McCain the Self-Annointed

McCain touts lead as Democrats scratch for edge

John McCain is poised to become the nominee of the Republican Party. Or so he says... After his recent victory in South Carolina, the withdrawal (finally) of Rudy Giuliani, the poor performances by Mitt Romney and the fizzle of the Mike Huckabee campaign, John McCain, the so-called maverick of the right, sits pretty as the king of the Republican Party mountain. On "Super Tuesday" 24 states will with relative certainty provide us with the Republican nominee. McCain has emerged strong in this last week, as he received the support of Giuliani as well as the backing of California governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, a significant boon in a state with 170 delegates.Before one sticks the final feather in John McCain's cap and declares him the banner-carrier of the Republican Party in the 2008 election, it may be wise to halt the forward march and consider a significant consequence of a McCain nomination: the shattering of the Republican Party.

There is a visceral dislike and visible backlash against John McCain and the prospect of a McCain Republican Party presidential candidacy. This revolt sits firmly in the grassroots while being vocalized significantly by the opinion makers of the right wing media. Most prominently the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has predicted (perhaps startlingly) that a McCain (or Huckabee, for that matter) nomination will "destroy the Republican Party."

That such words would emit from the standard-bearer of popular American conservatism cannot be overplayed. This is a blow to McCain and this signals the divergence of the Republican Party with a movement has been for decades been associated with it. Conservatives essentially are the Republican Party. That may change with a McCain nomination.

Yet this split is not only between conservatives and the Republican Party. There is a fracture within the conservative movement. Multiple fractures, actually. On the one hand is the split between the establishment conservatives and neoconservatives, exhibed by Rush Limbaugh and the Weekly Standard (in which an article was recently published titled McCain's Bumpy Ride); as much of a centrist McCain may be, this split which places him in the camp of the neoconseratives (a group which has supported him in the past; McCain is most certainly an "establishment" Republican, and such an endorsement more than proves that) may in fact preserve neoconservative dominance, thus a continuation of the radical foreign policy doctrines and actions of the Bush Administration.

This premonition of a McCain presidency, by Justin Raimondo in the February 11, 2008 issue of The American Conservative, ought to provide a reason to pause and ponder the dangerous possibilities ahead

If McCain finally makes it to the White House, the U.S. will surely start new wars, and not just in the Middle East. With the world as his stage, the persona McCain has created—given visible expression by what Camille Paglia trenchantly described as “the over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel (from Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety)”—will have every opportunity to act out his fantasies of soldierly greatness.