The Big Tent's Getting Emptier

Well, McCain won my state (excuse me, "Commonwealth") Virginia, but as many Virginian Republicans voted for his opponents as voted for him. And that’s McCain’s problem. He campaigns like a Conservative but legislates like a Liberal.

Mark Steyn explains McCain’s challenge better than anyone else.

For a certain percentage of voters, McCain is tonally a conservative, and that trumps the fact that a lot of his policies are profoundly unconservative. He won New Hampshire because if you stuck him in plaid he'd be a passable Beltway impersonation of the crusty, cranky, ornery Granite Stater. The facts are secondary that, on campaign finance, illegal immigration, Big Pharma and global warming, the notorious "maverick's" mavericity (maverickiness? maverectomy?) always boils down to something indistinguishable from the Democrat position.

As it happens, on the Woodstock museum, McCain's absolutely right: If clapped-out boomer rock is no longer self-supporting and requires public subsidy, then capitalism is dead, and we might as well Sovietize the state. In a sense, it's the perfect reductioof geriatric hippie idealism: We've got to get back to the garden, but at taxpayer expense. A McCain presidency would offer many such moments. But, in between, he'd be "reaching across the aisle" to enact essentially Democrat legislation on climate change, illegal-immigration amnesty and almost everything else.
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So, if Republicans went for McCain because he's the "national security sheriff," I think it's the sheriff part they like, rather than the national security. It's easy to see him moving down a dusty Main Street in a low crouch, hands ready to draw. Actually, now I do try to picture it, he's less like the sheriff and more like Yosemite Sam, and that doesn't usually work out as well.

Still, Republicans seem to have decided that McCain matches their mood. George W. Bush, you'll recall, was reviled by Dems and Europeans as a shoot-from-the-hip, dead-or-alive Texas swaggerer, but Republicans could never quite match the Dubya caricature with the guy who cooed all the religion-of-peace mush while strolling hand in hand with King Abdullah or announced homoerotically that he'd gazed into Putin's eyes and got a glimpse of his soul. It's hard to imagine McCain offering such effusions, yet at the same time, insofar as he has anything that could be regarded as a grounded political philosophy, it lies in the same "compassionate" direction as much of the Bush era.

Meanwhile, in this primary season, as the field has winnowed on the Republican side, the gap between GOP and Democrat "enthusiasm" has widened. John McCain is supposedly the man who'll bring "moderates" and "independents" and even "anti-Hillary Democrats" into the big tent. Look at the Super Duper Tuesday turnout figures. One reason why the tent feels big is because it's getting emptier.

I don’t want to see either Hillary or Obama win. But if, at age 72, McCain can’t learn to bend, can’t learn to appeal to Conservatives between now and the election, and appeal to them with more than rhetoric, he’s going down to defeat.
So far McCain’s message has been: “I’ve got the nomination so pipe down and get on board.” That’s too much like the punch line of the joke that starts with “If rape is inevitable…” It’s not funny and it’s not appealing.