Rightwing movement crackup spells the end for McBush

Does the Conservative Movement's Crack-Up Spell Doom for McCain?
By Rick Perlstein, The Nation
Posted on April 14, 2008, Printed on April 14, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/81637/
Back when the Republican presidential race was still competitive, the
insults against John McCain from leading conservative voices were so
extravagant they almost constituted a new literary genre. Rush
Limbaugh said McCain threatened "the American way of life as we've
always known it." McCain's Senate colleague Thad Cochran said, "The
thought of him as President sends a cold chill down my spine." Ann
Coulter charged the most unforgivable sin of all: McCain was, in fact,
"a Democrat." Coulter's employer, Fox News, seconded the smear on
February 7 by printing the words "John McCain (D-AZ)" under footage of
the Arizona Republican.

That day was no ordinary one in the history of McCain-hate. On that
afternoon, most of these figures' preferred candidate, Mitt Romney,
announced at CPAC, the big annual conservative conference in
Washington, that he was dropping out of the race. McCain, now the
presumptive Republican nominee, was booed. The next morning the
conservative magazine Human Events sent out a weekly roundup of its
top ten stories to its e-mail list. Eight were anti-McCain jeremiads.
One called the McCain ascendancy "the new Axis of Evil." Michael
Reagan's article "John McCain Hates Me" posited a "huge gap that
separates McCain -- whose contempt for his fellow humans is patently
obvious -- and my dad, Ronald Reagan," and concluded, "He has contempt
for conservatives who he thinks can be duped into thinking he's one of
them."

Michael Reagan, for one, would not be duped. He would not defile his
father's sacred memory. At least for a week. Eight days later Reagan's
article for Human Events argued, "Assuming that John McCain will be
the Republican nominee, you can bet my father would be itching to get
out on the campaign trail working to elect him even if he disagreed
with him on a number of issues."

Such are the strange McCain contortions Republicans have been forcing
themselves into in recent weeks. Tom DeLay used to fret that he "might
have to sit this one out" if McCain won the nomination. Now he's
stumping for the presumptive nominee with apparent enthusiasm. At a
March 1 "Reagan Day" dinner (Republicans used to call them "Lincoln
Day" dinners), Texas Senator John Cornyn likened the base's swing to
McCain to the grieving process: "You come to acceptance."

But what is it that made supporting a senator who has earned an 83
lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union and votes with
his party 88.3 percent of the time feel like mourning in the first
place? They weren't this hard, after all, on fair-weather
conservatives Bob Dole in 1996 or George H.W. Bush in 1988 and 1992,
were they?

Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most
important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural
grievance -- the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low,
theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone,
somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending
sneer. And to conservatives, McCain has been too often one of the
sneerers. It is, as much as anything else, a question of affect. As
Michael Reagan wrote, "I don't like the way he treats people. You get
the impression that he thinks everybody is beneath him."

They are not entirely imagining things. Birds fly, fish swim, McCain
preens: it has ever been thus. His preening has turned the thin-
skinned crypt-keepers of conservatism hysterical. "McCain's
apostasies," Charles Krauthammer recently wrote in the Washington
Post, "are too numerous to count." They aren't, really. Some
conservatives still call the Republican nominee "Juan" McCain, for
what Reagan calls "such blatantly anti-conservative actions as his
support for amnesty for illegal immigrants." But of course Reagan's
sainted father, in signing the 1986 immigration bill, was a more
unapologetic and effective advocate of "amnesty" than McCain ever was
-- and you don't hear him getting labeled "Ronaldo" Reagan. Note,
also, that other supposed bugaboo of conservative ideology: pork-
barrel government spending. McCain is the Senate's leading fighter
against spending earmarks. If pork was what they truly cared about,
he'd be a hero. But that stance has earned him no points on the
"conservative" side of the ledger.

The issues aren't the issue. George Stephanopoulos once asked Tom
DeLay what it was conservatives demanded of McCain, and DeLay admitted
as much: "I don't think they're demanding that he change in his
position," he said. "It is attitude."

In other words: it's the ring-kissing, stupid. Consider George H.W.
Bush's attitude: he all but groveled before conservatives -- first
calling supply-side doctrine "voodoo economics," then swallowing hard
and accepting a spot as voodoo priest Reagan's running mate. Bob Dole,
formerly a proud budget balancer, lay prostrate before them in
accepting a 15 percent across-the-board tax cut as the cornerstone of
his 1996 presidential platform, then took on movement hero Jack Kemp
as his running mate.

For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly
and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power
before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly. Ronald Reagan
never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver
videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion
rallies on the Mall. Pentecostal leaders were horrified to see George
W. Bush violate what they considered biblical prophesy by giving over
the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in 2004. After they made their
dismay known, Bush did not change his mind. He did, however, send top
White House and National Security Council staffers to flatter them in
a private meeting that concluded, according to an account one of the
pastors sent to his followers, "with a heart-moving send-off of the
President in his Presidential helicopter." Rings kissed, egos assuaged
-- and these particular Pentecostals stopped complaining about the
sacrilege. The issue wasn't the issue.

For decades, the operative theory in Republican politics has been that
there exists a seething mass of lockstep conservative voters
controlled by leaders like these, without whose support no Republican
can win a presidential election. Michael Reagan puts it this way: "If
[McCain] gets the nomination the only way he could win against Hillary
or Barack Obama would be to be part of a McCain-Limbaugh ticket." But
that's certainly never been reflected in any actual electoral data.
Indeed, this year it appears that conservative opinion leaders are
more out of touch with the masses they purport to lead than ever.
According to a recent CBS poll, only 17 percent of Republicans want an
uncompromising conservative as their nominee. Eighty percent of
Republicans are satisfied with McCain. Sixty percent of conservative
primary voters say they "want a candidate who would compromise with
Democrats in order to get things done."

McCain has called their bluff. He didn't suck up to Rush Limbaugh but
won the nomination anyway; he's also faring well in general election
matchups. He has shown that the kingmakers have no clothes. The
humiliation is hard to forgive. It has made it harder for conservative
leaders to do business and turned politicians like McCain (and Arnold
Schwarzenegger), in their eyes, into monsters. On Glenn Beck's CNN
show, for instance, Democratic consultant Peter Fenn pointed out that
the reason McCain does well with voters is that "they think he is
independent."

"Yes," Beck replied, "well, so is Dr. Frankenstein."

Kind of gives the game away: in their mind, these conservative leaders
create Republican Presidents. But what's the point if GOP candidates
are just going to go crashing around the countryside doing whatever
the hell they want?

And so the professional conservatives did their best to set loose the
torch-bearing mob. Late in January, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick
Santorum made call after call after call spreading the word that, yes,
even a President Hillary Clinton or a President Barack Obama would be
better than a President McCain. At one point, according to Democratic
activist Mike Lux, who overheard an indiscreet Santorum making such
calls on the New York-DC Metroliner, Santorum attempted to talk an
interlocutor into "coming out with a terrible story about McCain from
five or six years ago." Clearly the crusade to sabotage McCain didn't
work. Professional conservative Monica Crowley finally admitted the
obvious: "A lot of people have actually voted for McCain, and they
weren't just moderates and independents. Enough Republicans have voted
for him to give him the nomination -- and yes, a decent number of
conservatives have too."

The frustration has been palpable. There was, for instance, the
incident with radio host Bill Cunningham. Cunningham had warmed up a
partisan crowd before a McCain speech in Cincinnati by barking out
Obama's infamous middle name, Hussein. When McCain later "learned"
about the remark, he pronounced himself shocked, shocked -- and said
he'd never met Cunningham in his life. Republicans have been
choreographing such stylized minuets for so long now -- the
"grassroots conservative" gets the smears "out there," the
"establishment" candidate distances himself from them, everyone
emerges all the stronger -- that the steps have become implicit. But
Cunningham pretended to have forgotten the dance. He went on TV and
complained that, of course he had met McCain several times before, and
that of course McCain's handlers had told him to throw the crowd "red
meat."

But everyone couldn't abandon McCain. If the Democrats won the
presidency, after all, the country would see, as Human Events's Bret
Winterble warned, "Obama socializing entire corporate sectors."
Republicans were stuck with McCain. So what would happen next?

Conservatives started to pivot publicly in the middle of February. It
may have had something to do with reports that McCain gave in to what
Robert Novak identified as the negotiating terms of "elements of the
Republican Party's right wing": "first, that McCain would veto any tax
increase passed by a Democratic Congress; second, that he would not
emulate Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush in naming liberal Supreme
Court Justices such as John Paul Stevens and David Souter." It may
also have something to do with McCain's bowing down before the
conservative holy grail of super-harsh enforcement-first immigration
reform.

Or, if my theory is correct, the conservative turnabout may have less
to do with any particular policy pledges than with an ostentatious
shift in apparent attitude: a show of groveling before the
professional conservatives. "I've listened and learned," ran McCain's
Super Tuesday radio ads announcing he'd seen the light on immigration:
"No one will be rewarded for illegal behavior." Note the language.
"Listening" is precisely the word the angriest professional
conservatives use most when describing McCain's attitude problem. "He
promises to hear, not to listen," Human Events editor Jed Babbin
complained. "I am appalled by his contempt for the intelligence of his
listeners," Michael Reagan moaned in his column.

We may never know how these meetings went down. Something, however,
seems to have shifted in those days following CPAC. Jack Kemp, the man
who was made Bob Dole's 1996 running mate as a sop to conservatives,
penned an open letter to right-wing talk-radio on February 11, arguing
that for conservatives to sit petulantly on their hands this fall
would turn over the nation to "those who would weaken our nation's
defense, wave a white flag to al-Qaida, socialize our health-care
system, and promote income redistribution and class warfare instead of
economic growth and equality of opportunity." He even, rather
comically, compared McCain to another "well-known maverick"
conservatives once foolishly turned against: Winston Churchill. "He
was even banned from talk radio (aka the BBC) in those days," Kemp
wrote.

Then, fortuitously, in the third week of February, just as the
floodgates for McCain's redemption were opening, came an exposé of his
alleged favors to an attractive blond lobbyist -- from dreaded bête
noire of conservatives, the New York Times. That offered the fig leaf
to erstwhile McCain-haters who wished to make the pivot to party
loyalty and still save face. It was no accident, they claimed, that it
had been the people Jed Babbin called in another context "the
hyperliberal editors of the New York Times" who had engineered the
man's downfall. "The New York Times is trying to Swift Boat McCain,"
trumpeted one Republican strategist. "This is the first real salvo of
the general election." An RNC letter sent, among other places, to the
Human Events e-mail list blared, "The New York Times has proven once
again that the liberal mainstream media will do whatever it takes to
put Senator Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the White House." Mac-
Lash: Times Slime Boo$ts McCain, declared the New York Post headline
on a story of the fundraising blip that ensued.

To which a citizen of the reality-based community might reasonably
ask: why would the editors at the Times -- a paper that hired McCain's
most consistent and aggressive backer in the conservative opinion
firmament, Bill Kristol, as a columnist -- "Swiftboat" a candidate
they had endorsed for the Republican nomination?

How naïve you are. "The media picked the GOP's candidate," explained
Rush Limbaugh, "and is now, with utter predictability, trying to
destroy him." Shock-talker Laura Ingraham helpfully elaborated: "You
wait until it's pretty much beyond a doubt that he's going to be the
Republican nominee, and then you let it drop." The Times conspiracy
was so immense and manifestly evil that even McCain's sworn rival,
Mike Huckabee, found it in his heart to denounce it.

So the right is finally rowing more or less in the same direction,
right? Not so fast. Newsmax.com on the day of CPAC, approvingly
quoting Limbaugh, added to the anti-McCain thunder this way: "We are
sick and tired of how the people who seem to be triumphing in our
party are precisely the people who seem to be selling this party out
in terms of its ideology." Four days later, McCain's nomination
guaranteed, Newsmax, whose e-mail list of millions of names makes it
much more influential than elite outlets like National Review or The
Weekly Standard, attempted an awkward 180-degree twist. It quoted the
testimony of a left-wing British writer, Jonathan Hari -- identified
as an "editorial board member of The Liberal magazine," so he must be
speaking for Liberal Central Command -- saying that McCain's
"credentials as a 'bipartisan progressive' are in fact a 'lazy, hazy
myth' ... 'The truth is that McCain is the candidate we should most
fear.'"

See? The liberals hate him. So it's safe for us to like him.

But conservatism, like I say, is a business. You know you never get an
e-mail from Newsmax editors without them trying to sell you something.
What they were selling this time was a previous issue of their
magazine with a McCain story on the cover. The piece was called
"Inside McCain's Head," and it retold the far right's favorite former
story about the man: that he's a Manchurian candidate whose true
loyalties ultimately belong to the enemy. Newsmax hadn't even bothered
to change the advertising copy now that former foe was friend: "In
this eye-opening report on McCain Newsmax magazine delves into: How
McCain charmed Manhattan's media elites with an exclusive fete that
pundits say 'launched' his 2008 campaign for the White House ... "Why
Paul Weyrich thinks McCain isn't the right man for the White House ...
"McCain's 14-hour stints at the Las Vegas craps tables."

We like to think of the American right as a finely honed mechanism --
a "conservative noise machine." And most times over the previous
decade, the metaphor worked. But these days, the movement can no
longer keep its stories straight. It reminds me of the McCain website
the day after the New York Times lobbying exposé, the same day the RNC
sent out its fundraising letter accusing the Times of electioneering
for the Democrats. To anyone who might doubt that the good old
conservative machine is overheating from the confusion and strain,
here is proof that the noisemakers had clearly neglected to coordinate
their anti-Times fundraising push with the McCain campaign. For there
was the Times endorsement on its website that same day, bold as brass.

The gears of the contraption are jamming. Let the contortions of a
Michael Reagan or a Newsmax attest to that, if nothing else. The whole
machine had always been built on a series of bluffs: that once the
malign hand of the liberals was removed from the executive,
legislative and judicial branches, our new conservative Jerusalem
would be achieved. But something remarkable occurred in the five years
between 2001 and 2006: for the first time since the rise of the modern
conservative movement with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964,
then the rise of Newt Gingrich's revolutionaries in 1994, the right
had a chance to control all three branches of government -- to
actually run the country. Naught but obvious failures have been the
result: a crashing economy, a rotting infrastructure, a failed war and
a less safe world, more Americans saying their nation is on the wrong
track than at any time since pollsters started measuring.

In the face of all this, the conservative movement has kept on trying
to do the only thing it knows how to do: sell conservatism. Saner
heads in the Republican Party, meanwhile, have done their darnedest to
put forward a presidential prospect who might let the party distance
itself, if only rhetorically, from the disaster that conservatism in
power has proved to be.

But without "conservatism" as the core narrative, the Republican Party
doesn't know how to tell any stories at all. Its confusion over how to
talk about McCain is only the symptom. The conservative era is over --
if you want it.


© 2008 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/81637/
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