John McCain is under a lot of pressure these days. His relatively comfortable and relaxed existence being a Senator for Life from Arizona has been upended by this whole being the Republican nominee thing. He can’t go on teevee and goof around any more; he can’t say impolitic things without some journalist or website fact checking him. He was accustomed to being a celebrity, he’s been a national figure for eight years now after all, but this amount of attention clearly doesn’t agree with him.
Much has been made about how, in the last few months, McCain’s campaign has taken on some of the harder edges previously associated with Bush the Younger’s two campaigns. This has largely been attributed to the installation of one Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove disciple, as the man in charge and has manifested itself in more rigorous message discipline and sharper (and often outright dishonest) attacks. There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of this; lying, screaming, kicking, biting, eye gouging and unsanctioned foreign objects have always been and will always be a part of American politics.
The really amusing thing is that there have been experienced political observers who’ve been shocked (Shocked! I tells ya!) to see the blatant shamelessness of the McCain campaign on full display. Time’s Joe Klein:
Back in 2000, after John McCain lost his mostly honorable campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he went about apologizing to journalists–including me–for his most obvious mis-step: his support for keeping the confederate flag on the state house.
Now he is responsible for one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen in presidential politics, so sleazy that I won’t abet its spread by linking to it, but here’s the McClatchy fact check.
I just can’t wait for the moment when John McCain–contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat–talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.
And The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan:
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him.
(Both links come courtesy of Talking Points Memo.)
Separate from the dirty tricks angle was The Economist’s ludicrously naïve cover editorial two weeks ago lamenting McCain’s capitulation to his party’s most disingenuous and disastrous policies:
Mr McCain used to be a passionate believer in limited government and sound public finances; a man with some distaste for conservative Republicanism and its obsession with reproductive matters. On the stump, though, he has offered big tax cuts for business and the rich that he is unable to pay for, and he is much more polite to the religious right, whom he once called “agents of intolerance”. He has engaged in pretty naked populism, too, for instance in calling for a “gas-tax holiday”. If this is all just a gimmick to keep his party’s right wing happy, it may disappear again. But that is quite a gamble to take.
Apparently Klein, Sullivan, The Economist’s editorial writers and the many others out there who doubtlessly feel the same way seriously believed that John McCain was going to run a Marquis of Queensbury campaign full of high minded debate and well argued non-ideological ideas. That a massively unpopular incumbent party can’t win by debating the issues and not kowtowing to its most fanatical partisans apparently never occurred to them. Or if it did they assumed that McCain and the Reds would rather fight fair and lose with honor than disgrace themselves for a chance at victory.
Perhaps they were being insufficiently cynical, but in all the blather and analysis and background noise that has been generated by this 2008 campaign there are a few things which have not received the attention they deserve. One of those things is the truly dire situation in which the Republican Party will find itself should John McCain fail in November. Whatever thoughts you may have about whether or not this is a “change” election, or a “generational” election, or any other buzzword that has become fuzzy and meaningless with overuse when it comes to the race for the White House the Reds have a lot more on the line than the Blues.
Consider this election from the viewpoint of the Republican Party. The White House is their only hope for retaining some of the levers of federal power; the legislative branch is closed to them. They’re almost guaranteed to lose more Senate seats and no one expects the Republicans to do anything more than maybe stanch the bleeding in the House. In the short run they’d be handing over undivided control of the federal government for at least two years, and that’s bad enough, but the long term picture is even bleaker.
In 1992, the last time the Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House, Blue control only lasted two years. But that 103rd Congress was very different than the 110th that sits on Capitol Hill now. Those nineties Democrats were out of place, the last remnants of the liberal heyday of the 1960s. Consider the makeup of the House in 1992-1994, there were 140 seats from the 13-states of the Confederacy and the Democrats held an 87-53 majority in them. On the state level only Florida had a majority Republican House delegation, Mississippi’s was 100% Democratic and in Texas, in what we now think of as the reddest of the red states, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2-1.
Compare that to the 110th Congress, there are now 146 House seats in the South and even after the Republican bloodbath in 2006 they still outnumber Democrats 84-62. Today the makeup of the House reflects the overall ideology of the country much closer than it did then. Plus, the Blues have only been back in power for two years and the rot and corruption which cost them Congress in ‘94 (and which helped cost the Reds in ‘06) hasn’t happened yet. Their grip on Congress is much tighter than it was fourteen years ago. It’s impossible to say what things will be like two, four or six years from now, but unless a President Obama is massively unpopular in 2010 it’s hard to think Congress will be turning Red again anytime soon.
(Not to be overlooked, 2010 is a census year, doing well at the state and federal level then means the winner gets to gerrymander the hell out of all the new lines and the Blues are likely going to be in a much better position than the Reds.)
The presidential race in 2008 is the last stand of the Republican Party as presently constituted. If they lose they could be spending a long time in the political wilderness and as obvious as that is it hasn’t been much remarked upon. Looked at in that light the idea that John McCain was ever going to run anything but a pandering, dishonest, balls-to-the-wall campaign seems laughable. There is no Republican Plan B, there is no Red fall back position, there is only John McCain. In terms of dirt, sleaze and dog whistles, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
