As we all struggle with the inevitability of McCain’s nomination as the Republican Party Candidate for the Presidency some terrible misinformation is being spread around liberally. (Pardon the Pun) Mark Levin gets it exactly right in this post on the National Review Corner. As an aside it is heartening to see that some in the National Review have not forgotten what being a conservative is all about.
Reagan challenged his party from the Right. He sought the Republican nomination in 1968 against Richard Nixon and lost. He sought the nomination against Gerald Ford in 1976 and lost. He fought the Republican establishment in 1980 as well, including Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and George H. W. Bush, and won. McCain has challenged his party from the Left. I don’t know how many more times I and others have to lay out his record to prove the point. To put a fine point on it, when he had to, Reagan sought compromise from a different set of beliefs and principles than McCain. It does a great disservice to historical accuracy and the current debate to continue to urge otherwise. The Corner on National Review Online
To many Republicans are making the sorts of excuses regarding McCain that make me worry that we have lost our way. McCain is profoundly wrong in so many different areas that having folks compare him to Reagan tells me more about their version of principles than it educates me about why I should vote for McCain.
Here is Victor Davis Hanson giving us some of that McCain is just like Reagan love…yea I know that is not exactly what he is doing but it is close. Bullshit to that nonsense. Victor Davis Hanson has been going off into the wilderness lately.
Reagan, and Bush I and II all adjusted to that unfortunate reality. A Democrat did not appoint Souter, O’Connor, or Kennedy, nor raise payroll and gas taxes in the 1980s, nor sign amnesty and de facto open-border legislation in 1986, nor, later, increase federal spending well past the rate of inflation, or offer amnesty again in 2007. Tax cuts were great, but without caps on spending they were unfairly slurred as revenue reducers once deficits soared. Recent Republican congressional scandals mirror-imaged some of the Clinton-era roguery.
Reagan’s pragmatism on taxes, amnesty, new federal programs and government expansion, was continued by both Bush I and II. In that regard, McCain seems a continuum, not an abject disconnect. His problem is mostly temperament — when he strayed he was blunt about what he was doing and sometimes gratuitously offended his base in a way that neither Reagan nor the Bushes dared. That is a legitimate concern of tactical aptitude, but not one so much of ideology.
Back to Mark Levin setting that crap straight.
Let me be more specific, rather than spar in generalities. Reagan would never have used the phrase “manage for profit” as a zinger to put down a Republican opponent. Reagan believed in managing for profit because he believed in free enterprise. That doesn’t mean he didn’t agree to certain tax increases (after fighting for and winning the most massive tax cuts in modern American history), which were incidentally to be accompanied by even greater spending cuts.
McCain believes the oil companies are evil, and said it during one of the debates. Among his first acts as president, Reagan decontrolled the prices of natural gas and crude oil with the stroke of his pen because, as he understood, profit funds research and exploration. Reagan had a respect for and comprehension of private property rights and markets that McCain does not. There never would have been a Reagan-Lieberman bill, in which the federal government’s power over the private sector would have trumped the New Deal.
Reagan opposed limits on political speech. The Reagan administration ended the Fairness Doctrine and the media ownership rules, which helped create the alternative media that McCain despises. Reagan’s reverence for the Constitution would never have allowed him to support, let alone add his name to, something like McCain-Feingold.
So to all you Hanson’s, Simons and Anchoress’s out there, I call bullshit to the idea that we have to believe that McCain is not some big stinking pile of shit. I may indeed vote for this pile of shit because the other side of the aisle is a bigger pile of shit but both of them came from the same spot.
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