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John McCain, Not "McSame"---"Mc????!!!

By John Minehan - Sep 5th, 2008 at 10:17 am EDT

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John McCain, Not "McSame"---"Mc????!!!

John McCain is somewhat in the tradition of Ronald Reagan. As Reagan famously said of the Democratic Party, he didn't "leave ... [his party, his party] left ...[him]." John McCain, a Republican in the Lincoln, T. Roosevelt and Eisenhower tradition, has had his party leave him. Unlike Reagan, however, McCain has been in denial and has been trying to stalk the Republican Party for the last 20 years.

As seen in his moving acceptance speech, McCain doesn't dislike the idea of government, he just wants it to be cheap, effective and efficient. No man who has had four generations of his family educated at one of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges (by US News & World Report's taxonomy and to the great surprise of generations of Midshipmen) at tax payer expense hates the government. His is the old Republican tradition, of Lincoln who started the land grant college system and opened government lands in the west for settlement by people of limited means with the Homestead Act; of Teddy Roosevelt and the Pure Food & Drug Act; and of Eisenhower and the construction of the Inter-state Highway system.

Additionally, McCain sees himself as part of a great Republican tradition of Country before self or party. This is the tradition of Jerry Ford, pardoning Nixon to stop the bleeding, knowing it would cost him election; and of Barry Goldwater (a man with whom McCain had a complicated relationship) telling Nixon that his party was not behind him, his party was behind the Constitution.

However, for good or ill, these traditions are out of favor with the Republican Party today. Today's Republican Party believes in a far more limited government than Lincoln, T. Roosevelt and Eisenhower believed in (and, in my opinion, than the Framers intended). Today's Republican Party believes that party loyalty trumps all, for example, with Reagan's 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican."

Over the last year or so, John McCain, in permanent denial over his party leaving him, has courted it by supporting the current Administration. The same man who in 2006 risked his political career fighting for an increase in the number of troops, including one of his sons, in Iraq and against an incompetent and self-serving Secretary of Defense, in 2007 embraced the same man whose operatives slandered McCain's youngest daughter, then 9 years old, in South Carolina back in 2000. He is not "McSame." He is something worse. He is "McPander."

In the words of the old country song, John McCain "has done a load of compromising, on the road to his horizon." But, based on his moving acceptance speech, he will govern according to what a great Republican called "the better angels of his nature."

The problem with that is that he now has a doctrinaire conservative running mate, who ran for mayor in a small Alaskan town on the Newt Gingrich talking points, inapplicable at that level, and her notoriety as a TV sportscaster and beauty queen. (Perhaps “beauty princess” would be more correct, as she did not win?) The problem with this ticket is this new Republican running mate may bring a slender majority of new Republican legislators to Congress. The problem with that outcome is that we may well be condemned to an era of gridlock within a political party, at an inflection point in history when new ideas are needed.

The central reason not to elect this decent, brave committed man is not that his will be a “third Bush term.” It is that it is impossible to say what this man will do or who he will be. It is that it is impossible to know how his own Party will react to whatever agenda he chooses or persona he presents. Neither we, nor his own party, can know which John McCain he will be as President. In short, where we need focus and a vision, we will almost inevitably have disillusionment, factionalism and chaos at the least opportune time.

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