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Establishment conservatives: not exactly Minutemen
Scott of Powerline writes:
Our friends Vin Weber and Mark Levin make strong cases that now is the time for all good conservatives to come to the aid of Mitt Romney.Now is the time? What about three weeks ago, when the conservative movement, with all its resources, would have had time to build up support for Romney and head McCain off? I’m glad that many establishment conservatives have been writing strong anti-McCain columns in the last couple of days. But if they were against McCain and for Romney, why didn’t they rally to Romney’s side after Iowa, when everyone was saying that McCain was going to win New Hampshire and that this would propel him toward the nomination? Or why didn’t they reach this point right after the New Hampshire primary? Or after the Michigan primary, when Romney showed he could win? Or after the South Carolina primary, which set McCain up for Florida? Why did they wait until McCain was on the verge of locking up the nomination before they finally started to oppose him? In my view, the long delay is of a piece with the ubiquitous prejudice against Romney about which I’ve commented so often. People didn’t like Romney’s strangeness, his “too-perfect” quality (for many people it was the latter that made him strange), his recent arrival at some of his conservative positions, maybe his Mormonism, so they never zeroed in on Romney’s virtues and on the simple and obvious fact that he is the only viable and acceptable alternative to McCain. Only when the horror of a McCain nomination was right In their faces did they finally face reality.
Apart from all of McCain’s bad positions and bad qualities, the single greatest reason he must be stopped is the damage that the nomination of the biggest open borders proponent in America would do to the immigration control movement. However, I suppose there’s another side to it. If the McCain-Kennedy “comprehensive” immigration bill last year could rouse the biggest grass roots lobbying effort in American history, imagine what McCain’s nomination, let alone his election, would accomplish. The more aggressive and anti-American the other side becomes, the more they wake up the American people. Email entry |