The only way to cure the GOP of Bushism/McCainism: elect a Democrat

Throughout the 2004 election cycle I said over and over that President Bush’s re-election would seal and affirm his liberalization of the Republican party, ruining conservatism, but that the election of his Democratic opponent would galvanize the Republicans to oppose liberalism instead of slavishly supporting it in the person of Bush. At the end of a single, calamitous Kerry term, I added, a revitalized and more conservative Republican party, free of the incubus of Bush, would be ready to take power. Not that this scenarios was guaranteed, of course, but that it was reasonably likely.

Four years later, that same view is being expressed by mainstream conservatives ranging from Ann Coulter to a commenter at Lucianne.com. First the L-dotter:

Reply 23—Posted by: Jimmyboy1, 2/6/2008 8:10:01 AM

Even here I’m surprised you people aren’t listening to our real wise advisers.

Hillary and McCain are the same, except for one thing: a Republican Congress will fight against a Dem president, but not against one of their own party, so it would be better to have Hillary. Sorry, but it’s the truth.

Now Coulter:

If Hillary is elected president, we’ll have a four-year disaster, with Republicans ferociously opposing her, followed by Republicans zooming back into power, as we did in 1980 and 1994, and 2000. (I also predict more Oval Office incidents with female interns.)

If McCain is elected president, we’ll have a four-year disaster, with the Republicans in Congress co-opted by “our” president, followed by 30 years of Democratic rule.

There’s your choice, America.

Unfortunately, Coulter has herself been a staunch Bush supporter and thus helped enable Bush in the very liberalization of the Republican party that has now reached its culmination in the victory of McCain that has turned Coulter into a Hillary supporter. Does Coulter recognize her own role in the steady compromising of conservatism that has facilitated the rise of McCain? To put it another way, does she really think that Bush is so good that he deserved her unstinting defense, while McCain is so bad that Hillary Clinton would be better? In an entry in February 2004 I discussed how the conservatives’ total loyalty to Bush, that loyalty supposedly made necessary by “the war, the war, the war” (that war which is not even a war), liberated him to move left and take the Republicans with him.

See also this entry where I summed up my 2004 argument.

- end of initial entry -

Robert in Nashville writes:

Here in Tennessee, I finally decided to vote for Romney. Huckabee won. The way it looks, we may now have to choose between McCain, a traitor (imo) and a person who will lie when and if he takes the oath to defend our country from invasion. Apparently he is a man who does not even believe in the idea of a nation, only of a state and a never ending war abroad, while embracing invasion and occupation abroad but embracing continued invasion of his own county.

If those are the choices, I think I will vote for Hillary. McCain he betrayed not only his nation with his support for the so called reform bill last year, but his party as well. If he is elected, the Republican party is dead and extinct as a conservative party.

If Hillary is elected, it is possible, though just barely, that the Republican elites, having seen the cost of betraying their own constituents, may promote conservatives again. Unless I misunderstood him badly, tonight, O’Reilly joined the voices saying he would support Hillary over McCain. I was stunned. I would be interested in your thoughts given such choices. Or is better, not to vote at all instead of choosing between two evils?

LA replies:

I would not vote for McCain under any circumstances. He is a bad person. I wrote in 2000 that he was a “dangerous man,” and I didn’t like him for years before that. Whether I would vote FOR Hillary is, I must admit, a thought I’ve been having lately. But that’s really an extreme position and may just be a product of current emotions. It’s not something that has to be decided for a long time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 06, 2008 08:12 PM | Send