Arizona representative Martha McSally is a reliably party-line Republican who has voted for almost all of President Trump’s deregulatory, health insurance, tax, and immigration agenda. The one exception is her disapproval of a medical liability reform bill last June that the White House favored. Notwithstanding that Republican primary season has been a Trump fan-fest for candidates regardless of ideology, a McSally campaign aide said that she “votes for the president’s agenda more than anyone else” in Arizona’s congressional delegation. Based on the oft-cited “Trump score” calculated by FiveThirtyEight, he’s right—she “votes with” the president on 97 percent of key legislation. And McSally’s district, the Arizona 2nd, is more purple than it is red.
All this is to say that McSally, the GOP nominee to replace retiring senator Jeff Flake, is “conservative” by substantive measures. “Conservative” policy-making on domestic affairs during the Obama years called for fewer federal regulations, Obamacare repeal, and tax cuts, among some internecine and defunct pursuits like immigration reform and entitlement reform, respectively. With Republicans now controlling both Congress and the presidency, McSally has supported the bulk of this platform, even on efforts like the American Health Care Act, which the public staunchly opposed.
Yet several press accounts described McSally after her primary victory against Joe Arpaio and Kelli Ward on Tuesday as … not conservative? Relatively moderate? The question marks are necessary to admit doubt about what the papers were going for by describing the two-term rep as some sort of milquetoast Republican. She was said to face a “conservative challenge,” for example, by several outlets.
· Reuters: “Republican U.S. Representative Martha McSally’s embrace of President Donald Trump and his agenda paid off on Tuesday, when the Arizonan beat back conservative challengers for her party’s nomination in a crucial U.S. Senate race.”
· NBC News: “McSally, a former fighter pilot, had been favored to prevail over the two conservatives (Arpaio and Ward), who split the anti-establishment vote.”
· FOX News: “McSally, a former Air Force colonel considered the favorite of the Washington establishment, played up her allegiance to President Trump while competing against two outspoken conservative contenders.”
· CNN (Chris Cillizza): “Conservatives have struck out repeatedly in Arizona Senate primaries. … Ward and Arpaio lose to McSally in 2018.”
· Slate: “Despite all the love being thrown his way, the president himself stayed out of the race. … His silence, it seems, was enough to keep either Ward or Arpaio from consolidating the conservative opposition to McSally.”
McSally, then, only became “conservative” enough to win when she embraced “Trump and his agenda” (Reuters)? Or in fact she was an establishmentarian all along who managed to fend off “conservative contenders” (NBC News, Fox News)? Is she even conservative, if the conservatives in the race “struck out” (Cillizza)? Perhaps not, if Martha McSally—that RINO squish with a spine of putty—was so insufficiently right-of-center she attracted “conservative opposition” (Slate).
The Wall Street Journal’s takeaway was that McSally beat “more conservative rivals,” implying that McSally at least was conservative. But Nebraska senator Ben Sasse took issue with the very comparison of her beliefs to those of her primary foes:
those people were not “more conservative” https://t.co/ZaPW1afuV1
— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) August 29, 2018
By one interpretation—conservatism as policy substance—Sasse is correct. The GOP’s tax reform legislation lowered the corporate tax rate to 21 percent; neither Arpaio nor Ward stumped for 20 percent or lower. Neither candidate advocated a more ambitious alternative to Obamacare than House Republicans, Senate Republicans, or Mark Meadows, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, or Bill Cassidy did. McSally wants a wall separating the United States from Mexico—did Arpaio or Ward ever say they wanted it reinforced with electrified metal plating? No?
That leaves, really, one other interpretation: conservatism as attitude, as edginess, as PR. As the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack wrote last week, Ward wound down her campaign on “a bus tour with conspiracy theorist and alt-righter Mike Cernovich.” Previously, she floated herself unreservedly to be appointed the late Sen. John McCain’s successor while he was still alive last year. She suggested during the weekend that McCain timed his decision to end his medical care to harm her campaign.
“Arpaio was, like President Donald Trump, one of the most prominent promoters of the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory about former President Barack Obama,” McCormack’s story continued. The public elected Arpaio to be a lawman. A federal judge ruled last July that he was a criminal, finding him in contempt of court for defying a 2011 order to stop detaining suspected illegal immigrants “only on knowledge or reasonable belief, without more, that the person is unlawfully present within the United States.” Trump pardoned him the next month. Thus Arpaio was a martyr for hardline immigration policy. And his pro-Trump bona fides were never in question.
Me: “Do you think John McCain is a patriot?”
Arpaio: “Yes.”
Me: “A hero?”
Arpaio: “That’s hard for me to answer. Because I never had a hero in my life until several months ago when I woke up after 75 years and I found my hero. You know who that person is? Donald Trump.” https://t.co/OCjq8yhLYV— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) August 28, 2018
A debate about the taxonomy of “conservatives” is relevant to the future of American politics. Already it seems that a right-of-center politician can be labeled “moderate” simply for having the restraint not to slur an opponent. If this is the measure of a conservative—high on conspiracies instead of grounded in facts, bullheaded rather than thoughtful, spoiling for a fight but not a debate, caring never what is said but how one says it—then there needn’t be a discussion at all. For the word “conservative,” at that point, is meaningless.
