The Super Tuesday Dilemma

As the field of Republican presidential hopefuls narrows, Tuesday the 5th (super Tuesday/tsunami Tuesday) will likely yield decisive margins for an emergent front runner in the party. But as the partisan rancor barely reaches a low simmer, intra-party aggression boils vehemently in the conservative punditry. Talkers such as Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh have exclaimed that a McCain nomination will "destroy the Republican party" and Ann Coulter threatens to campaign for Hillary if McCain wins the nomination, but increasingly it seems that the real threat to the party might indeed be extreme positions taken by influential party activists in the aftermath of a McCain nomination.

McCain has a very real chance of winning the nomination. In the waning hours before 24 states will allot their delegates, McCain's polling numbers have jumped to an impressive 2-1 lead against his combined GOP rivals! If he does continue to build on this surge toward the party nomination the talk radio faction of the party will have handed the biggest victory in years to the left leaning media: they will have brought about their own irrelevance.

Who would take seriously Rush Limbaugh's endorsement of McCain over Hillary or Obama? Or more relevantly, what would he have his listeners do in November? Stay home? The party is indeed undergoing a period of flux; the Bush presidency has turned out to be exactly what it was billed as: a different kind of conservative. Never since Nixon have we seen a Republican president so eager to expand the size of the federal government as President Bush, yet conservatives loyally stand by their president while chastising McCain as a liberal and pining for the days of Reagan. Perhaps the reason we don't have "another Reagan" on the ballot is in fact a function of history, and perhaps that history is itself more a figment of our imagination than it was a reality.

Reagan came to power as a direct result of the extensive damage done during that national tragedy called the Carter administration. Never before has a landslide victory like Reagan's been achieved, and Reagan reversed the course of government away from misery and near socialism which Carter had fought hard to bring about. Reagan was a hero, Reagan was one of the great presidents, and I would be thrilled to have the opportunity in my lifetime to vote for someone with the clarity of vision that he had. But the rose colored tint of history is misguided when we look in disdain at John McCain as compared to this great president.


Reagan won the presidency by promising to do three things: fix the economy, beat back the soviet union, and lower your taxes while doing it. Done, done, and done. But it might also be helpful to remember that he agreed to a 165 Billion dollar bailout of social security, expanded the size of social security by bringing federal workers into the system, started taxing Social Security benefits (yes, that would be a tax on the return of your tax), compromised with the Soviets on arms control, and raised taxes four times between 1982 and 1984! Does this make Reagan a liberal? Of course not! Reagan was a politician, and when we leave the land of fantasy and enter the land of reality, compromises can and must be made in order to get things done.

Much of the criticism surrounding John McCain's record stems from some of the legislation he has worked on: namely McCain-Feingold, and the recent "comprehensive" immigration reform. Yet in spite of the fact that Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which he even called amnesty because that's what it did (Gasp!), every pundit has been stampeding to be the first to say that John McCain is nothing like Reagan. John McCain has an 83% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, has crusaded against spending in Washington, has an impressive record in cutting subsidies to the bloated US Agriculture Department, has supported every single free trade bill that has come to the senate, supports reforming Social Security into an individual account plan with a positive rate of return, supports solving our health care systems problems by instituting a more market based approach, doesn't want to wreck the housing market with government intervention, doesn't believe writing a bunch of checks and spending more of your money should be called "stimulus", has pledged to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and refuses to stop fighting for victory in Iraq. The only valid criticism that can be leveled at him results directly from his willingness to compromise to get things done, exactly like Reagan did.

In spite of the trash talk McCain is a lot more like our beloved Reagan than Rush Limbaugh would like to believe. He has the strongest, most conservative record of anyone running, and those in the conservative media who have failed to see this have squandered their opportunity to lead the movement in this election. He has a good shot at winning the nomination, and a good shot at winning the white house precisely for all the same reasons why Ann Coulter hates him: the fact that he can appeal to 51% of the population. Regardless of how the 2008 contest turns out, talk radio already lost big.