MCCAIN AS THE ANTI-REAGAN

It's going to take a while for conservatives to become fully resigned to John McCain's securing the Republican presidential nomination.

They may never be if he does some incredibly dumb thing like picking a Preacher Socialist – Mike Huckabee – as his running mate, or his supporters continue to demonize conservative heroes like Rush Limbaugh for not genuflecting at the saintly image of Sir Galahad McCain.

No Knight of King Arthur's Round Table, like Sir Galahad who McCain pretends to be, possessed "a strutting self-righteousness… that goes hand in hand with a nitroglycerin temper."  That memorably accurate description of John McCain by Mona Charen explains why McCain is the Anti-Reagan.

On the day of Ronald Reagan's passing, June 5, 2004, I wrote my tribute to him, The Great-Souled Man.  It contained this description: 

There was a depth of character to his charisma that seemed bottomless. There was a solidity of integrity and humanity behind the dazzling charm that was matchless. You loved Ronald Reagan for his ideals and his complete fearlessness in advocating them – and you loved Ronald Reagan for the man, the human being, he was.

Compare that to McCain – for whom, if you Google his well-deserved nickname of "McPain," you'll get 24,500 hits. 

Aside from Ronald Reagan the politician, statesman, or political conservative, Ronald Reagan the human being was someone of great-hearted likeability.  It was almost impossible to dislike him.  The contrast is stark.  It is almost impossible to actually like, to be genuinely fond of John McCain because at the bottom of his character he is an insufferable jerk.

Which is why he is going to lose to an opponent who should be ridiculously easy to beat, Barack Hussein Obama Jr.

McCain's only chance was to run against the wicked witch herself – Shrillary, Her Thighness, Her Heinous, the Hildebeast, the Pig-In-A-Pantsuit or PIAPS for short.  Only her specter could generate the conservative passion necessary for a GOP victory, despite McCain being McPain.

Now he has to face Obambi Hussein, and conservative passion won't be there.   Remind yourselves what the passion for Ronald Reagan was like, what it felt like.  Remember?  (Yes, I'm assuming you're in your 30s or older;  if you're too young to remember, just ask any conservative who isn't.) 

Because of his essential unlikeableness, McCain cannot create conservative passion for him.  This truth will outrage the McCainiacs, who will thus angrily blame his loss in November upon conservatives.  But as anyone should know on this Valentine's Day, you can't force someone to love you.

You've got to entice them instead.  You don't angrily stomp your feet and call them deranged if they don't love you.  There's no bigger turn-off than that.

Seducing conservatives wouldn't be that hard.  But it would take actually doing things, rather than promising you'll love them in the morning (promises to appoint constructionist judges, giving good speeches like the victory in Virginia one on 2/12).

The most obvious example that everyone's clamoring for is a conservative running-mate.  The consensus choice of top conservatives in Congress is Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina.  No doubt that would help. The latest buzz, however, is over McCain's recent overtures to Condi Rice.

Condi has been a terrible disappointment as Secretary of State, becoming a puppet of the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy and its pro-Arab/anti-Israel clique in particular.  But she would obliterate The Obamarama and any running-mate he chooses in a debate.  She sure would make the GOP ticket interesting and the race exciting.

Nonetheless, given McCain's irrational irascibility, I expect him to pick someone almost designed to alienate conservatives.  I would love to be wrong, so let's see.

There are other examples of what he could actually do, like making a commitment to, if elected, pardon Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, currently in prison for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler in the butt.  Bush's infuriating refusal to do so has alienated him from conservatives more than just about anything else.

The most convincing action, though, would be for McCain to commit a no-turning-back liberal heresy, to condemn the sacred religion of the left and the Democrat Party as a hoax.  His public announcement would be something like:

"My friends, we are always being advised to have the courage of our convictions.  But it takes even greater courage to question our convictions, to re-examine them under the bright light of countervailing evidence. 

"This is what I have done regarding something I thought was true.  I have recalled Ronald Reagan's famous observation that ‘The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant;  it's that they know so much that isn't so.'  Thus it is that, upon re-examining the evidence, I have decided that the theory of man-made global warming is a liberal left-wing hoax.

"Global warming – or as it is more fraudulently called, ‘climate change,' to provide a dishonest rationale for any change in the weather – is, in fact, much more than a hoax.  It is the left's substitute for Marxism and socialism.  With the failure of both, it is the left's latest excuse for seizure of government power to run and control our lives.

"Just ask the millions of people around the world from China to our own Mid-West currently suffering record cold, or those in the Southern Hemisphere from Peru to South Africa to Australia during their last winter, about the fraud of global warming.  The world may well be getting colder, my friends, not warmer.

"Whichever, we may be sure the villain of the left is not responsible:  carbon dioxide.  CO2 makes up but a small fraction of the atmosphere's greenhouse gases (3.6% — 95% of greenhouse gases is water vapor), and most of that is natural – from forests and oceans – 96.7%.  Only 3.2% of CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made.

"If you multiply 3.6% (0.036) times 3.2% (0.032), you get mankind's carbon dioxide contribution to the total greenhouse effect presently warming the earth:  slightly more than 1/10^th of 1%.  One tenth of one percent.  That's our total contribution.

"So all the left's demands to ‘stop global warming' and ‘reduce our carbon footprint' in order to  ‘save the planet' by giving government more control over our lives and economy is to reduce that 3.2% of 3.6%, that infinitesimal one tenth of one percent.

"This is a ridiculous left-wing fraud, an absurd liberal hoax, and I will have no part of it."

I can guarantee you that if John McCain gave that speech with real conviction, it would cause conservatives to re-evaluate their opinion of him and increase their enthusiasm for him like nothing else.  I can also almost guarantee you he will never do it.

Simply because he is a stubborn jerk who won't admit he's wrong.  Again, I would love for him to prove that I'm the one who's wrong.

At best then, we'll be stuck with the key word in the first sentence of this article.  The story of the 2008 GOP presidential campaign will be a process of conservatives becoming resigned to McCain's candidacy, rather than becoming enthusiastic.

Sure, most conservatives, me included, will dutifully go to the polls in November and pull the lever for McCain because they can't stand the alternative Democrat nightmare.  But it will be without fire, passion, and enthusiasm.  And that's what wins elections. 

Passion, fire, enthusiasm for a candidate among the conservative base is a necessary condition for a Republican victory.  It is not a sufficient condition, meaning it's all you need to succeed.  You need more, like moderate and disaffected Dem votes as well.  But conservative enthusiasm is a necessary condition, meaning without it you will fail.

This is what McCain is too stupid or too stubborn to understand. 

His problem is not overcoming a negative, conservative reluctance or rejection.  It is generating a positive, conservative passion and enthusiasm.

Let's visualize the problem with a thought-experiment.  Can you imagine John McCain at a campaign rally generating even a substantial fraction of the passion and enthusiasm created in the audience by Barack Hussein Obama?

If McCain could, he could easily deflate the Obamamania balloon. 

Obamamania is a frenzy, and all frenzies have short life-spans.  It is February, and November is a very long ways away.  There is simply no way for a candidate to sustain the frenzy for that long, especially when he's from Oakland, California.

Poet Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) famously complained of Oakland that "there is no there there."  Obambi's all show and no go, all soaring empty rhetoric with nothing but left-wing anti-capitalist tripe and can't-we-all-get-along naiveté for a foreign policy behind it.

But once Obamamania starts to dissipate, the liberal media will launch volley after volley of attacks on McCain, relentlessly exposing scandal after scandal – possibly the one I discussed regarding "T" in Vietnam, but most certainly how he left his crippled wife for a young rich blonde, his crooked involvement with the Keating Five, his adulterous affairs with women lobbyists, his long list of broken promises and back-stabbing disloyalties to his senate colleagues – item after item, headline after headline, week after week.

Unless he aggressively moves to preempt these scandals before they break and has an enthusiastic conservative base fired up enough to run over them and cast them aside, he is toast.

I'll reiterate it once more – I could be wrong and I hope I'm wrong because of the horrific damage either Hillary or Obama will do to our freedom, our economy, and our national security.  But McCain has a fundamental problem being the Anti-Reagan.  Being a jerk seems hard-wired into one's personality and I don't know how one would go about getting a personality transplant.

At the least, John McPain McCain should discretely inquire as to how such a transplant might be possible.