IT’S OVER. The love affair of the left with John McCain is now ending, as these things do so often, in tears. Of course, liberals’ hearts have been broken before, usually as the result of some cherished illusion that a maverick Republican, who seems to them “better,” will blow the whistle on the whole monstrous fraud that is the Republican party by dramatically ditching it, denouncing it for its monstrous and retrograde theories, and then coming over to . . . them.
For years, the editorial board of the New York Times clung to the belief that Colin Powell would one day resign from the cabinet, denouncing George W. Bush as an idiot. It begged. It pleaded. It cajoled him. It said he owed it to God and his conscience (to which it somehow had access). It didn’t happen. Powell broke their hearts quietly, but this was nothing compared to how they were jilted Monday night, when John McCain, their favorite Republican of many years’ standing, broke all of their hearts with a bang.
For years, liberals professed their love for John McCain. They loved him, they said, because he was independent, unpredictable, and told the truth as he saw it, but mainly because he managed to rile the president. They watched the bruising confrontation in the 2000 primaries as Bush and McCain locked antlers, and dreamed it would go on forever. They hoped from the end of the 2000 election that McCain would defect, that McCain would rebel, that McCain would launch a third-party run, like his hero, Theodore Roosevelt. Their fantasy was not that McCain would actually win such a race, but that he, like TR, would split his party and let a Democrat in. Then they hoped he would bolt completely and join Kerry on a “unity ticket,” though no one explained what the unifying factor might be. Throughout, there were conspicuous swoons for his independence, his courage, his habit of speaking his mind. Then McCain spoke his mind here Monday night, saying George W. Bush ought to be reelected, and especially endorsing the Iraq invasion. This was not the straight talk they were expecting, and the love stopped.
The liberal illusion was based on two deep misconceptions, concerning both McCain and his party. Most of the people who indulge in these dreams have a view of the Republican party as a crabbed and warped wing of neoconfederates, ruled by a group of semi-fanatics, in which no sane person could happily be at home. But the Republicans are in fact a modern governing party, a diverse collection of people linked by a few big ideas. The FDR coalition was the most diverse ever, embracing both the civil rights movement and the worst segregationists, crypto-Communists, and Bourbon reactionaries. The Reagan coalition consisted of libertarians and social conservatives, traditional Republicans and disaffected blue collar Democrats, émigrés to the Sunbelt and neoconservatives from the urban northeast.
Today’s Republican party has a congressional wing that skews to the base of its party (as the congressional Democrats skew to the base of their party), and a governors’ wing that is more centrist. It has, as did Roosevelt’s, a base in the South, but a broad representation throughout the nation, with the governorships of the four largest states in the union, and of such blue states as Massachusetts and Maryland. Few people in governing coalitions get their way all the time, but they stay in them because they know that the alternative is not a large party of likeminded people but a ragtag coalition with which they would agree even less.
And then, the liberals misunderstood John McCain. He is, as noted before, a contrarian, who gets a large kick out of tweaking the orthodox, jerking the chains of conventional thinkers, who respond, none too smartly, with predictable howls of rage. Their mistake was in thinking that McCain, who often enjoys tweaking Bush and Republicans, might not also tweak Kerry, and them.
McCain worked hard, in the Hanoi Hilton and later, for the moral authority he now has with the American people, and he can hardly be blamed if he uses it sometimes, as he used the speculation he might run with John Kerry to toy both with Kerry and Bush. But McCain is also a serious man, and he knows that on September 11 Bush became serious too, while most of the Democrats, Kerry included, did not.
“What’s on the mind of John McCain, who not long ago seemed to be flirting with a nomination for Veep on the Democratic ticket but suddenly has become an ardent Bush booster?” asked the Wall Street Journal‘s Holman Jenkins on Tuesday. “Mr. McCain wants a U.S. victory in Iraq and dreads U.S. abandonment of another war amid domestic squabbling . . . and the failure of the country to have the courage of its convictions.” Hence McCain’s central message: “Do not yield. Do not flinch. Stand up. Stand up with our president and fight.”
This was Straight Talk, but not the straight talk that liberals wanted, and on Tuesday they burned with rage. “The existential question becomes how John McCain ever looks at himself in the mirror,” said the blog of the American Prospect, and this was just the beginning. McCain’s speech was a “flop,” said the Nation, a view held by few others. Others for the first time discovered that McCain was a Republican (!), and a politician with higher ambitions, neither of which he had ever disguised. But the fact that he was a Republican was forgiven only when he could be used to hurt other Republicans; and his ambitions were laudable only when they could be used to trip up the Bushies.
The liberals just wanted to use McCain. It never was love after all.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
