Since John McCain emerged as the Repuliblican front-runner, conservative Republicans have been staggering through the stages of grief. James Dobson remains in denial. Rush Limbaugh, in character, is apoplectically enraged. CPAC organizers are instructing the faithful not to boo McCain's speech today. The inimitable Grover Norquist has smoothly sailed from bargaining to acceptance -- in time to do more bargaining, presumably.
Schadenfreude aside, it would be wrong to conclude that McCain's victory spells the end of conservative rule. The enemy of my enemy, in this case, is not my friend.
"Maverick McCain" is hardly the centrist moderate that a hostile conservative movement and a friendly press corps portray him to be. McCain proudly and rightly boasts that he is a true conservative. And he is.
Why the disjuncture between the image and the reality? The answer lies in the confusion of meaning generated by the three adjectives most commonly used to describe McCain: maverick, independent, and moderate.
McCain's undeserved reputation as a moderate rests almost exclusively on his independent streak, on maverick actions against the dictates of conservative leaders. True, there are a few issues on which McCain has broken substantively with the conservative movement. His principled condemnation of torture and Guatanamo, and his advocacy of humane immigration reform are positions that put him in the American mainstream. He's distanced himself from the wacky right by acknowledging that global warming is real. But, for the most part, McCain has earned the Right's enmity for bucking their directives, not for going against party orthodoxy.
For reasons of temperament and principle, McCain has often refused to be commanded by the unelected leaders of the conservative movement. For example, McCain is a fiscal conservative who supports tax cuts and cuts in social spending, but he has never signed Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform's no-tax pledge. Since Bush senior broke that pledge -- remember "Read my lips, no new taxes" -- few Republicans have dared to thumb their nose at Norquist so brazenly as McCain has. When conservative interest groups demanded McCain drop restrictions on issue advertising from campaign finance reform, he rebuffed them. The National Rifle Association and anti-abortion groups want to pay him back for that. The Christian right is having difficulty finding forgiveness in their hearts for McCain's denunciation of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance" in the 2000 campaign.
The pervasive misunderstanding of McCain will pose a special challenge to the Democratic nominee and down-ticket Democratic candidates in the general election competition for independents and real moderates. True, McCain is a different kind of conservative Republican, one more independent of the conservative movement than most Republican politicians of the Bush era. But make no mistake. If elected, McCain will govern as a conservative. Because he will run on his reputation as a maverick, and because he is not a run-of-the-mill rightwinger, he won't be easy to dismiss. To make the case against a McCain presidency, Democratic candidates and progressive bloggers will need to be smarter, more subtle, and less inflamed by partisan loathing of the right. First, they will need to report on and analyze his conservative record. (NARAL has a good entry on this today in "Myth of the "Moderate Maverick'") Second, they should turn the spotlight on McCain's courtship of the right and the promises he has made to them.
McCain deserves to be accorded respect for the service he has given to this country, for his defense of American principles against the prevailing opinion in his party, and for his few moments of political courage. The nation deserves an honest appraisal of McCain's bedrock conservatism and the potential consequences of the conservative policies he will undoubtedly advance if elected.