United States Senator and former Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain recently came through California — helping out Gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman, and LG candidate Jeff Denham. Good for them, I suppose. Whitman played a key role, nationally, on McCain’s finance team in the general election (she supported Mitt Romney in the primary) and Jeff Denham has been a McCain guy for a long time. It’s notable and noble, I suppose, to see McCain coming back to help out people that helped him.
I was invited to come and hear McCain at these California events — and ultimately, I just couldn’t do it. And let me preface these comments by saying that they are not intended to be a slight on Whitman or Denham, their inclusion in this commentary is merely to reference McCain’s reason for traveling out here.
I am so done with John McCain.
As the elected Vice Chairman of the California Republican Party for Southern California, I was obliged by state party rules to refrain from involvement in the Republican Presidential primary last year. Let me assure you that had I been able to do so, I would certainly have not been a McCain backer in the primary. In the general election, acknowledging the selection of McCain by primary voters, I along with everyone in the party circled the wagons around McCain and worked hard to try to elect him President. Make no bones about it — when you see what Barack Obama is doing to our nation, in that context, I really wish McCain were my President right now.
That said, when I was watching one of the Presidential debates, and watched Republican McCain propose a federal program costing hundreds of billions of dollars to, in essence, nationalize home loans, I groaned. When I watched Republican McCain hop off the campaign trail to go to Washington, D.C., and vote for a truly massive government bail out of Wall Street, it made me sick.
Someone said to me once that the best way to describe John McCain is that on any issue that is defined by patriotism, waving the American flag, and being pro-U.S. — you can count on him to do the right thing — because that is his passion (hence such a strong focus on foreign policy). But that on every other issue — he simply doesn’t have a defining ideology, and there is really know what to know or predict where he will come down (hence the nationalizing mortgages proposal). Now foreign policy is important — as my friend Bruce Herschensohn pointed out in his support of McCain, "What difference does it make where a President stands on any other issues if there is Mullah running America?"
That having been said, John McCain’s type of Republicanism has played a key role in our minority status today. What he likes to refer to as being a "Maverick" and his own man, to me, translates to saying that you simply cannot count on McCain to play team ball. And I truly believe that one of the reasons that Republicans are in the wilderness today is that we had no problem gaining the majority in Congress and the Presidency by campaigning as fiscal conservatives, but then — we failed to deliver. The size and scope of the federal government ballooned under GOP reign, and so who can blame voters who now say, based on polling, that on economic issues they trust President Obama’s party more than Ronald Reagan’s.
Granting a "pathway to citizenship" for criminal aliens, Draconian laws attacking free speech rights, opposing tax cuts, support of Al Gore’s extremist environmental agenda, federalizing education policy with support for programs like No Child Left Behind — all of these things and more are positions that I just can’t fathom from someone who wants to move our party forward.
One of the key lessons of last year’s Presidential elections is that while foreign policy is an important issue, Americans care a lot about domestic policy. And for Republicans to win an election where domestic issues are very much in play, we need to be unified as a party, and we need to have a Republican candidates who are proud of our party’s positions on issues — not candidates who are literally all over the map.
"Maverick" loses elections. "Team Player" wins them.
I don’t bear Senator McCain ill will. I am just done with him. He wanted his shot, and he got it. And now we need to look forward to the future of the Republican Party and America, not backwards.
I suspect that John McCain spends a lot of time thinking that he might have been President had he tapped his Senate colleague Joe Lieberman as his running mate. The rest of us wonder if we would have won the Presidency if we had put forward a better candidate as our GOP nominee.
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