The pundits are wrong when they say that John McCain's victory in Florida proves he can win the Republican base, without the help of Independents. They're wrong, because Florida is not a bellweather of the conservative movement -- it's a state full of Republican "pieces" -- Cuban-Americans who are Republican because they believe JFK betrayed them on Castro; "redneck" Republicans who were former Dixiecrats, social conservatives who can't stop themselves from putting up successive gay marriage amendments in a state where gay marriage is already illegal, and cloth coat Republicans who run the state and wield power through corporate tax cuts and privatizations schemes a-la Jeb Bush. [Photo at left from the New Republican Party blog]
McCain won this state by consolidating the Hispanic vote -- and because this is one of the few states where his immigration stand is popular (Cubans don't have an immigration problem, thanks, ironically, to Bill Clinton). The endorsement from his immigration ally Mel Martinez, plus nods from the elected "Cuban mafia" (the Diaz Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen) helped him crush Mitt Romney and Rudy in Miami-Dade.
He won by capturing the majority of moderate Republicans, some of whom may have been influenced by our super-moderate governor, Charlie Crist, who at this stage is probably more popular with Democrats than he is with members of his own party.
What McCain did not win, is the vote of a majority of conservatives, particularly social conservatives. Those, he lost to the combination of Mitt Romney (who is becoming surprisingly acceptable to SoCons, though he is a Mormon, whom they don't consider Christian...) and Mike Huckabee. And he lost "very conservative" or "movement" conservative voters, also to Romney.
When McCain is tested on Super Tuesday, it won't be so much about his appeal to conservatives, as it will be a test of whether the GOP will continue its tradition of capitulating to the front runner, as happened when McCain lost South Carolina, and then the entire primary race to George W. Bush.
Is John McCain a conservative? Sort of. He's certainly more conservative than your average Democrat. But look at the company he keeps: people like Rudy and Arnold and even Charlie Crist -- hardly conservative icons. And look at who he rejects: up until last year, he had no use for people like the late Jerry Falwell. If you think of conservatism as the ideological mantra of low taxes, deregulation and crimped spending, McCain fits the bill. But if you judge conservatism by what it has become: an amalgam of religious zealotry, pro-life activism and war fever, with a fascination for torture and a paranoia about Arabs and Mexicans thrown in for good measure, then McCain only fits into the war fever part. In other words, McCain is not a conservative, he's a neoconservative, which I define as a non-ideological political actor who cares nothing about social issues or the economy, and only about war in the Middle East, and who is only a Republican for bookkeeping purposes.
So how did he get to be the Republican front runner at a time when neoconservatism has seemed to fall out of favor with the party of Reagan? Well, what if it hasn't?
McCain made his comeback by making a deal with the Devil -- becoming fellow neocon GWB's BFF for seven years and swallowing his contempt for him, in order to garner the most important support of all: the support of the Republican establishment -- which favors neoconservatism because you make more money with war than you do stopping abortions -- and which Vin Weber helpfully pointed out this week in a great column by E. J. Dionne, is not the same as the conservative movement (last paragraph in the clip below):
If John McCain secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics — a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments.
McCain would be the first Republican nominee since Gerald Ford in 1976 to win despite opposition from organized conservatism, and also the first whose base in Republican primaries rested on the party's center and its dwindling left. McCain is winning despite conservatives, not because of them.
Those who built the American right, from Barry Goldwater in 1964 through the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, are intensely aware of the dangers a McCain victory portends. Some on the right feel it would be less damaging to their cause to lose the 2008 election with the Republican-conservative alliance intact than to win with John McCain.
For those outside the conservative movement, such anxiety seems strange. McCain's voting record in the House and Senate has typically won high ratings from conservative groups. His positions on key issues (support for the Iraq War, opposition to abortion, his long-standing criticism of government spending) are those of an orthodox, conservative loyalist.
If McCain is the nominee, Democrats will have plenty of ammunition to persuade middle-of-the-road voters that he is not a moderate. And in Wednesday's California debate, McCain repeated his oft-declared claim that he had been a "foot soldier" in Ronald Reagan's army.
But staunch conservatives see things differently. They know that in primary after primary, McCain's base has been formed by moderates, liberals, independents, supporters of abortion rights and critics of President Bush. Conservatives — who mistrust McCain because of his history on taxes, immigration, global warming and campaign finance reform — were not his coalition's driving force. And Republicans who describe themselves as "very conservative" have consistently rejected McCain. In this week's Florida primary, such voters backed Mitt Romney over McCain by more than 2-to-1.
Vin Weber, a former member of Congress, who backed McCain in 2000 but supports Romney this year, said the confusion outside Republican ranks is not surprising. "People usually think that the conservative leadership and the Republican leadership are one and the same, but they're not," Weber said. ...
You hear that sound? It's the sound of the Republican coalition cracking... neocons and their corporate backers no longer need the social conservatives, who many of them see as kooky pain in the necks. They no longer need loudmouth media conservatives like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who let's face it, are embarrassing. They are betting on being able to put another war president into the White House with the help of moderate Republicans who are hawks on the GWOT and Iraq, conservative Democrats (read Democrats who have a paranoid fear of Muslims and think water boarding isn't such a bad idea), and hawkish Independents who sill think America likes Joe Lieberman.
The neocons, having wrecked the Republican Party, are forming a new coalition, bankrolled by the defense industry (Eisenhower's "military industrial complex.") Having lost Rudy to the ages, they now see John McCain as the man who can help them hold onto the White House.
The question is, will movement conservatives, who agree with neocons on the war but hate McCain, stop him?
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
