Novak’s Not Feelin’ the “Joe-Mentum”
Written by Press 7 for Celtic on August 28th, 2008Nice to see Bob Novak’s feeling well enough to write the occasional column:
Reports of strong support within John McCain’s presidential campaign for Independent Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman as the Republican candidate for vice president are not a fairy tale. Influential McCain backers, plus McCain himself, would pick the pro-choice liberal from Connecticut if they thought they could get away with it.
But they can’t get away with it — and this has been made clear to McCain by none other than Joe Lieberman himself.
Lieberman surely doesn’t know that much about Republican politics, but he has close Republican friends. One of them prevailed on Lieberman to tell McCain that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be a disaster for all concerned, and especially for the GOP.
I don’t have a problem with Lieberman, but I know that many of you do. If the first rule of “Veep-ology” is to do no harm, then Lieberman is a bad pick. He might bring in independents, but he’d alienate too much of the base.
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Yet again conservatives should be pushing Lieberman because he has no chance of running for President under our ticket in 2012 or later.
We should not want McCain to anoint the next generation of conservative leaders. Letting him pick someone like Lieberman or Ridge means conservatives will have another shot of getting their act together in four years win or lose.
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Speaking of not taking certain people seriously… Thank you, Ryan, for demonstrating yet again that I shouldn’t care whether you take me seriously, because the things you say put a whole new shine on the word “loopy.”
The idea that conservatives should want someone as far to the left as Lieberman is ridiculous. McCain could die in office. I don’t believe it’ll happen, but if it does, do we want Joe Lieberman picking Supreme Court justices? Give me a break.
More than a century ago, orthodox Republicans went nuts when McKinley put that raging liberal Theodore Roosevelt on the ticket. They were comforted with the message that Roosevelt was only there to help the ticket; he’d never become PRESIDENT. And then what happened? We got ourselves a progressive president, utterly contemptuous of the Constitution.
We (minus Ryan) are a sadder but wiser conservative movement now. Conservatives have no reason to push for Lieberman.
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Alan, do you actually think any President with a liberal dominated Senate is going to get a good judicial nominee through? With the Democrats gaining several Senate seats this time, McCain will be lucky to get any of his picks on the high court even if they remotely scream conservative.
The conservative movements (notice there is not one, but several) have not learned anything from this experience other than pointing the finger at each other. There needs to be a serious examination of what it means to be a conservative if there is ever going to be a “conservative” running for President. We saw the repeatedly botched attempts to define the term conservative during the primary. Nobody agreed to a definition and McCain won partially because certain factions are engaged in a purity contest.
Is there anything changing? Nope. There is nothing resembling a coherent leadership in the movement, but factional leaders like Pat Toomey for the CfG and Mike Huckabee for the big government values people. The conservative movements are far from wiser and sad, but are bitter at each other.
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“Alan, do you actually think any President with a liberal dominated Senate is going to get a good judicial nominee through?”
If McCain dies and is replaced by someone who genuinely wants to appoint justices in the Roberts-Alito mold, we might actually get that. It depends on whether the president has the guts to fight. The president could send up a well-qualified constitutionalist, see that nominee defeated, then send another well-qualified constitutionalist to send the message that he won’t let the Dems steamroll him. If the Dems reject two or three consecutive nominees who were well-qualified for the job, that’ll hurt the Democrats’ public image. Especially if a nominee has broad demographic appeal. Emilio Garza would be a home run, both politically and judicially. If he’s the second guy nominated, yes, a president with a liberal-dominated Senate will succeed in getting good judicial nominees through.
“With the Democrats gaining several Senate seats this time, McCain will be lucky to get any of his picks on the high court even if they remotely scream conservative.”
I wasn’t talking about McCain. I know that McCain won’t even consider nominating a true constitutionalist, since he favors abortion rights and since he wants to protect his legacy, McCain-Feingold, from further judicial attack. I was saying that if McCain dies, it would be nice to have a VP who isn’t a hard-core leftist like Lieberman. A conservative VP would make better choices vis-a-vis judicial nominations.
“We saw the repeatedly botched attempts to define the term conservative during the primary. Nobody agreed to a definition and McCain won partially because certain factions are engaged in a purity contest.”
Since Lieberman indisputably is not a conservative, this point you raise has absolutely nothing to do with whether conservatives should want someone as liberal as Lieberman to be vice president. Judicial nominations (the issue I singled out) wouldn’t be the only area where Lieberman would make a lousy president. I’d like to see McCain pick someone who’d be superior, not inferior, in the job of president in case McCain dies in office. You apparently don’t care.
In any event, your analysis of the primaries tells only half the story. While many conservatives did indeed say, “Your candidate is not conservative enough for me,” who was insisting on perfect purity? Seriously, anyone who supported Romney, or Fred Thompson, or Huckabee, or Giuliani, or McCain–and that’s the overwhelming majority of the GOP primary voters–can’t be called “purists.”
#1. Giuliani’s supporters weren’t “purists” when it came to fiscal issues, as many idiots said they were; if they had been, they wouldn’t have voted for Giuliani. Giuliani’s record on fiscal issues was mixed at best. He sued in federal court to stop welfare reform from going into effect; he endorsed Mario Cuomo over George Pataki because he opposed Pataki’s tax-cut plan; he distorted his record on taxes as mayor, even taking credit for at least one tax cut that he bitterly opposed.
#2. Huckabee’s supporters weren’t “purists” on social issues; if they had been, they wouldn’t have supported Huckabee. Huckabee said that he approved of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas. I know that many social conservatives don’t approve of sodomy laws, but some do; and anyway, the line of reasoning in the Lawrence case (please, read the majority opinion) is pure libertinism–totally antithetical to social conservatism.
#3, 4. The supporters of Thompson and Romney weren’t purists. Nobody thought of them as ideal candidates. Their support came from disaffected conservatives who had too many things they hated about the other candidates and hoped that Thompson or Romney would be at least satisfactory, if imperfect.
#5. McCain. This is where your analysis absolutely crumbles. It could be thought that “DefCons,” or “national-security conservatives,” thought that McCain was the pure candidate. But of course that’s not true. I remember so many people writing about how McCain was right on all war-related issues, but had bones to pick with him when it came to so many other issues, such as economics and judicial nominations. You paint a picture of warring factions of conservatism that cared deeply about one issue, or one batch of issues, to the exclusion of all others. But of course that’s not accurate. No conservative “purist” supported McCain; even if they thought he was 100% right on military issues, they thought he was wrong on other, major issues, like tax relief and global warming–so clearly he wasn’t “pure” to his supporters. You can’t be called a “purist” if you support someone with whom you disagree on major issues, even though you ultimately overlook the disagreements on those issues.
So now that we’ve got those five out of the way, we see that the overwhelming majority of Republicans were not purists. Who’s left? The people who supported Tancredo, Hunter, Paul, and other electoral nonentities made up a tiny fraction of the primary electorate. Even if you called all of them “purists” (which would still be wrong, but truth isn’t your strong suit anyway), you still couldn’t blame “purists” for cracking up the GOP, because the vast majority of the Republican electorate didn’t vote for purity; they voted for what they regarded as the lesser of many evils.
“Is there anything changing? Nope. There is nothing resembling a coherent leadership in the movement, but factional leaders like Pat Toomey for the CfG and Mike Huckabee for the big government values people. The conservative movements are far from wiser and sad, but are bitter at each other.”
Whereas, if McCain picks Lieberman, you think that there’ll be handholding and Kumbaya between the conservative movements? Do you even THINK about the things you type before you type them?