McCain Redux
Here's NewEnglandGuy responding to my post on McCain's surprise victory:
Mcain won... well because McCain won. Maybe the timing was affected by the arcane scheduling and process rules. The other candidates were in the mix and didn't emerge and McCain proved victorious against all of them and the double blast of the talk radio performers. His victory may largely be that he is not an ideological adherent. His victory does not seem related to his positions (this seems true on the Dem side as well) but more to the fact of who he is not - a card-carrying member of some movement. It also shows the waining influence (this year at least) of cartoons like Coulter and Limbaugh.
Here's my response to his reponse:
For all McCain's alleged popularity, he didn't win most states he ran in and up till Super Tuesday (and in most states on Super Tuesday) when he won it was by a plurality. And Huckabee was whipping him still this weekend while Romney won in the CPAC straw poll. When you look at the votes, you realize he lost most of the time if it was just Republicans voting, and just about all the time among the conservative base. Luckily for McCain, Huckabee rose in Iowa--otherwise, he might have had to go up against just one other candidate and he probably would have lost. Follow Iowa with non-Republicans allowed to vote in New Hampshire and elsewhere, and then the big McCain states on Super Tuesday being winner-take-all, and McCain lucks out.
The voters liked him for a number of reasons, but it's not as if they rejected conservatives for being conservative (not the Republicans, anyway). McCain is seen as a staight-talking man of honor, but he's best known for strongly supporting the war in Iraq.
All this has nothing to do with the influence of Coulter and Limbaugh and I'm surprised to hear people talking up this meaningless point. It's as if they want to pretend that conservatives can't think for themselves, but simply get their marching orders from columnists and talk show hosts.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:06 AM
6 Comments:
Considering how McCain is still losing, perhaps Romney left too early.
Various news reports on TV commented on how McCain had been "booed" at CPAC. Then yesterday I saw a pundit on say he had been at CPAC, and there were some very faint boos early in McCain's speech, and nothing but loud applause by the end.
So I turned on right-wing talk radio (which I normally avoid) and heard some guy taking callers, and he was berating the callers who were calling McCain "liberal".
Obviously we can all point to McCain positions that are not "conservative". But his opposition to pork-barrel spending is one thing that turned so many Republican senators against him -- and who is "conservative" here? The Republicans who took over Congress in 1994 and then immediately imitated the Democrats' pork habits? I think not.
McCain also denounced the Swift Boat ads, and while I never would have voted for Kerry in a million years, those accusations were BS.
What accusations were BS? Almost all the ads released information that was a matter of public record. The only controversial part was when the recollection of over a hundred swift boat veterans differed from the recollection of one politician who was also there, and who had already made questionable statements about his time there that were proven wrong.
I was referring to the overall implications of the swift boat accusations. Individually, many (perhaps even all) of the accusations may have been true, but the overall impression that they gave -- and were clearly designed to give -- was that John Kerry did not deserve his war honors, and in particular, did not deserve his purple hearts.
Indeed, at the Republican Convention, a number of delegates sported purple Band-Aids to mock Kerry's "trivial" wounds.
Now, just as there has been grade inflation in universities over the last few decades, there has been "medal inflation" in the military in the past century. John Kerry would not have won three purple hearts had he sustained identical injuries in World War One.
But he certainly would have received at least one. For John Kerry, to this very day, has shrapnel in his left thigh.
I did not vote for Kerry in 2004, and would never vote for him, because his positions are anathema to me. But I love America, and therefore I think it is shameful to mock the military record of a man who sustained wounds to protect America's allies from Communism. Especially when this mockery is coming from so many conservatives whose own legs are shrapnel-free.
"Especially when this mockery is coming from so many conservatives whose own legs are shrapnel-free."
I think you go a little too far, Larry. If criticism is wrong, it's wrong, no matter what the source. But if it's right, it doesn't matter where it comes from. Otherwise, we'd all have to shut up about an enormous amount of things we're not intimately involved in. (Which some people might think is good thing.)
Good point. I retract that part of my comments.
Although "wrong" has two meanings. Criticism is externally wrong if it is false or inappropriate in the forum it is raised in. For this, it doesn't matter whether the critic is himself a veteran.
Criticism may also be internally wrong if it is unethical or immoral for the specific critic to say something. If person X publicly criticizes Y for doing something that, secretly, X is doing as well, that is usually internally wrong.
However, in political discourse, it is not generally relevant whether criticism is internally wrong -- at least, if the person we are deciding whether to vote for is Y. (If we are deciding whether to vote for X, perhaps it might be relevant.)
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