Over the past 48 hours, I’ve been watching and digesting the McCain vs. conservatism story unfold in the conservative and mainstream media — the anti-McCain statements, the anti-anti-McCain lectures, the anti-anti-anti-McCain rants — and it seems to me that a major element of the story is being ignored.
McCain is drawing fire from leading GOP conservatives because that’s what he’s worked towards for many, many years.
McCain is not just a senator who occasionally picks fights with his colleagues over matters of principle. He is a self-styled maverick, a politician who enjoys being a loner and has actively cultivated the prestige press by “straight talk” primarily aimed at his party. They love that. He loves their love. So he keeps doing it.
Iraq is not an example of McCain’s standard-operating procedure. It is the one great exception, the just cause that demonstrates he is not simply a political poseur but is indeed prepared on occasion to be unpopular to achieve a noble purpose. His position on Iraq was not popular when he espoused it, early and often. It did not win him praise from the Washington and New York elites. While critical of the Bush administration, it was not designed to undercut the president but to save his signature public policy.
But just about every other event in the McCain-as-maverick story involves him abandoning conservatives and the Bush administration to adopt the favorite policies and pet projects of media elites and the Left. During the 1990s, these groups became fascinated with three causes: the fight against global warming, campaign-finance reform, and stopping the conservative drift in the federal judiciary. In all three cases, Left-wing elites sought to maintain or expand their power: climate-change regulations finally give bureaucrats a chance to implement central economic planning, campaign-finance reform strengthens media companies at the expense of alternative political institutions, and the judiciary is where elite judges can enact laws and amend the constitution to advance their Left agenda without bothering to subject it to public vote. In all three cases, McCain was instrumental in providing these elites a crucial Republican crossover voice or vote, and clearly knew all the time that he was playing that role for them.
Conservatives who criticize McCain may be wrong or politically impractical, but it is unfair to blame them for starting the row. McCain started it, years ago, and is reaping what he sowed. Don’t be fooled — he knew exactly what he was doing all along, and is not surprised to find himself in a civil war with the mainstream of his party and with the conservative movement.