I suppose, with both halves of the Presidential ticket now set, now is as good a time as any to outline the three choices conservatives have with regard to John McCain. I will say out front that I am still undecided on which course I will personally take because all three choices involve the highest of risks with at best a minimal chance of a reward, and I cannot yet see which course offers the better chance of reward.
First, we have to understand how we got where we are. The Republican National Committee and its leadership, from President Bush on down, has made its goal the supplanting of conservatives with moderates as its “base”. While the state parties didn’t quite follow the script as far as the Presidential nomination is concerned, they got the message to promote moderate-to-liberal candidates to the mutual exclusion of conservative ones loud and clear. The folly of that achieved goal is something that deserves its own post, but in case that post slips into the memory hole, I’ll state that there are far more conservatives that can be and are being turned off than there are moderates that can reasonably be expected to become part of the party.
Further, their apparent strategy continues to be “Dem Lite”, with but a couple of not-overwhelmingly-popular differences between the two flavors of what I term the bipartisan Party-In-Government in the forms of the War on Terror and socialism-lite versus socialism-heavy. Again, an expansion on those points is something left to its own thread.
So, what now? The first option is to say, “Screw McCain and the RNC this year; let the RNC come back to me.” That will undoubtedly, even with concentration on individual Congressional races, give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. I may not have a lot of memories of the Carter administration, but those that I do have are uniformly bad. Further, I do believe we tried that in 2006, and look at what it got us even with but one statewide/Congressional “R” pickup (Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen) and a whole host of “R” losses.
On the flip side, the RNC will, in all likelyhood, finally understand that they can’t win without conservatives. Of course, if McCain does beat Barack Obama under this scenario, we are truly a group without a home.
The second, related option is to say, “Screw McCain and the RNC; I’m doing a third party.” I strongly believe that it would kill the Republican Party, which in a vacuum would not necessarily be a bad thing. However, we aren’t in a vacuum, and the Democrats have spent the last 75 years preparing for the destruction of the Republican Party. I doubt they’ll make the same mistakes as they did after killing the Federalists in the 1810s and the Whigs in the 1850s and allow either one of the current fringe third-parties or a brand new party to take root.
Also, in the lag time between the mass exodus and the final twitches, I doubt we’ll get a lot of support from the conservatives that have really hitched their wagons to the GOP structure.
The third option is to say, “I’ll swallow the bitter pill and don my noseplugs for McCain so I can get a chance of a seat at the table.” That is generally how politics works. However, once again, we tried that in 1988, 2000, and 2004, and look at what it got us; a party that voted for the largest (in absolute dollars) expansion of welfare in the history of the country, a party that continues to push for amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens in the face of 80% opposition, a party that has adopted the Gorebal Warming line of Bravo Sierra in the face of collapsing scientific support, and a party that is increasingly hostile to conservatives, now going so far as to support center-left candidates to the mutual exclusion of conservative ones for open Congressional seats.
Moreover, McCain is not as accomodating toward conservatives as Bush. Even if we delivered for him, I doubt he’ll even give us the lip service Bush did.
