Monday, October 13, 2008
McCain's Ideas Problem
Written by Matthew Locke at 4:25 PM
With his long-held Presidential ambitions crumbling before him -- and an entire conservative movement, half a century old, crashing down around him -- John McCain did his best to smile as he took the stage this morning in Virginia. After a terrible week spent pressing vicious attacks that only produced a decline in his favorables and a public spanking from John Lewis, McCain's campaign hinted over the weekend at a bold new response to the ongoing economic crisis that would press the reset button on the campaign. But today McCain arrived armed only with a new stump speech, not new ideas. It was a speech that retreated to the kind of 'experience and bravery' boilerplate that's been McCain's bread and butter for close to two years before detouring into some low-rent-Aaron-Sorkin-knock-off rhetoric:I've been fighting for this country since I was seventeen years old, and I have the scars to prove it. If I'm elected President, I will fight to take America in a new direction from my first day in office until my last. I'm not afraid of the fight, I'm ready for it.
I know what fear feels like. It's a thief in the night who robs your strength.
I know what hopelessness feels like. It's an enemy who defeats your will.
I felt those things once before. I will never let them in again. I'm an American. And I choose to fight.
Don't give up hope. Be strong. Have courage. And fight.
In between is a policy section focused almost entirely on the economy but filled with McCain's usual assortment of vague promises and feel-good aphorisms; when he does get specific it's predictable low tax no pork drill baby drill.
What is striking about the speech, then, is not its new ideas its dearth of new ideas, or really any ideas at all. In this the speech typifies McCain's deer-in-front-of-a-Peterbuilt response to the financial crisis so far: bluster and noise to mask intellectual catatonia. The Democratic grassroots often worries (often rightly) that its party seizes up whenever the foreign policy gauntlet is thrown down; now Democratic acquiescence in the face of Bush II's post-September 11th coalition and the drive to war has found its parallel on the right.
It didn't have to be like this. The fact is that most voters don't understand much about the economy, but they know how it affects their lives. They want, above all, a calm and confident leader who understands the mess and how to lead people out of it. Obama, beyond the merit of his particular ideas, has done a more than adequate job of communicating to people the kind of confident, imperturbable leadership they crave, but he's had more difficulty in connecting on a more visceral level. He's no Bill Clinton. He doesn't feel your pain, he sees it. He knows what caused it, and he knows how to fix it, but he doesn't feel it.
Maybe McCain could have. Admittedly, he's no Bill Clinton either, but he lacks Obama's professorial air. Maybe he could have remade himself the way that Hillary Clinton did late in the primaries -- become a hard-charging populist fighter for Main Street America. What was an effective strategy for Clinton would have had even more credibility coming from McCain. Sure he'd have lost some small-government conservative support on the floor of the House, and sections of the base would have been apoplectic, but that would only have served to augment his maverick brand. Would it have been disingenuous? Maybe, but this is politics, baby; no game for losers. It would have been the right move electorally, and McCain has ample examples in his past of ideological course corrections. Would it have been enough to win? Maybe not, but then that question presumes victory was possible in a way McCain could have controlled.
Why didn't this happen? Obviously I can only speculate. To a degree I think it was, as I've intimated above, a gut reaction: Republicans freeze up at the sound of declining stock markets. Partly it might have been an over-reaction to the negative press McCain dredged up with his 'fundamentals are strong' gaffe, and partly it might have been Rove protégé Schmidt's predeliction for tactics over strategy. The campaign has shown itself increasingly captive to the base and, more than that, locked within the conservative echo chamber. The result of all this was the conclusion that talking about anything -- anything -- other than the economy was preferable to tackling the crisis head-on.
This lack of ideas is symptomatic of today's conservative movement as a whole. I don't want to digress too much here (and I want to save some of this for a later post), but as David Brooks recently pointed out, what began as an electoral strategy of anti-intellectualism has become a core component of conservative ideology. This is a disservice to what began as, and in some corners persists as, a movement of ideas.
The descent of the National Review has been particularly troubling. One might heartily disagree with everything William F. Buckley, Jr. stood for, but nobody could accuse him of being a rube. He created a journal of ideas that wasn't afraid to use words like 'athwart'. Today the buffoons at NRO's Corner spend their days playing six-degrees-of-domestic-terrorist and spinning wacky conspiracy theories about which controversial figures have ghostwritten which prominent liberals' biographies. (My Life by Louis Farrakhan? The Vital Center by Alger Hiss?) It's hardly surprising that Buckley's beloved son has endorsed a Democrat for the first time in his life.
We can hope that the GOP's time in the wilderness encourages it to retool. Brooks's criticism has stoked self-reflection, if not necessarily agreement, in some of the healthier parts of the conservative blogosphere. But there is every reason to believe that the Michelle Malkins and Andy Martins and Hugh Hewitts of the world will take the opposite lesson: that McCain focused too much on ideas, that he was too cerebral, that he wasn't vicious enough. The question is whether the Limbaugh/Hannity coalition will continue its stranglehold over the Republican Party, and the prospects look pretty grim. Then the question becomes: how many elections will the Republicans have to lose?
As a liberal and a Democrat I welcome an intellectually reinvigorated conservative movement and Republican party. I welcome the clash of ideas. I live for the debate. My side might not win -- but then my side might not always deserve to. And in the longer run it's not which side wins that matters to the health of a democracy: it's the debate itself.
Photo printed under a Creative Commons license from Chris Dunn.
