No Man’s Land
A longer version of this article went into the Lancaster Newspapers, for which I’m a regular columnist and through which I’m now reaching about half a million readers. Despite the local popularity of my columns, I’ve not been syndicated; nor have I been invited on to Republican talk radio nor asked to appear with prepubescent bloggers on the O’Reilly Hour. The observation I make about McCain’s total inability to appeal to the right has been confirmed since the article appeared by the fact that his poll numbers relative to either Democratic opponent have been steadily falling throughout the last week. Not surprisingly, I may be the only columnist in the state of Pennsylvania who noticed (or elected to call attention to the problem) that Ron Paul’s share of the Republican primary vote in any way indicates the weakness of McCain’s candidacy.
John McCain’s political course may strike some observers as mystifying. Instead of doing what Republican candidates are supposed to do before the general race, securing their base by moving rightward, McCain has generally done the opposite. This may be hard to notice if one watches FOX, whose pundits have been reassuring us that “McCain is mending his fences with the conservative base.” Save for his talk about making Bush’s tax cuts permanent, McCain has not been tending to such fences. That is, unless one looks upon more government programs for student loans, a speech in Memphis expressing McCain’s deep regret for not having rallied to the Martin Luther King national holiday soon enough, and menacing threats to the anti-democratic regime in Teheran as gestures intended to satisfy the Republican Right. Of course here the Right refers to the neoconservative media and to such unlikely Republican news interpreters as Geraldo Rivera and Dick Morris. These are the “conservative” voters whom McCain seems to be satisfying. If there are others, I am still looking for them.
McCain or any other Republican politician is facing a declining electoral base, as Professor Alan Abramowitz of Emory University proves in an essay, “The Incredible Shrinking Republican Base in Real Clear Politics. Most Republican voters are white, married Christians, and the number of those who fall into this category has sunk since the 1950s from over 80% to less than 50%. Those who do not belong to this once dominant group and those who do but who have also attended elite universities tend to be on the social left. Presumably those who are not or no longer part of the Republican base are the ones McCain is trying to lure. That may be why he plunged headlong in 1980 and again in 1988 into heated local debates in South Carolina by calling for the removal of the Stars and Bars from all public buildings. The Republican candidate has tried even harder to reach out to blacks by apologizing to civil rights groups for not having been in step with them in the 1980s. Last year McCain opposed his own party’s measures in Arizona (which passed in a referendum) to control the influx of illegals; and because of this move he enjoyed a favorable press not only among Latino advocates but also in the New York Times.
The problem here is that elections have to be waged in the short run; and McCain’s, or his advisors’, attempt to chart a leftwing course for the GOP on the basis of shifting demographic trends may be ruinous for the fall election. No matter how ostentatiously Mac displays his sackcloth and ashes before civil rights official, he is not likely to crack the black Democratic vote, that is, go much beyond the 8 to 10% of black voters that Bush picked up in 2000 and 2004. McCain may do better among Latinos, but if he faces Hillary, someone who enjoys immense Latino favor, McCain might not even win as many Latino votes (about 40%) as Bush did in 2004. He can also fall into what I described in my last column, as no man’s land, the indeterminate zone between the two national parties, where the candidate does not take votes away from the moderate Left but also fails to energize the Republicans’ conservative base.
That is exactly where McCain is right now. In the Pennsylvania Republican primary, the antiwar, anti-big-government candidate Ron Paul picked up 15.9% of the votes, a fact that neither the liberal nor neoconservative media had any interest in playing up. What makes that underreported fact particularly interesting is that Congressman Paul had dropped out of the race even before the primary took place. Exactly where will his voters go in the general race? It is highly unlikely they will go to McCain, whose contempt for Paul, as an “appeaser,” was obvious in the primary debates. In fact there was nothing substantive the two men could agree on, since they come from opposing traditions in their party, one from the centrist, leaning-left, internationalist wing and the other from the anti-welfare state and war-averse one.
But McCain is going to need the votes of the anti-welfare-state Right to pull out a presidential win. And so far even movement conservative talk show hosts, like Limbaugh, are not rallying to his cause. While these Republican talking heads may come around, the fact they’re grumbling even now shows that McCain still can’t overcome his image of not really being on the right. He’s also being crowded out of the center and center-left by Hillary, who seems to have moved there by deploring the racism of Obama’s minister and by presenting herself to ethnic Catholic Democrats as a “moderate.” The national polls I’ve seen put McCain at least 9 points behind Hillary in a presidential match-u. These are their relative positions even before Hillary and her Democratic rival have stopped clobbering each other. If Obama can rebound from his association with the mouthy Jeremiah Wright, he too might be a deadly challenge for the Republicans. But that would depend on his ability to move toward the center and contest that ground with McCain.
Comments
Back in the 1990s, the political scientist Theodore Lowi darkly warned of the “Europeanization” of US politics, or the temptation of political parties to appeal to their own specific voting blocs, at the expense of bipartisan consensus reflective of a truly “propositional” nation. If only this were the case! As Paul documents here & elsewhere, McCain’s GOP is going out of its way to alienate or ignore its traditional voting blocs (on immigration, borders, and global interventionism). The Democrats at least still know how to appeal to their base. Sadly, the GOP has convinced some rightist parties around the world (as in Canada) to avoid building on their traditional base and instead embrace a strategy of “me-too” leftism.
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The reason the New York Times and other leftist rags support McCain is that there is no way this guy can win. His strategy of trying to appeal to the left is one of disaster. I hope he hasn’t paid anyone for this bad strategy but the fact that his campaign is broke tells me otherwise. My feeling is that his role in this charade was that he eliminate all the Republican’s who were even close to conservative and then lose badly to the Democratic candidate.
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Great post Mr. Gottfried, but if I could offer my two cents…
“Ron Paul picked up 15.9% of the votes, a fact that neither the liberal nor neoconservative media had any interest in playing up”
A growing trend I see on this website is the support or condemnation of a presidential candidate based on single issue politics. For some it is the war in Iraq, for others it is whether or not a candidate will relegate the interests of Israel beneath the United States, and for others still, it is trade policy or abortion. I must admit that my own proclivities are leading me to vote for the candidate who is most likely to be tough on immigration.
Regardless of how you order the importance of these issues, it should give us all great sadness that there is no true candidate who stands for a multiplicity of the issues paleoconservatives tend to care about. I say true candidate because Ron Paul was never a real contender, and unlike some of the pundits on here, I do not hold the media entirely responsible for his inability to win a primary election. Ron Paul is an intelligent man and his intentions are always honorable, but he is not an articulate or charismatic leader capable of captivating the interest of the common man. Scroll through Youtube and you will see countless videos that cherry pick many of the brilliant remarks he made during the debates. However, every time I watched the debates in their entirety, Dr. Paul failed to deliver with the consistency of a talented and confident politician. He squirmed around on stage and often tripped over his own words. Many of the remarks he made were put together poorly. They may have made sense to me because I am familiar with paleoconservative literature, but for the common “nine to five” guy who comes home after work, cracks open a beer and usually watches the ballgame, many of Ron Paul’s answers probably seemed like gibberish. The inability of Dr. Paul to articulate his ideas concisely, precisely and coherently gave him a limited appeal to the masses. Do not misunderstand me. I begrudge Ron Paul nothing and I am grateful for all that he has done. Dr. Paul has, in fact, done more for the conservative movement than any leader since Pat Buchanan and his recent performance in Pennsylvania, 15.9%, was encouraging. However, Mr. Paul is not the man we are looking for. To galvanize the populous base we need a charming, well-spoken, charismatic, intelligent front man. In other words, we need an Obama of our own.
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Nucci,
I think you are spot-on, and we should perhaps be alarmed at what such a dynamic will entail. What will the public elementary school teachers celebrate the most when discussing the ‘First Black President’ or the ‘First Female President,’ these immortal national heroes of progress and the American idea of egalitarianism ? They will be at pains to point out that McCain, an old, white, conservative, Christian war hero was seen as a stale relic of a bygone age and that the true spirit of America triumphed at the behest of the good-willed masses against archaic patriarchal social constructs and bigoted prejudices. The propaganda material is endless, hence why the leftist agitprop institutions will write little to nothing about him. It does not matter that McCain, fueled by lust for fame and power, is enslaved to politically correct cognitive dissonance. He is the perfect straw man symbol of the archetypal old conservative, stuck in his ways despite all information and selfishly unable to understand a world perpetually leaping forward to liberté, egalité, et fraternité.
The childish fantasy of Marxist youth radicals and the pseudo-intellectual ‘progressives’ of a generation ago is unfolding before us.
I, for one, hope Obama or Hillary are so alarming in their misrule that the majority of conservatives, heretofore docile and lazy subjects of a monstrous tyranny of godlessness, will find the fortitude to actually do something.
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All of my respondents are on the mark in their observations about the current
political situation but I’m particularly struck by Charles’s apocalyptic hope for such
misrule under the likely leftist victor in the presidential race that conservatives
will be brought to their senses. Unhappily the rest of the population may like the
“monstrous tyranny” until it’s too late. Grant’s comments about the “Europeanization of
America” may be tit for tat after all the toxic ideas and pseudo-culture that we
exported to the Europeans.
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Dr Gottfried,
I should clarify that I am not hoping for misrule as such, but rather I expect it as I do the sun rising tomorrow. My hope is that they are too clumsy in maintaining the façade.
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Lowi’s concept of “Europeanization” (e.g., polarization between right and left) ignores the Americanization of European politics, especially the US-inspired demonization of right-wing populist movements. The leftist parties of Canada and Europe, despite their anti-US posturing, have learned very well from their American masters how to vilify even milquetoast versions of rightism. No wonder most western nations outside of the US are rooting for Obama against the allegedly “right-wing” McCain.
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Mr. G sed: “Most Republican voters are white, married Christians, and the number of those who fall into this category has sunk since the 1950s from over 80% to less than 50%.”
And there lies the crux of the problem. From Pat Buchanan to Steve Sailor, the problematic nature of the Bush/McCain strategy of ignoring the hot button white working class issues like unrestrained immigration, globalization/outsourcing and racial preferences is a sure loser for the Republican Party.
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