Going the Distance

Congressional Republicans are apparently starting to think they should separate themselves from the grossly unpopular George W. Bush. John McCain, it seems, is thinking much the same thing.

This all goes back to the weird decision-making of the congressional Republicans in November 2006 through February 2007. After the spanking the GOP took in the midterms, conventional wisdom held that congressional Republicans would tell Bush that either he was going to embrace Baker-Hamilton and moves toward winding-up the Iraq War, or else he was going to face mass defections. The shrill blogger set, reading recent history, accurately predicted that no such thing would happen and we were right. But the Republicans' determination to behave this way is still odd. And now John McCain's running for President and he is different from Bush in some respects and is now wisely trying to emphasize those points of difference, but on the key driving factor of the rise and fall of Bushism -- national security policy -- McCain is more Bushite than Bush and wants to resolve the problems with our current approach to the world by banging the table much harder.

Comments

Are we supposed to complete the last sentence?

I'll go with

...McCain is McSame

Posted by John DE | May 15, 2008 10:11 AM

The last sentence is:

"And now John McCain's running for President and he is different from Bush in some respects and is now wisely trying to emphasize those points of difference, but on the key driving factor of the rise and fall of Bushism -- national security policy -- McCain is *more Bushite than Bush* and wants to resolve the problems with our current approach to the world by banging the table much harder."

The phrase "more Bushite than Bush" is a broken link tag, missing its final close quote, which accounts for the disappearance of the final part of the sentence. The link is to

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_militarist

Posted by Anonymous Nitpicker | May 15, 2008 10:15 AM

The dynamic of the presidential nomination contest explains what is happening. Basically, the GOP can't win general election contests with these policies, but their candidates can't win nomination contests without them. So they are stuck, and will be until enough members of the Party accept that they need new policies.

Posted by DTM | May 15, 2008 10:16 AM

Thanks Anonymous Nitpicker.

Posted by John DE | May 15, 2008 10:20 AM

There's an interesting study in vanity and mendacity going on. McCain couldn't win the nomination without kowtowing to the hard right and can't win without distancing himself from them. Is the "real McCain" the guy who will toe the line of the hard right after getting elected or or the guy who will keep the promises he ran the general election on. The hard right quickly patched things up with McCain after McCain smooched their collective heinies, but they must be aware that he can't campaign in the general election that way. So, they're content to vote for a candidate, betting that he's just lying to the general populace and not to them. Sort of like the 2nd Mrs. McCain.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | May 15, 2008 10:25 AM

MCCAIN IS PERMALINK

IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW

Posted by ACLS | May 15, 2008 10:29 AM

Matt, McCain's attempt to disown Bush is the least interesting comment in the Times' article. This is far more fascinating: "But Mr. McCain’s advisers said the Mississippi race underlined his intention to distance himself as much as possible from Congressional Republicans."

This really indicates what should be a second prong in the Democratic attack on McCain, one that the Republicans obviously fear. McCain is a "Congressional Republican," after all, and he's voted with them pretty much all the way. The Republicans obviously think this is a weak position, and will try to obfuscate it. I agree, and the Democrats better be ready to highlight it. It's a real winner. Make him disavow both his President and his party, whom he's supported all along, and he's the biggest flip-flopper ever.

Posted by David in NY | May 15, 2008 10:31 AM

The fact is John McCain is a America Hero Maverick who will rewrite the past history of what Republicans have said and done because only He has the guts to make the past different and also do a really good dry rub (?) for journalists at his ranch house.

Posted by El Cid | May 15, 2008 10:36 AM

Obama responded today to Bush's criticism that [someone] wants to appease dictators.

Obama was mistaken, however. What Bush was really criticizing was appeasing dictators who don't have OIL.

Posted by Don Williams | May 15, 2008 10:39 AM

I never click Permalinks!

Posted by Matthew | May 15, 2008 10:40 AM

DTM,

The dynamics of the presidential nomination contest have revealed some contradictory and irrational aspects in the thinking of many segments of the electorate.

In poll after poll, when the question of the merits of Gulf War 2 considered by themselves, the overwhelming majority of Americans see it for the gross blunder that it really is. Yet, when doing a quick evaluation of the commander-in-chief ability of a particular candidate, much of the primary electorate for both parties use support of Gulf War 2 to determine which candidates would make the best commander-in-chief of the military. That's why poll after poll of voters in both the GOP and Democratic primaries consistently pick the most hawkish candidates as best commander-in-chier: John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

You would think that the ability to see our true strategic priorities would be the most importan tfactor in this evaluation, yet McCain and Clinton keep outpolling Obama in this evaluation. It appears that there many voters out there who think that being "tough" is more important than being "smart", and use hawkishness as a proxy for toughness.

Posted by eltoro | May 15, 2008 10:40 AM

What he's going to do is what he's doing now. Liberal photo-ops in places he "shouldn't" be to remind the press that they LOVE him and ooh! He's still a mavericky maverick at heart! Even though he has to play games to get elected, he REALLY REALLY wants to be one of us!

It's all quite Bushian. Bush suggested he was a moderate through his compassionate conservatism, McCain suggests it through his toothless environmentalism and cheap talk on Katrina. It's pathetic.

Posted by anonymous | May 15, 2008 10:40 AM

McCain is Permalinked to Bush, perhaps? Ah, the poetry of blogging. ;)

Posted by Tel | May 15, 2008 11:01 AM

eltoro,

Perhaps, but I'm not sure how people actually interpret a phrase like "Commander in Chief". Specifically, I'm not sure everyone interprets it to include making decisions like whether or not to go to war, as opposed to directing operations once we are in war.

Posted by DTM | May 15, 2008 11:02 AM

only He has the guts to make the past different and also do a really good dry rub (?) for journalists at his ranch house

for all the fellating the journalists have done for him, a good dry rub for them is the least he can do.

Posted by cleek | May 15, 2008 11:06 AM

One of the legends connected to the horror of Kent State was that many people on campus were telling one another National Guardsmen's guns didn't have bullets. The GOP has, for quite some time, but especially since the '06 drubbing, been telling themselves a metaphorical version of the same thing: that no matter what they did, the electorate wouldn't have bullets available to punish them. The last few months' special elections have disabused them of the notion, but it's way too late to do anything about it -- unless you believe rhetoric can completely trump reality.

I think the GOP dilemma is well articulated here: the fact that such a high percentage of Republicans continue to support the president put candidates in a huge bind, forcing them to cater to this band of dead-enders to gain nomination but then losing elections when the sane portion of America gets to weigh in. McCain was luckier than I expected -- the wild splits in GOP primary voting, and the number of winner-take-all contests in his strongest states, enabled him to take the nomination without blatantly prostituting himself to the right. But he did enough...and, anyway, the basics of the country's state work so against him that his chances of winning are zero.

Posted by demtom | May 15, 2008 11:10 AM

"There's an interesting study in vanity and mendacity going on. McCain couldn't win the nomination without kowtowing to the hard right and can't win without distancing himself from them"

It's true that McCain has kowtowed to the hard right on many issues. But on the Iraq War - and militarism and saber-rattling in general - he has been a consistent hardliner throughout his career. He's flipflopping on taxcuts, but on Iraq he's sincerely and genuinely committed to a bad and unpopular policy.

Posted by Richard Cownie | May 15, 2008 11:29 AM

"I think the GOP dilemma is well articulated here: the fact that such a high percentage of Republicans continue to support the president put candidates in a huge bind, forcing them to cater to this band of dead-enders to gain nomination but then losing elections when the sane portion of America gets to weigh in."

You're being too kind to those Republican Congressmen and Senators. They didn't follow President Bush off the cliff because they were afraid of GOP voters. They did it because they wanted to do it. The natural conservative instincts of resistence to change and deference to authority combined with a communist-like elevation of ideology over reality produced this irrational allegiance to President Bush long after they should have jumped ship.

Mike

Posted by MBunge | May 15, 2008 11:39 AM

Mike,

I'm not sure political self-interest and the tendencies you are identifying are really separable. Indeed, the fact that the other people in the GOP are likely to exhibit "irrational allegiance to President Bush" is a large part of why a GOP official has little choice about doing the same, regardless of where their personal inclinations may lie.

Posted by DTM | May 15, 2008 11:48 AM

The curious case of the dog that didn't bark in the night

It certainly was very atypical political behavior for the administration to react to the electoral loss in 2006 with an open rejection of the ISG's temporizing advice. Just accepting the idea of any sort of course correction would seem to have been the no-brainer course of action to minimize the political price to be paid for the electorate's turn toward dovishness. The ISG recommendations were enough of a middling muddle that accepting the idea of a course correction along lines suggested by the ISG would not have kept the administration from doing any of the hawkish things on the ground that they actually did. They could have put the same number of extra troops on the gound as they did without calling it a Surge. Troop levels had been raised higher in the past without anyone calling that a surge, and without scheduling Congressional votes to implement changing troop levels. In every respect, the administration moved to pick fights that it didn't need to fight, staking out an unnecessarily hawkish position that the voters had just angrily rejected.

I wrote at the time (wander over to my dKos diaries if you're interested) that this made sense only if you assumed that the administration planned to arrange future events to make hawkishness seem brilliant and prescient rather than the stubborn and foolish that the electorate and ISG had just branded that stance. Presumably this would be done by provoking Iran into setting its terror network on us, which they would presumably only do after we killed a whole lot of Iranian civilians and they felt compelled to retaliate. No matter how extreme our original provocation, any attack on US civilians would almost certainly put any consideration of why the Iranians had done that beyond the political pale in this country, and indeed make hawkishness seem the wise and prescient course. Churchillian Republicans then beat appeasing Dems in the 2008 election, Bush retires to Crawford instead of the Federal Pen in Atlanta, and all remains very not right with the world.

Perhaps this was conspiracy theorizing all along. Perhaps something like this was in the works, but the generals and admirals blocked it. Perhaps it's still in the works, and they're just waiting until closer to the election to make sure the initial shock and awe (to the electorate, of course, not Iran, since the electorate is the real enemy to this crowd) hasn't worn off by 11/4/08. And, of course, the explanation may be something entirely other than these possibilities, because people sometimes just do randlomly irrational things. But I think the fact remains that responding to losing Congress and the ISG report by staging a Surge, simply made no sense whatever, in a field, political optics, where they usually behave pretty predictably.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | May 15, 2008 12:11 PM

Glen: "Perhaps it's still in the works, and they're just waiting until closer to the election to make sure the initial shock and awe (to the electorate, of course, not Iran, since the electorate is the real enemy to this crowd) hasn't worn off by 11/4/08."

You've hit it. It IS still in the works, and of course it will be launched sufficiently before the election that the "war bounce" will have an effect but not so long before that the essential disaster that the war will be becomes evident before the elections.

And in any event, as I've said, once the war is started, there is no downside. The incoming administration will have its hands tied - unable to stop the war because now it will be TRUE that "Iranians are killing US troops" and the US jingoism that will stimulate. The Democrats will be unable to stop the war because of the same fear that stopped them from dealing with the Iraq war, and because they get the same bribes from the same military-industrial complex the Republicans do.

So the war will go on, the oil companies and the military-industrial complex companies will profit just as they have for the last six years.

The only losers will be Iranian civilians, and US taxpayers - as usual.

As I've said, there is absolutely NO downside to Bush and Cheney attacking Iran this year. And they don't even need a full-scale attack on the nuclear facilities as they originally planned - just one simply raid on some lame "training camp" in Iran. Iran will retaliate either directly or in Iraq, and the war will then escalate nicely. And Bush can sit there and say, "Well, we just hit them a little and look what they did!"

This also lets Israel off the hook. Cheney has been trying to get them to start the war with a bombing raid on Iran's nuclear facilities - but the Israelis balked since they know what a disaster such a war would be and don't want to be blamed for it like they were (correctly) blamed for supporting the Iraq war (not to mention wanting the US to attack Iran INSTEAD of Iraq before jumping on the Iraq bandwagon in late 2002, SLC's lies notwithstanding.)

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 15, 2008 5:43 PM

It's fairly simple. The majority of the American people oppose the Iraq War. But a majority (or close to a majority) of conservatives and Republicans support it.

So opposition to the Iraq War = primary challenges. Support for the Iraq War = general election losses.

One of the worst possible situations to be in is to have your base passionately committed to a position that is both unpopular AND is a key voting issue for the electorate. That basically forces poiticians into a position of defending unpopular positions.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 15, 2008 8:08 PM