't feel bad for him--this is the result of years of McCain poking his finger in the eyes of conservatives.

UPDATE: on the other hand, many conservatives liked his speech at CPAC today.
I remain highly skeptical. But I agree wholeheartedly with this:

"This McCain speech would not have been given today, if it weren't for folks like Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Andy McCarthy, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Can I thank them on behalf of America?"

John McCain's continuing problem

Plenty of good info here.
But for now, let's focus on this: after last night's contests, Senator McCain said this:
"They've [conservatives] made their case against me and I think the majority of Republicans have stated their view and now I hope we can join together for the good of the party and the good of the nation," McCain said today."

Really? A "majority" of Republicans? Let's see: last time I looked, last night McCain lost more primaries (12) than he won (9). And there's this: "While the Arizona senator has a commanding delegate lead over his rivals, only 32 percent of self-described conservatives  the majority of GOP primary voters yesterday  cast their votes for McCain, according to exit polling."

Oh, he'll probably get the party's nomination, in the end.
But he won't be able to unite the party's conservative base. He stuck it to conservatives a few too many times over the years, on big issues.

And he'll lose in November. As I've said before, a race in the fall pitting the elderly McCain against a younger Democratic candidate spouting change and diversity and new ideas (whether it be Obama or Clinton) will spell disaster for Republicans. It's a terrible campaign narrative and will spell doom for Republicans.

Last night was a terrible night for the Republican Party--it pretty much guaranteed it's defeat this fall.

Why not McCain?

Mark Levin on National Review Online lays out the case for conservatives against him.
I think it's worth a lengthy excerpt:

Last night McCain, who is the putative frontrunner, resorted to a barrage of personal assaults on Romney that reflect more on the man making them than the target of the attacks. McCain now has a habit of describing Romney as a “manager for profit” and someone who has “laid-off” people, implying that Romney is both unpatriotic and uncaring. Moreover, he complains that Romney is using his “millions” or “fortune” to underwrite his campaign. This is a crass appeal to class warfare. McCain is extremely wealthy through marriage. Romney has never denigrated McCain for his wealth or the manner in which he acquired it. Evidently Romney’s character doesn’t let him to cross certain boundaries of decorum and decency, but McCain’s does. And what of managing for profit? When did free enterprise become evil? This is liberal pablum which, once again, could have been uttered by Hillary Clinton...

As for McCain “the straight-talker,” how can anyone explain his abrupt about-face on two of his signature issues: immigration and tax cuts? As everyone knows, McCain led the battle not once but twice against the border-security-first approach to illegal immigration as co-author of the McCain-Kennedy bill. He disparaged the motives of the millions of people who objected to his legislation. He fought all amendments that would limit the general amnesty provisions of the bill. This controversy raged for weeks. Only now he says he’s gotten the message. Yet, when asked last night if he would sign the McCain-Kennedy bill as president, he dissembles, arguing that it’s a hypothetical question. Last Sunday on Meet the Press, he said he would sign the bill. There’s nothing straight about this talk. Now, I understand that politicians tap dance during the course of a campaign, but this was a defining moment for McCain. And another defining moment was his very public opposition to the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. He was the media’s favorite Republican in opposition to Bush. At the time his primary reason for opposing the cuts was because they favored the rich (and, by the way, they did not). Now he says he opposed them because they weren’t accompanied by spending cuts. That’s simply not correct.

Even worse than denying his own record, McCain is flatly lying about Romney’s position on Iraq. As has been discussed for nearly a week now, Romney did not support a specific date to withdraw our forces from Iraq. The evidence is irrefutable. And it’s also irrefutable that McCain is abusing the English language (Romney’s statements) the way Bill Clinton did in front of a grand jury. The problem is that once called on it by everyone from the New York Times to me, he obstinately refuses to admit the truth. So, last night, he lied about it again. This isn’t open to interpretation. But it does give us a window into who he is.

Of course, it’s one thing to overlook one or two issues where a candidate seeking the Republican nomination as a conservative might depart from conservative orthodoxy. But in McCain’s case, adherence is the exception to the rule — McCain-Feingold (restrictions on political speech), McCain-Kennedy (amnesty for illegal aliens), McCain-Kennedy-Edwards (trial lawyers’ bill of rights), McCain-Lieberman (global warming legislation), Gang of 14 (obstructing change to the filibuster rule for judicial nominations), the Bush tax cuts, and so forth. This is a record any liberal Democrat would proudly run on. Are we to overlook this record when selecting a Republican nominee to carry our message in the general election?

John McCain, Mitt Romney, and the war in Iraq

So John McCain is claiming that Mitt Romney's position on Iraq is flawed because, he claims, Romney in the past advocated a specific timetable for withdrawing from Iraq.
Well, now. If you go here, you can see that his claim just isn't true.
And in any case, if one IS going to try to twist Romney's words and position and claim he supports "timetables", well, guess what---then one can argue McCain supported them too! See here.

Stop this nonsense, Mr. McCain. You should be better than this.

The least repellent Republican

That, boiled down, amounts to the substance of the NY Times' endorsement of John McCain.
More details here, including the fact that apparently the McCain campaign touted the endorsement on the front page of its website--but soon, upon being zinged for the endorsement by the Romney campaign, quietly took it down.

As the Powerliners point out, the tone and substance of this endorsement literally drips with contempt and insults for Republicans. What McCain should do, if he really wants to begin to unite conservatives around his candidacy, is publicly reject this endorsement. But he won't. He apparently wanted the endorsement, even meeting with the Times' editorial board.

Good advice for Senator McCain

It comes today from the editors of National Review:

"McCain’s supporters are telling one another that his victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina prove that he can ignore and isolate conservative opinion leaders such as Rush Limbaugh. That’s what they said when he won primaries in 2000, too, and McCain paid dearly for listening to them. Our guess is that the voters who are leaving Huckabee and Thompson will go disproportionately to Romney. McCain has yet to win a plurality of self-identified conservatives anywhere. McCain will never win over all conservatives, even if he gets the nomination. But he can reassure conservatives if he pledges to name a conservative running mate and identifies respected conservative legal figures to whom he will turn when nominating judges. He can promise to approach immigration reform piecemeal rather than comprehensively. He should say that strong evidence that the illegal-immigrant population is shrinking will have to arrive before he legalizes any large segment of that population. And he can acknowledge that scientific advances have weakened the case for federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research."

Fundamental: McCain cannot, in my view, win the GOP nomination without conservative support. Nor can he win the fall election without it. To get conservative support (and doesn't he still claim to be, while a maverick, still part of the conservative movement?) he's got to run like a conservative and BE a conservative. Will he?