The establi-cons on McCain, February 2008

Lots of establishment conservatives are coming out of the woodwork wailing about McCain’s ineffectiveness and lack of will to take the fight to his leftist opponent. Last winter I warned over and over that McCain’s nomination would be a disaster for the Republican party and conservatism and must be stopped at all costs, while many of those same establishment conservatives were either supporting McCain or not opposing him. For example, here’s something I wrote on February 14:

If Mitt Romney had held onto his delegates until the convention, there was, in combination with Huckabee’s continuing campaign, a slight chance of stopping the nomination of McCain. Any means of doing so should have been pursued. So I am disappointed that Romney endorsed McCain today and asked his delegates to support him. As a result, we now face the certain nomination of a 71 year old mediocrity in obvious poor health, whose strongest beliefs are for open borders, for keeping our troops in Iraq for a hundred years, and for sticking it to conservatives every chance he can get. The Republican party has committed hara-kiri, while the Democratic party seems to be moving toward the selection of a nonwhite leftist messiah who will “unify” us (i.e., unify us around leftism) and take care of all our needs.

(See in that same entry my exchange with a reader who thought I was bigoted for my above description of Obama.)

One of the establishment “conservatives” who has made a big splash this week about McCain’s ineffectiveness and basically written off his candidacy is William Kristol. Yet last February Kristol wrote in the New York Times:

The prospect of John McCain as the likely Republican presidential nominee has produced a squall of anger on the right. Normally reserved columnists and usually ebullient talk-radio hosts vie to express their disgust with McCain, and their disdain for the Republicans who are about to nominate him. The conservative movement as a whole appears disgruntled and dyspeptic.

That same week the magazine of which Kristol is the editor, The Weekly Standard, had an article by Noemie Emery mocking all opponents of McCain as hate-filled crazies who did not have a single rational reason for opposing him. See “The Weekly Standard smears the McCain opponents.”

Then there’s the uber lightweight Richard Lowry, editor of the magazine that endorsed Romney for president, who instantly abandoned Romney when he came in second in the Iowa primary, and showed his eagerness for McCain.

And then there’s David Frum, who last winter, after pointing out that McCain is lethally flawed as a candidate, declined to endorse the only candidate who could stop McCain, Romney, for the momentous reason that

I don’t understand why he is running for president…. And so I am left to struggle with that question of “why”? If I cannot figure out why a candidate is running, how am I to evaluate why I should support or oppose him?

Yet having refused to support the only man standing in the way of McCain’s nomination, Frum now blasts the McCain-Palin ticket just three weeks before the election—so harshly that his own editor at National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez, has taken him to task for it at the Corner.

(You know what? I’ll bet that if Romney had been exactly the candidate he was but with one slight change, namely that he more forthrightly embraced the neocons’ universalist democracy agenda, Frum’s concern about Romney’s uncertain motives for wanting to be president would have vanished and Frum would have endorsed him.)

Delving deeper, this entry considers how the rise of McCain was made possible by (1) George W. Bush, whose betrayals and distortions of conservatism ruined the conservative “brand,” and thus made it impossible for Republicans to nominate a real conservative, and (2) the conservatives who all along supported Bush instead of opposing him, thus assisting in the hollowing out of conservatism which they now bewail. If Bush had been defeated in 2004, as I said at the time was the preferable outcome, conservatism at this moment would be vital and confident and ready for a comeback, instead of being played-out and exhausted as is the actual case.

One establishment conservative who took a stand against McCain last winter was David Limbaugh. I don’t know if he turned around and endorsed McCain after McCain had won the nomination. Another conservative who made a strong case against McCain was Don Feder.

There’s a lot more on McCain’s candidacy in VFR’s archives , especially for the weeks of January 27, February 3, and February 10.

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A reader who is a well known conservative writer writes:

Excellent memory! That’s really something about Frum. Romney won my eternal loyalty for standing up to McCain’s populist demagoguery about the evil drug companies and their evil profits during one of the debates. I have to think it would make a big difference now if he were at least on the ticket as VP.

I guess everyone just wants to win, so they back whoever’s on the ticket.

LA replies:

It’s one thing to support who’s on the ticket, it’s another abandon your own endorsed candidate for the nomination the moment he loses a primary, as Lowry did. It’s another to call McCain’s opponents irrational haters, and then turn against McCain oneself, as Kristol has done. It’s another to say that McCain is lethally flawed, but refuse to support his only opponent for the nomination for the flimsiest of reasons, as Frum did.

James P. writes:

You might want to listen to Derb lamenting the nomination of McCain and praising Romney as a man of calm good sense, and as a clearly superior alternative to the dismal McCain, and wondering how this happened. Also some remarks about immigration.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 14, 2008 09:02 AM | Send