A Party of Mavericks
BARNES, FRED
A Party of Mavericks Can there be such a thing? BY FRED BARNES When Representative Kevin McCarthy of California introduced the Republican platform to the party’s convention last week, he...
...As a Republican president facing a hostile Democratic Congress, McCain would need Senate and House Republicans as reliable allies...
...Yet having as president and head of the Republican party someone who proudly strays from party orthodoxy or ignores the party entirely—that’s a recipe for diffi culties in Washington...
...And Sarah Palin wouldn’t be ready to offer immediate help...
...To keep their ties with McCain secure, they probably will have to yield on those...
...McCain would have to give up some of his cherished goals, including a total ban on earmarks and the defunding of every subsidy for business...
...As far as I could tell, no one at the convention or in the Republican hierarchy or in Congress was bothered by this contradiction...
...A maverick, by defi nition, is an animal without a brand...
...By adopting the Republican call for offshore drilling for oil and gas, McCain has given himself a powerful talking point against Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama...
...The next night, a video extolling Ronald Reagan was screened with the disclosure that Reagan had been a maverick...
...If he brushed them aside in pursuit of bipartisan compromises with Democrats, that would make matters worse...
...I suspect he does...
...Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, once referred to McCain as a “bridge burner...
...Nor is there a maverick ideology that might compete with conservatism or liberalism or even libertarianism...
...Chances are, a President McCain who worked with congressional Republicans would improve the brand of the GOP...
...They must have fi gured he was talking about them, and he was...
...And the reason is that, in politics, a maverick merely suggests someone with a certain attitude and image or, as McCain put it, “someone who marches to the beat of his own drum...
...If the McCain-Palin ticket loses, the governing problem will vanish...
...That’s not a compliment...
...I don’t work for a party,” he declared...
...Though many Republican senators were wary of his Iraq policy, Bush kept their support in part by accommodating them on other issues, such as earmarks...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...BY FRED BARNES When Representative Kevin McCarthy of California introduced the Republican platform to the party’s convention last week, he had this to say: “Yes, we are a party of mavericks...
...Perhaps the maverick problem is already being taken care of...
...According to a former Bush administration offi cial who worked closely with congressional Republicans, McCain would begin his White House term with “less good will and felt loyalty” among members of his own party than any president in memory...
...Imagine what Democrats thought when they heard McCain last week boast of “having fought the big spenders” as a senator and vow to fi ght them all the more vigorously as president...
...But if McCain wins— and his chances improved considerably when he chose Palin as his vice presidential running mate—he’ll have a tricky task to accomplish...
...Should McCain try to impose his every wish on congressional Republicans, he’d risk alienating them...
...If there were, we’d have heard a good bit about the virtues of maverickism during the four days of the convention...
...Only with Republicans and some renegade Democrats on board would he be able to keep that promise, however, since the vast majority of Democrats would reject a pared-down McCain budget out of hand...
...Of course we didn’t...
...Kevin McCarthy thinks so...
...Indeed he’s just such a person, McCain said...
...He’s learned the lesson that he can go further when the party’s with him...
...Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment and sometimes it’s not,” he noted...
...Or when he’s with the party...
...Congressional Republicans will be on their own...
...McCain, after all, has promised to reach at least some bipartisan solutions...
...Courting many of the same Republicans he’s been infuriating for years wouldn’t be easy...
...As governor she’s clashed with Republicans in Alaska as frequently as McCain has with Republicans on Capitol Hill...
...I will cut government spending,” McCain said in his acceptance speech...
...Republicans shouldn’t count on McCain’s willingness to jettison his non-Republican position on environmental issues...
...Democrats would not only object strenuously to that sort of budget process, they’d attempt to block it...
...A political party requires one...
...But these were campaign compromises, necessary for him to win the Republican nomination and now the general election...
...It would split Republicans and wipe out hopes of a full recovery by the party from its collapse two years ago...
...Running for president as a maverick is fi ne, so long as McCain recognizes there’s no such thing as a maverick political party...
...One thing it’s never meant as, though, is a coherent set of political ideas or a strategy for governing...
...And in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain mentioned in passing that he’d been called a maverick, too...
...President Bush was confronted with exactly this circumstance— Democratic control of Congress— after the election of 2006...
...Eric Cantor, the deputy Republican whip in the House, believes President McCain would implement an “ideology of accountability,” acting “like a sledgehammer” to get rid of unneeded or unjustifi ed spending...
...McCarthy’s examples are energy and immigration...
...And most of them, by the way, aren’t mavericks...
...By backing away from support for sweeping immigration reform in favor of the party’s position of securing the border with Mexico fi rst, he’s avoided alienating hordes of conservative voters...
...McCain the reformer, he says, “understands he can’t walk alone...
...McCain said this right after accepting the Republican party’s presidential nomination “with gratitude, humility, and confi dence...
...Again, to prevent Democrats from gutting his plans, McCain would need Republicans on his side, lots of them...
...Without solid Republican backing in the Senate, his controversial troop surge that has turned around the situation in Iraq would have been jeopardized or halted altogether...
...But without near-unanimous backing by Republicans in Congress, McCain’s two top priorities would be doomed: reform of spending practices, including deep cuts, and an aggressive foreign and national security policy...
Vol. 14 • September 2008 • No. 1
