In preparation for Super Tuesday (Feb. 5th) Hoosier Access is highlighting the merits of the four Republican Presidential candidates still left in the field. Will Tuesday decide who our nominee will be?

The Case for John McCain

Let me begin this post by saying straight up that John McCain was not my first pick to be the Republican nominee for president. What a ringing endorsement, right? In fact, at this time last year (when the field was basically Giuliani, Romney, and McCain) he was probably my least favorite candidate.

By the time the whole immigration thing was going down, I was definitively ABM: Anybody But McCain. I didn’t really take to any of the others, though I have always liked Hunter (who I felt never had a chance, unfortunately), Brownback (ditto), and Giuliani. I have never cared for Romney, but this is a column for someone and not against someone, so I won’t go there.

As late as the Governor’s State of the State address, I was asked who I favored in the presidential race, and McCain still wasn’t among them.

Rudy has always been near the top of my list, though he has at times been supplanted by Fred Thompson (who failed to impress and was a big snooze) and even Mike Huckabee (until it became clear that the Democrats were going to have an easy time of painting him as a radical theocrat, a campaign that would probably see the GOP lose forty states). Suffice to say Rudy was a deeply flawed candidate, and his campaign was deeply flawed too.

The Perfect Candidate?

Rudy Giuliani was by no means perfect. None of the candidates are. I will tell you straight up that John McCain is not a perfect candidate. In my experience, there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. If someone looks like the perfect candidate, then they are either lying to you, or you are in for one heck of an unpleasant surprise at some point down the road.

Heaven knows George W. Bush wasn’t perfect, and neither was Ronald Reagan.

Imagine the conversations today about the heretical notion of conservatives in the Republican Party rallying behind a governor that had signed a law legalizing abortion in his state, spoke of complete and total nuclear disarmament, signed into law a sweeping immigration amnesty bill, approved a giant tax increase, and signed the most sweeping arms reduction treaties in history. Sounds like a Democrat, right?

[Read more below the fold]

Well, that was Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was not perfect.

He is also gone.

Quit looking for another one. The Almighty broke the mold when he made the Gipper. There’s no more where he came from.

“The Reagan Coalition”

The times of the Gipper are long gone, but the principles that guided him endure. None of the candidates left in the Republican field (with perhaps the exception of Ron Paul) represent a fundamental breach with those principles, despite what they will sometimes say about each other, or despite what you hear from the gabbing heads on talk radio.

And it is the principles we should be concerned about, not nebulous coalitions. Whether the Reagan Coalition still exists is a subject for another debate. The FDR Coalition, of southern Democrats and northern liberals, does not exist anymore. It is FDR’s principles that endure for the Democrats, just as it must be Reagan’s principles that shall and must endure for the Republicans.

If a Democrat tried to win a presidential election today with the old FDR coalition of northern liberals and conservative southern Democrats, he wouldn’t have a chance. Those votes aren’t there anymore. The voters changed, they died, they moved, perspectives changed, and events changed.

The day is coming when it won’t be possible to win an election with a Reagan “coalition” anymore. There will never be a day when it won’t be possible to win an election with Reagan’s principles.

It’s an important distinction, but one that is being lost in all of the spin and intra-conservative and intra-Republican sniping of late.

The candidate that can best win the Reagan coalition is John McCain. I don’t think that any of the other current candidates can do better. I also don’t think that what is left of the Reagan coalition would be sufficient to win an election, particularly with the wind blowing so fiercely against Republicans and conservatives.

This is why McCain’s appeal to independents is so important.

If the election is to be won, it will be won by Reagan’s principles, not by a cookie-cutter replica of his coalition.

Coalitions, you see, those change.

Ideas endure forever.

John McCain

If you’ve managed to read this far, I bet you’re wondering why I haven’t been talking about the candidate much. It’s because I think it’s important for us to all understand both where we are coming from, and the situation in which we now find ourselves, both as a movement and as a party.

John McCain was left for dead lots of times, whether in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, or politically after he touched a new third (or fourth or fifth) rail of American politics, illegal immigration, and got burned. McCain lost his frontrunner status virtually overnight. His consultants deserted him, and he went back to being John McCain.

You might say that McCain was left for dead like the Republican Party today is being left for dead.

Anyway, McCain set out with straight talk 2.0, and went on a “no surrender” tour, based upon his support for the Iraq War and for the surge. And lo, Republican primary voters and independents (contrary to what people on the radio will tell you, it is not possible to win a general election without those) liked what they heard, and they have since granted John McCain a surge of his own.

So much of a surge that he’s now the frontrunner, and a lot of Republican establishment and conservative establishment types are terrified, since it seems like that by Wednesday morning, he will be all-but the Republican nominee.

And let’s look at the biggest of the issues that terrify the Republican and conservative establishments (they’re not the same thing, far from it) about John McCain.

Immigration

One word says it all. John McCain was involved in the evil immigration bill that, along with Ted Kennedy, bears his name. I’m not about to forgive John McCain for his stance on immigration. He pissed on the electric fence and he got shocked. Given his recent statements, I’m glad that—when he talks about border enforcement first—he has decided that it wouldn’t be wise to do it again.

But remember the context of McCain’s support for the immigration bill. It was George W. Bush’s plan, and one supported by John McCain. If the plan couldn’t be passed with the support of one president, I suspect that it wouldn’t be able to be passed under another.

If McCain-Kennedy couldn’t get passed under George W. Bush, I don’t think that it can get passed under John McCain either.

Immigration is a concern for me. I favor enforcement first, oppose a comprehensive solution that might lead to a double-cross of enforcement not being carried out later, and I hate the idea of amnesty.

But, if the conservatives—and the American people at large—could rally once to stop one president hell-bent on an immigration compromise, there is nothing that makes me think that we can’t do it again.

So if John McCain really wants to piss on that electric fence again, we’ll shock him again. I think he knows that, and I think he won’t try.

He will have bigger fish to fry when he’s in office anyway.

Issues

As McCain has focused his campaign largely on the war (with a few exceptions based on debate questions), very little attention has been given to the rest of his record. Indeed, it sort of serves to hide how conservative he is, a fact that certain of his opponents have been swift to jump upon.

I see no need to reiterate his position on the war here; everybody knows it. Nobody has been stronger on the war than John McCain.

McCain has a strong pro-life voting record (0% rating from NARAL). He favors free trade and private accounts for social security (despite being a cranky old guy). He wants less government involvement in health care. He supports school vouchers.

He voted against the Brady Bill and opposed the Federal assault weapons ban. When gun groups dislike him or rate him poorly, it has mostly to do with how his support for campaign finance reform has adversely impacted them.

I will grant you that McCain didn’t vote for the Bush tax cuts six years ago, but he doesn’t want to repeal them. This is to say that he values balanced budgets more than he values tax cuts (which might be a good thing, given how huge our debt and deficits have become), but his favoring of balanced budgets doesn’t rise to the level of raising taxes (which is a very good thing, as anyone represented by Baron “I want to raise taxes to cut the deficit” Hill can surely tell you).

And maybe McCain flip-flopped on favoring the Bush tax cuts. People change in six years. Heck, six years ago, a certain person in the race with a very tan face and perfect hair that now claims to be the most conservative guy in the Republican field was pro-choice, anti-gun, and anti-tax-cuts. If you are willing to swallow so many changes of position from one candidate, you should find no trouble swallowing a fewer number of smaller changes from another.

McCain also has a stalwart record on spending, particularly as it comes to earmarks. It is from this, in particular, that he has earned the hatred of the K Street Republican establishment in Washington, the same people that brought endless GOP corruption scandals that dragged the party’s name and reputation through the dirt. Those sorts would be all too happy to see their nemesis never make it to the White House.

In a party that values marching in lock-step, John McCain hasn’t been one for just marching along. It is for this reason, not because he is not a conservative, that he has gained a reputation as a maverick. It is for this reason, not because he is not a conservative, that talk radio hates his guts.

And, to be perfectly blunt, all of that lock-step marching by Republicans turned the party into a bunch of lemmings that walked off a cliff in 2006 because they were no longer really behaving like Republicans. Not being a part of the Washington Republican establishment orthodoxy is a good thing, not a bad thing.

John McCain is not a conservative ideologue. His record shows him to be a conservative pragmatist. I am not sure that is such a bad thing, since we’ve just had eight years of a supposed conservative ideologue, and it didn’t look a whole lot like I envisioned it would.

McCain isn’t perfect, and there are things about him (like campaign finance reform and immigration) that I don’t like. But I am strongly inclined to believe that the things I don’t like can be thwarted (as the immigration bill was last summer), and that those things are far outweighed by things that I like.

In particular, there is nothing that makes John McCain less appealing to me than George W. Bush was (Bush signed campaign finance reform, he was an advocate of the immigration bill too), and quite a bit that makes him more appealing, particularly if you are a fiscal conservative, but don’t subscribe to the “cut taxes so much that government starves and shrinks so we can drown it in a bath tub” theory put forward by some ideologues that has seen government grow out of control and the debt balloon like Rosie O’Donnell in a Hostess Twinkie factory.

Electability

It is my opinion that John McCain is not only the most electable of the remaining Republican candidates, but that he is also the most conservative that is capable of winning in a general election.

McCain has significant appeal among independents. Whereas Huckabee and Romney invariably cap out at around 40%, unable to get higher in any poll, McCain routinely bests the Democrats in head-to-head polling or runs quite close with them. Just check the Real Clear Politics poll averages.

Given the environment that Republicans are going to face in 2008, it is amazing for any Republican to be able to run neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. The polling deficits seen for Romney and Huckabee simply are not going to be surmountable with the national situation so bad for Republicans. All of Romney’s millions and all of Huckabee’s aw shucks moments won’t be enough to get over that hurdle.

McCain supports the war, the most important issue in my view, and he is the only one who can do so without suffering from it politically. Why? Because he is irritable and has been willing to criticize the President, precisely the thing that other Republicans would not do until it was too late.

It is a matter of credibility.

People do not believe George Bush or the Republicans in general when they speak on the war, but they believe John McCain.

People do not believe George Bush or the Republicans in general anymore when they speak on cutting spending, but they believe John McCain.

History has made the Republican Party amazingly lucky. Fate has dropped into our laps the one man who is right on the war, right on spending, and a bedrock conservative on almost everything, and can still win the election.

McCain carries none of the negative baggage that Bush and the Washington Republican establishment have built up in the past seven years. Alone in the Republican field, he can proudly carry the standard of the party without being touched by all of the bad things—corruption, scandal, cronyism, endless spending, earmarking, incompetence—that have plagued the party and its leader in recent years.

McCain, it is true, has his own negative baggage. But McCain’s negative baggage stems from him taking stands on matters he views to be issues of principle; no one seems to doubt this, even his opponents.

Moreover, McCain’s negative baggage, such as it is, is not seen as negative by most voters; in some cases it helps him with them. It is only within his own party, egged on by primary opponents and by folks on the radio, that such baggage is an issue.

It is addition that wins elections, and in a party whose chattering elites have become obsessed with subtraction and exclusion, it is John McCain that can make sure that the Republican Party remains a big tent, the sort of tent that—while still remaining true to Reagan’s principles—is welcoming to moderates and independents and people in the general election that can be persuaded to our way of thinking, the sort of big tent that wins elections.

The sort of big tent that has coattails and regains majorities lost because the Party has sullied its brand and tarnished its honor. John McCain wipes away all of the dirt that the GOP has gotten on itself in recent years.

A great deal of McCain’s baggage is rather empty. It looks, thanks to the heat of the primary battle, to be a lot worse than it actually is. When the dust settles from the nomination battle, conservatives are going to realize that the Republican Party has nominated one of them.

He may not be a down-the-line checkbox plastic clone of everything we want. Nobody is, no matter how they say they are. McCain is sincere and earnest and principled even in his disagreements however irritating they are (and I find them to be irritating).

But give John McCain a good second look, and you’re going to find that there’s a whole lot more there that you’ll like and agree with than you’d ever expect. McCain was my last choice this time a year ago, and he has come to the top of my list now, both through the courage of his convictions and through his dogged political comeback.

I’d like to have a presidential nominee that stands up for what he believes in without being a blind ideologue, who can bend but not break and adapt rather than dig himself deeper.

A conservative, however sometimes the maverick, that is sincere in his beliefs, not one that came to them just in time to run for president. A guy whose convictions date to when Ronald Reagan was in office, not the day after George W. Bush was reelected and an open White House beckoned.

I’d like a nominee that is a dedicated reformer, not a soulless machine politician. Someone qualified to be president by more than marriage.

Most of all, I want a nominee we can be proud of, an American hero who has bucked the Washington establishment in fighting for change his entire career, rather than reading about change for a few months from a teleprompter at campaign events.

Love him or hate him, like him or tolerate him, this man—this nominee—is John McCain.