The McCain Insurrection

At first glance, the McCain insurgency seems nothing like the other two. Reagan and Gingrich led ideological crusades. They attacked the Republican establishment from the right, and the ground had been prepared by a conservative movement which first won the war of ideas. The McCain insurgency is not ideological. It does feature certain themes and principles, but they are not yet fully developed into a governing agenda.

But if one abandons the premise that insurrections have to be ideological, it becomes clear that in some ways the McCain insurgency does resemble its two predecessors. Like Reagan and Gingrich, McCain makes the corporate and lobbyist types nervous. The corporate elites have invested heavily in George W. Bush, and they must have been chugging Tums after New Hampshire.

Furthermore, like the other two insurgents, McCain is trying to bring new and unlikely blood into Republican ranks. Reagan appealed to the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt and brought in the Reagan Democrats, along with intellectuals like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Bill Bennett who had been Democrats all their lives. In Gingrich’s Republican landslide of 1994, eight million Americans voted Republican in House elections for the first time. And for better or worse, Gingrich tried to import a whole raft of ideas and people that were not part of the conservative canon: thinkers ranging from Marvin Olasky on the right to Heidi and Alvin Toffler on the left, through Edwards Deming and all the rest of that Third Wave zoological futurology.

Rather than Reagan Democrats, this election season has produced the McCain Independents. Many of these new Republican primary voters seem ill-suited to the GOP. But that’s what insurgencies do. They expand the base. They topple the old establishment by bringing in new people. They create new alliances within the party. That’s why 1980 and 1994 were winning years for the GOP in the fall; that’s why the orthodox Republican campaigns of 1992 and 1996 were unsuccessful.

Finally, like Reagan and Gingrich, McCain attacks a Republican establishment that has already rotted from within. John McCain could cruise to such a massive win in New Hampshire because the Republican establishment has ossified. It cannot save a faltering campaign no matter how well funded it might be, no matter how many firewalls it claims to erect. It is possible that a revitalized Bush could save himself — but the establishment’s weakness has been exposed, and some other insurgency will eventually take advantage of it.

The current Republican establishment comprises two factions that were once rivals, the “pragmatic” corporate establishment and the “ideological” conservative movement. But both have suffered crushing defeats in the past decade. In their weakness, they now cling warily to each other. Last year when George W. Bush looked inevitable, they hoped to save themselves by riding his coattails to power. Now, as Bush has faltered, they hope that together they still have enough clout to propel him to the White House.

The corporate establishment suffered its crushing defeat back in 1990, with the tax-hiking budget deal. By breaking the “no new taxes pledge,” President Bush and his senior advisers — Richard Darman, Nicholas Brady, and the rest of the Republican pragmatists — sloughed off the Reagan legacy and forfeited the trust of the American people. They went on to run a typical establishment campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992. Their failure opened the way for conservatives — led by Gingrich, who had dissented from the budget deal — to take over the party. They did, and seemed to achieve a historic triumph in 1994.

But that triumph was short lived. The catastrophic budget shutdown of late 1995 was the conservative movement’s Waterloo. Bill Clinton seized the initiative. The Republicans were thrown back on their heels, saddled with a profoundly unpopular leader, and spent the next couple of years plagued by self-doubt and internal power struggles.

In the time since, neither the corporate honchos nor the movement types have been strong enough to dominate the party. Stumbling and grasping, the Republicans mounted the ineffectual Dole-Kemp campaign, suffered a setback in the 1998 midterm elections, and in general have fitfully surrendered policy ground to the Democrats (in their response to the State of the Union address, the Republicans boasted they were sending $ 500 million more to the Department of Education than Clinton asked for).

Reeling from these blows, both the corporate bigwigs and many movement conservatives seized upon George W. Bush as their savior. They saw Bush as a man with a magic political touch who could lead them back to victory.

And for much of 1999, George Bush did seem to possess that magic touch. More important, he seemed to understand that if it were to win, the Republican Party had to move beyond its two tired factions. Bush made several bold gestures to distinguish himself from the corporate establishment. He talked openly about his religious faith. He distanced himself from the Dick Darman types. He went on to propose a bold tax cut plan.

Bush also distinguished himself from the conservative movement. In a series of subtle and sophisticated speeches, he made it clear that he had a positive governing philosophy. Unlike the Gingrich-Armey-DeLay revolutionaries, he wasn’t merely going to cut, devolve, and dismantle. He proposed new conservative programs. He said government should be limited but energetic. Compassionate conservatism offered the prospect of something new and compelling.

For a time it seemed that the Republican party would not need an insurgency. It seemed that the Republicans had found a candidate who could transform the party from the top, revitalizing its message and broadening its support. But in the heat of the election campaign — in the debates, up against real competition and increased media scrutiny — all that had seemed potentially transforming about the Bush campaign withered. By the end of New Hampshire, compassionate conservatism was a memory. George W. Bush sounded almost indistinguishable from the Robert Dole of 1996 or the George Herbert Walker Bush of 1992.

Indeed, this became almost comically evident the last week in New Hampshire when the Bush campaign rolled out Jack Kemp, John Sununu, and George Bush the elder to prop up a faltering candidate. And whom did the Bush team bring out the day after New Hampshire, when they presumably should have learned that voters were looking for new blood and new themes? Dan Quayle.

In short, after a year of innovative groundwork the Bush campaign reverted to tired formulas. It defaulted to the most familiar conservative rhetoric and the most ineffectual GOP establishment political tactics.

This left the field wide open for John McCain. He attracted independent voters by stressing a reform agenda not part of conservative orthodoxy. But he also beat Bush among voters who called themselves conservative. The conservative establishment turned out to be almost as out of touch with real conservatives as the GOP establishment was with the Republican rank and file. And so McCain won.

At once heterodox in tone and conventional on most issues, at once a rebel and an experienced senator, at once a fervent reformer and a reassuring commander in chief, John McCain now finds himself at the head of the third major insurgency of the past two decades. Right now his strong showing looks like a victory of character over platform, of personality over position papers. But in the helter-skelter of the McCain campaign, two core themes are discernible, themes that could form the foundation of a new Republican approach to governing.

First, all of McCain’s talk about campaign finance reform, special interests, and shaking up Washington — some of it hyperbolic and demagogic — can be understood as part of a more comprehensive ambition to reinvigorate citizenship. As McCain said not long ago, “Although the locus of the change we are calling for is our campaign finance system, this crusade is about much more than changing how we pay for our campaigns. It’s about changing how we view our democracy.”

In speech after speech McCain calls on his listeners, especially young people, to serve a cause greater than themselves. That’s why Bush’s decision to press the tax cut issue was so ineffective. Bush was saying, in effect, I’m going to give you more of your money back. But in these good economic times, McCain was able to trump the appeal to self-interest with a public-spirited message: We should think of ourselves as citizens, not merely as consumers; we should serve the public good, not merely private interest; we should be represented in Washington as Americans, not merely as members of interest groups or as tax-payers.

McCain’s campaign reminds us that citizenship entails more than just voting, and the business of America is more than just business. His brand of conservatism rejects the notion that the highest end of government is to leave us alone. This may sound un-Republican. But just as Reagan reached across party lines to appropriate some of the rhetoric and spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, so McCain echoes some of the language and sentiments of John and Robert Kennedy.

This created a particularly effective contrast with Bill Clinton, who never sacrificed for the public good, who used the Lincoln Bedroom for partisan fund-raising and the Oval Office for private gratification, and whose vision of public policy consists of doling out favors to Americans divided into innumerable niche interests.

Against a Democratic party that is deferential to bureaucrats, judges, and professional activists, against a Republican party of corporate hierarchies and business lobbyists, against a conservative movement that loves the private sector so much it disdains the public one, McCain offers a vision of an engaged, active, self-governing citizenry.

He also offers a second vision, one that grows out of his own life story: a story of honorable behavior on behalf of a great nation. McCain launched his campaign with a book entitled Faith of My Fathers. McCain’s faith-based institution is America. He sees patriotism as a more solid ground for public action than the softer, more private compassion of George Bush’s faith-based charities. He offers a vision of a remoralized America, but his cultural renewal does not depend on a religious revival. It comes from a commitment to the idea of America and the public virtues, like courage, honor, integrity, and duty, required to keep America great.

It is clear that Vietnam plays an important role in McCain’s appeal. Vietnam led many on the left to doubt the idea of America, and many other Americans to shy away from full-throated patriotism. McCain, the Vietnam hero, is the final renunciation of all that.

It is no accident that McCain has emerged after a decade dominated by two politicians, Clinton and Gingrich, clever but not self-sacrificing, who never served in the armed forces. For all his conventional political views, McCain embodies a set of virtues that today are unconventional. The issue that gave the McCain campaign its initial boost was Kosovo. He argued that America as a great champion of democracy and decency could not fail to act. And he supported his commander in chief despite grave doubts about the conduct of the war — while George W. Bush sat out the debate and Republicans on the Hill flailed at Clinton.

McCain closed his New Hampshire campaign with two ads. One emphasized his commitment to reform, the other his fitness as commander in chief. For McCain, the president is, above all, these two things: citizen reformer and commander in chief. These two fundamental elements — reform for the sake of citizenship and leadership in the service of American greatness — undergird a not yet fully developed program. What’s striking is that both of these elements have been absent from most current political discourse. That’s why the McCain insurgency is not just a fundamental challenge to the Republican party but a political phenomenon with potential appeal to the country as a whole.