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McCatch-22

03 Mar 2008

John McCain

John Hawkins on John McCain:

The problem in a nutshell: he desperately needs the backing of the very conservatives he has infuriated time and time again over the last few years. We’re not talking about tepid support either. John McCain needs conservatives to pour money into his campaign, and to rabidly defend him when he’s under attack — and of course, vote for him. Achieving this won’t be easy. In order to patch things up with conservatives, McCain will need to cater to us by making meaningful gestures that show his heart is in the right place and by shifting his positions a bit on key issues, in order to placate our very valid concerns about him.

BUT — if and when he actually attempts to start trying to reach out to conservatives, he risks losing what made him attractive in the first place; McCain’s appeal to independents and moderate Democrats is directly based on liberals in the mainstream media saying nice things about him based on the fact that he DOESN’T try make conservatives happy.

We’ve had a taste of this with that apparently-nebulous lobbyist story already. I suspect that it was a shot across McCain’s bow to remind him who made him the nominee.

For all the problems a McCain presidency would bring with it, I still believe it’s far, far preferable to an Obama or a Clinton presidency. If we had a strong Conservative Congress in place, maybe I’d feel a bit differently. But we don’t even have a weak Conservative Congress in place, and I don’t see anything changing any time soon. So McCain it is for Murdoc.

One thing I’m wondering about the threat of a major media campaign against McCain is what the effect will be on staunch Conservative voters. Right now, the generally-friendly treatment McCain gets from the big media players not only builds support among centrist and moderate voters, but it actually hurts support among conservatives.

But let’s say that McCain is the nominee and big media turns on him this summer. As we’ve seen from the lobbyist story, it doesn’t appear that we’re going to get much in the way of quality, fair, or even logical coverage of the Republican nominee.

I suspect that seeing an uninterrupted hatefest being waged against McCain is going to convince at least some conservative voters that maybe, just maybe, McCain isn’t that bad after all. I mean, I can almost hear some of them saying, if the media hates him that much, how bad can he really be?

Sure, McCain has burned his bridges with a lot of hardcore Conservatives. But how many truly hardcore Conservatives are there out there? Not enough to get Fred Thompson any votes in the primaries, that’s for sure. Maybe McCain won’t look so terrible by this fall, particularly as we get more details (or lack thereof, as the case is likely to be) about Obama’s plans.

#Posted by Murdoc at 12:15
Media, Politics

No Responses to “McCatch-22”

  1. Dfens Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    The euro fetches $1.52 (from $0.82 in 2000), beyond the pain threshold for aircraft, cars, luxury goods and textiles. The manufacturing base of southern Europe is largely below water. As Le Figaro wrote last week, the survival of monetary union is in doubt. Yet still, the ECB waits; still the German-bloc governors breathe fire about inflation. The Fed is now singing from a different hymn book, warning of the ‘possibility of some very unfavourable outcomes’. Inflation is not one of them. ‘There probably will be some bank failures,’ said Ben Bernanke. He knows perfectly well that the US price spike is a bogus scare, the tail-end of a food and fuel shock. ‘I expect inflation to come down. I don’t think we’re anywhere near the situation in the 1970s,’ he told Congress. Indeed not. Real wages are being squeezed. Oil and ‘Ags’ are acting as a tax. December unemployment jumped at the fastest rate in a quarter century. The greater risk is slump, says Princetown Professor Paul Krugman. ‘The Fed is studying the Japanese experience with zero rates very closely. The problem is that if they want to cut rates as aggressively as they did in the early 1990s and 2001, they have to go below zero.’ This means ‘quantitative easing’ as it was called in Japan. As Ben Bernanke spelled out in November 2002, the Fed can inject money by purchasing great chunks of the bond market. Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act allows the bank - in ‘exigent circumstances’ - to lend money to anybody, and take upon itself the credit risk. It has not done so since the 1930s. Ultimately the big guns have the means to stop descent into an economic Ice Age. But will they act in time? ‘We are becoming increasingly concerned that the authorities in the world do not get it,’ said Bernard Connolly, global strategist at Banque AIG. ‘The extent of de-leveraging involves a wholesale destruction of credit. The risk is that the ’shadow banking system’ completely collapses,’ he said. For the first time since this Greek tragedy began, I am now really frightened.Telegraph

    Do you really want another George Bush in the White House? You would attempt (it will be a failure) to go from the most unpopular president to the next most unpopular president? Our nation would continue to hemmorage cash. Our middle class would continue to decline. What you don’t seem to understand, Murdoc, is that the very survival of the conservative movement is at stake here. This is a case where winning is losing.

  2. Flanker Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 4:44 pm

    By accusing McCain of being another Dubya, you’re telling all the right wing Nazi’s for Christ (commonly referred to as ‘real conservatives’ [Yes! I am an arsonist!]) that they are full of it, McCain ‘is’ a real conservative. Which they say he IS NOT. One of you is wrong. Obama is personable, inexperienced, and he speaks platitudes well, and he is THE Cult of Personality in 2008 (well, him and Hugo Chavez………you know they went to school together [there's that arson thing again!] LOL!). I agree McCain has got his head stuck somewhere on illegal immigration, NAFTA, and free trade, amongst other issues, nevertheless………….if anyone thinks things couldn’t be worse than the Bushites & Clintonistas, the vote for Obama, who’s probably the furthest left candidate the Jackass Party (Hey! Don’t yell at me, when his opponenets called him a Jackass, Andrew Jackson adopted it as the party symbol!) has ever put forth (almost) for President (or El Presidente in Obama’s case).

  3. Dfens Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    So let him flouder around and take the blame for the tanking economy. With someone like McCain, winning would cause more damage to the Republican party than losing.

  4. Nicholas Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 5:29 pm

    Of course, it’s far more important to worry about the damage that could be done to the Republican party than the damage that could be done to the USA…

  5. Dfens Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:18 pm

    At this point, if he doesn’t do any more damage than Bush, we could call ourselves lucky. Frankly, I don’t believe John ‘free traitor’ McCain will do less. I think he’ll do more. Bush did fine while he played to the conservative base of the Republican party, because in those days he had a base of support. McCain doesn’t have that. He will never have that.

  6. Nicholas Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 10:07 pm

    The question is not whether McCain will do damage, or will do more damage than Bush, unfortunately. The question is will he do more damage than Clinton or Obama. You honestly think he will?

  7. 11 Bravo Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    I cannot and will not support McCain. On the 3 issues most important to me, he differs from me on every one. I can’t believe how far the republicans have drifted from their historical positions.

  8. 11 Bravo Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    I cannot and will not support McCain. On the 3 issues most important to me, he differs from me on every one. I can’t believe how far the republicans have drifted from their historical positions.

  9. Dfens Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    If I thought Obama would do more damage than McCain, I would not vote for him. As it is, McCain is for staying the course in Iraq, staying the course on unconstitutional trade agreements that are devastating our nation’s industrial might right along with the middle class base of the conservative movement here in the US. McCain is a far larger threat to the conservative movement than Obama. Obama, if elected president, may go down in history as the president who saved the conservative movement. That is, if he keeps his promises and does away with or severely curtails agreements such as NAFTA. Come on, Nicholas, I’m betting you’ve played a chess game or two. I’m sure you know how to think more than one move ahead. Look at the facts. Look at what’s going on in this country. Real wages have declined. Industrial jobs have disappeared and been replaced by service sector jobs with few benefits and no job security. Technical jobs we haven’t outsourced are being taken by barely legal immigrants on H1-b visas. What do you think this is about, how much the middle class is valued in America? This goes far beyond ‘union busting’. The only jobs they haven’t been able to outsource have had the only real gains in the job market, those being in the medical and post high school education fields. Haven’t you ever wondered why medical insurance and college tuition are breaking the bank of middle class households? It’s not that doctors and professors are getting rich, they’re just staying on track while the rest of the US middle class declines. Once they figure out how to outsource those, then we can all decline together.

  10. Dfens Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:18 pm

    Here’s vintage McCain, the steely eyed, spineless bastard:

    Sen. John McCain said Monday that he hasn’t made up his mind on a $35 billion Air Force contract awarded to the parent company of French plane maker Airbus. McCain, the likely Republican nominee for president, helped scuttle a previous deal that gave the contract for the next generation of Air Force refueling tankers to Chicago-based Boeing Co. The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. and its U.S. partner, Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman, won a new competition with Boeing Friday to build the refueling planes in one of the biggest Pentagon contracts in decades. ‘Having investigated the tanker lease scandal a few years ago, I have always insisted that the Air Force buy major weapons through fair and open competition,’ McCain told The Associated Press. ‘I will be interested to learn how the Air Force came to its contract award decision here and whether it fairly applied its own rules in arriving at that decision.’ McCain’s two Democratic rivals have criticized the Air Force decision, which came as a surprise to analysts and lawmakers and was widely seen as a major blow to Boeing. The company has supplied refueling tankers to the Air Force for nearly 50 years. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois expressed disappointment Sunday that his home-state company lost out on the tanker contract. Obama said it was hard for him to believe ‘that having an American company that has been a traditional source of aeronautic excellence would not have done this job.’ - AP

    Seems a pretty obvious choice to me. You can vote for the traitor who has already brokered one amnesty deal through Congress. The traitor who has voted for NAFTA and every other ‘free trade’ agreement that’s come along regardless of it’s constitutionality or his own oath to said constitution. Or you can vote for someone who gives a damn. You could have voted for a Republican who gave a damn, but you thought he was nuts because he actually believed in a country ruled by laws. Now you have a tougher choice to make.

  11. Dfens Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    Oh and did you notice how the DoD waited until Friday to release the news on the taker deal so it wouldn’t cause a backlash against their boy McCain in Texas or Ohio? Go ahead and vote for George Bush’s buddy.

  12. 11 Bravo Says:
    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:22 pm

    dfens, you sound a lot like a paleocon. Do you read Buchanan?

  13. Nicholas Says:
    March 4th, 2008 at 3:31 am

    Fair enough. If you think Obama will do a better job than McCain than obviously you should vote for him. You have more at stake than I do, and more intimate knowledge, so I can’t act like I know better than you do. However, I’m worried he will be the next Jimmy Carter. You’re still having to deal with Carter’s fallout. How long has it been now, 30 years? I sure could be wrong (and if he’s elected I hope I am). He seems like a decent guy. I just don’t know if he’ll make a particularly good leader.

  14. Dfens Says:
    March 4th, 2008 at 8:26 am

    I am a thinking conservative, 11 Bravo, of the kind we used to have a lot of back when Regan was president. Nicholas, I think we as US conservatives are in a fight for our lives right now. I think we’re in a position to take aid from anyone we can get it from. Ironically, I find myself being allied with many liberal positions right now. I do not approve of this war dragging on. I do not think we have any plan for victory and staying the course is just a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I think we have real enemies we have to worry about like communist red China. I also think we are neglecting our own back yard while we’re screwing around in Southwest Asia. We have no energy policy in a time when oil is the currency of terror and war. Our trade policies are shipping our nations strenght to China so they can build their military at an alarming rate while sapping our own national sovereignty and pride. Worst of all, our trade policies are destroying our middle class, which is the very source of conservatism here. And in the midst of this chaos, our military procurment system is fundamentally broken and serves the interestes of countries other than our own. In short, I’m taking this election very seriously.

  15. Dfens Says:
    March 4th, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    Here’s Buchanan on McCain’s economic policy:

    John McCain seems blind and deaf to the crisis. In Michigan, he informed autoworkers their ‘jobs are not coming back’ and explained his philosophy: ‘I’m a student of history. Every time the United States has become protectionist … we’ve paid a very heavy price.’ This is ahistorical nonsense. From 1860 to 1913, the United States was the most protectionist nation on earth and produced the most awesome growth of any nation in history. In 1860, the U.S. economy was half of Britain’s; in 1913, more than twice Britain’s. In 1920, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge won a landslide, cut income taxes from Wilson’s 69 percent to 25 percent and doubled tariffs. America went on a tear. When Coolidge went home in 1929, the United States was producing 42 percent of the world’s manufactured goods. Who were America’s protectionists? Alexander Hamilton and James Madison moved the Tariff Act of 1789 through Congress. Aided by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, President Madison enacted the Tariff of 1816 to protect U.S. infant industries from British dumping. Abraham Lincoln used Morrill Tariff revenue to fight the Civil War. The 11 GOP presidents who followed, from 1865 to 1929, all protectionists, made America the greatest industrial power in history, with a standard of living never before seen. Mocking protectionism, McCain is repudiating Republican history and all its achievements up to the era of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. America rose to power behind a Republican tariff wall. What has free trade wrought? Lost sovereignty. A sinking dollar. A hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing. Stagnant wages. - Pat Buchanan, Human Events

    It is time to quit listening to the Rockefeller Republicans in conservative clothing and start waking up to what real conservatives are talking about. There are still real conservatives in this country who have real ideas, not just rehashed slogans from the early ’90s.

  16. Nicholas Says:
    March 4th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    I do not approve of this war dragging on.’ Tell that to the islamofascists. War is only over when one side is defeated. You can quit now - in which case you lose - or you can keep fighting until they lose. Your choice but personally I prefer being on the winning side - the one which doesn’t execute gays or force women to go around in potato sacks and be virtual slaves without the ability to get an education, a job, or have any real kind of freedom.

  17. Dfens Says:
    March 4th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

    You win a war when your objectives are achieved. You don’t need someone else to validate that you’ve won. We went into this war to ensure that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction they could provide to terrorist organizations to threaten us with. Mission accomplished. Bye bye. If they need some help later on cleaning up the mess we’ve made, we should be willing to go back, in my opinion, and help them. No one should get a 100 year blank check like what McCain is proposing though. That’s just stupid. We’re going to be their police force for 100 years? That’s nothing but a recipe for disaster and its costing us out the ass. Forget it. Not approved by this voter. Here is an interesting poll statistic:

    The survey determined that a quarter of self-identified Republicans rated Mr. McCain most likable, but nearly as many -23 percent -chose Mr. Obama as most likable. And among all adults surveyed, Mr. Obama was rated likable by more people than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. McCain combined, underscoring the Illinois senator’s appeal to voters across the political spectrum. - Washington Times
    Just goes to what I was saying about the only reason Huckabee is still in the race is to keep Republicans from crossing over to the Democrat’s primary ballot and voting for Obama. They know he’ll be much harder to defeat.