The McCain Insurrection

...The McCain insurgency is not ideological...

...For all his conventional political views, McCain embodies a set of virtues that today are unconventional...

...McCain's campaign reminds us that citizenship entails more than just voting, and the business of America is more than just business...

...It does feature certain themes and principles, but they are not yet fully developed into a governing agenda...

...In their weakness, they now cling warily to each other...

...He sees patriotism as a more solid ground for public action than the softer, more private compassion of George Bush's faith-based charities...

...At once heterodox in tone and conventional on most issues, at once a rebel and an experienced senator, at once a fervent reformer and a reassuring commander in chief, John McCain now finds himself at the head of the third major insurgency of the past two decades...

...But in the heat of the election campaign—in the debates, up against real competition and increased media scrutiny—all that had seemed potentially transforming about the Bush campaign withered...

...At first glance, the McCain insurgency seems nothing like the other two...

...And whom did the Bush team bring out the day after New Hampshire, when they presumably should have learned that voters were looking for new blood and new themes...

...He said government should be limited but energetic...

...That's why the McCain insurgency is not just a fundamental challenge to the Republican party but a political phenomenon with potential appeal to the country as a whole...

...It is possible that a revitalized Bush could save himself—but the establishment's weakness has been exposed, and some other insurgency will eventually take advantage of it...

...Like Reagan and Gingrich, McCain makes the corporate and lobbyist types nervous...

...In 1980, Ronald Reagan, fresh from challenging a sitting Republican president in 1976, ran against a party establishment represented in various ways by Howard Baker, George Bush, and John Connally...

...John McCain could cruise to such a massive win in New Hampshire because the Republican establishment has ossified...

...McCain launched his campaign with a book entitled Faith of My Fathers...

...Reeling from these blows, both the corporate bigwigs and many movement conservatives seized upon George W. Bush as their savior...

...As McCain said not long ago, "Although the locus of the change we are calling for is our campaign finance system, this crusade is about much more than changing how we pay for our campaigns...

...Finally, like Reagan and Gingrich, McCain attacks a Republican establishment that has already rotted from within...

...tuals like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Bill Bennett who had been Democrats all their lives...

...Indeed, this became almost comically evident the last week in New Hampshire when the Bush campaign rolled out Jack Kemp, John Sununu, and George Bush the elder to prop up a faltering candidate...

...He argued that America as a great champion of democracy and decency could not fail to act...

...And for better or worse, Gingrich tried to import a whole raft of ideas and people that were not part of the conservative canon: thinkers ranging from Marvin Olasky on the right to Heidi and Alvin Toffler on the left, through Edwards Deming and all the rest of that Third Wave zoological futurology...

...It comes from a commitment to the idea of America and the public virtues, like courage, honor, integrity, and duty, required to keep America great...

...BY WILLIAM KRISTOL AND DAVID BROOKS The two great Republican general-election victories of the recent past grew out of intra-party insurrections...

...They create new alliances within the party...

...George W. Bush sounded almost indistinguishable from the Robert Dole of 1996 or the George Herbert Walker Bush of 1992...

...The corporate establishment suffered its crushing defeat back in 1990, with the tax-hiking budget deal...

...After a year of innovative groundwork the Bush campaign defaulted to the most ineffectual GOP establishment tactics...

...It is clear that Vietnam plays an important role in McCain's appeal...

...The corporate elites have invested heavily in George W. Bush, and they must have been chugging Tums after New Hampshire...

...But he also beat Bush among voters who called themselves conservative...

...But in these good economic times, McCain was able to trump the appeal to self-interest with a public-spirited message: We should think of ourselves as citizens, not merely as consumers...

...Now, as Bush has faltered, they hope that together they still have enough clout to propel him to the White House...

...That's why 1980 and 1994 were winning years for the GOP in the fall...

...that's why the orthodox Republican campaigns of 1992 and 1996 were unsuccessful...

...Stumbling and grasping, the Republicans mounted the ineffectual Dole-Kemp campaign, suffered a setback in the 1998 midterm elections, and in general have fitfully surrendered policy ground to the Democrats (in their response to the State of the Union address, the Republicans boasted they were sending $500 million more to the Department of Education than Clinton asked for...

...They saw Bush as a man with a magic political touch who could lead them back to victory...

...They topple the old establishment by bringing in new people...

...Many of these new Republican primary voters seem ill-suited to the GOP...

...we should be represented in Washington as Americans, not merely as members of interest groups or as taxpayers...

...John McCain is taking on the Republican establishment...

...Vietnam led many on the left to doubt the idea of America, and many other Americans to shy away from full-throated patriotism...

...In the time since, neither the corporate honchos nor the movement types have been strong enough to dominate the party...

...But both have suffered crushing defeats in the past decade...

...Bush was saying, in effect, I'm going to give you more of your money back...

...Compassionate conservatism offered the prospect of something new and compelling...

...And for much of 1999, George Bush did seem to possess that magic touch...

...In short, after a year of innovative groundwork the Bush campaign reverted to tired formulas...

...One emphasized his commitment to reform, the other his fitness as commander in chief...

...He offers a vision of a remoralized America, but his cultural renewal does not depend on a religious revival...

...By breaking the "no new taxes pledge," President Bush and his senior advisers—Richard Darman, Nicholas Brady, and the rest of the Republican pragmatists—sloughed off the Reagan legacy and forfeited the trust of the American people...

...He distanced himself from the Dick Darman types...

...He talked openly about his religious faith...

...It seemed that the Republicans had found a candidate who could transform the party from the top, revitalizing its message and broadening its support...

...Rather than Reagan Democrats, this election season has produced the McCain Independents...

...Against a Democratic party that is deferential to bureaucrats, judges, and professional activists, against a Republican party of corporate hierarchies and business lobbyists, against a conservative movement that loves the private sector so much it disdains the public one, McCain offers a vision of an engaged, active, self-governing citizenry...

...And he supported his commander in chief despite grave doubts about the conduct of the war—while George W. Bush sat out the debate and Republicans on the Hill flailed at Clinton...

...Unlike the Gingrich-Armey-DeLay revolutionaries, he wasn't merely going to cut, devolve, and dismantle...

...They did, and seemed to achieve a historic triumph in 1994...

...Bush also distinguished himself from the conservative movement...

...Last year when George W. Bush looked inevitable, they hoped to save themselves by riding his coattails to power...

...In a series of subtle and sophisticated speeches, he made it clear that he had a positive governing philosophy...

...It defaulted to the most familiar conservative rhetoric and the most ineffectual GOP establishment political tactics...

...They expand the base...

...In Gingrich's Republican landslide of 1994, eight million Americans voted Republican in House elections for the first time...

...Reagan and Gingrich led ideological crusades...

...Right now his strong showing looks like a victory of character over platform, of personality over position papers...

...McCain's faith-based institution is America...

...He went on to propose a bold tax cut plan...

...But that triumph was short lived...

...But if one abandons the premise that insurrections have to be ideological, it becomes clear that in some ways the McCain insurgency does resemble its two predecessors...

...He also offers a second vision, one that grows out of his own life story: a story of honorable behavior on behalf of a great nation...

...Bush made several bold gestures to distinguish himself from the corporate establishment...

...McCain's campaign reminds us that citizenship entails more than just voting, and the business of America is more than just business...

...In speech after speech McCain calls on his listeners,especially young people, to serve a cause greater than themselves...

...The catastrophic budget shutdown of late 1995 was the conservative movement's Waterloo...

...He proposed new conservative programs...

...It cannot save a faltering campaign no matter how well funded it might be, no matter how many firewalls it claims to erect...

...He attracted independent voters by stressing a reform agenda not part of conservative orthodoxy...

...But that's what insurgencies do...

...This left the field wide open for John McCain...

...The Republicans were thrown back on their heels, saddled with a profoundly unpopular leader, and spent the next couple of years plagued by self-doubt and internal power struggles...

...More important, he seemed to understand that if it were to win, the Republican Party had to move beyond its two tired factions...

...His brand of conservatism rejects the notion that the highest end of government is to leave us alone...

...Dan Quayle...

...This may sound un-Republican...

...They attacked the Republican establishment from the right, and the ground had been prepared by a conservative movement which first won the war of ideas...

...And so McCain won...

...Furthermore, like the other two insurgents, McCain is trying to bring new and unlikely blood into Republican ranks...

...The current Republican establishment comprises two factions that were once rivals, the "pragmatic" corporate establishment and the "ideological" conservative movement...

...But just as Reagan reached across party lines to appropriate some of the rhetoric and spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, so McCain echoes some of the language and sentiments of John and Robert Kennedy...

...In New Hampshire, he crushed it...

...Reagan appealed to the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt and brought in the Reagan Democrats, along with intellecWilliam Kristol i^ editor and publisher and David Brooks a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...This created a particularly effective contrast with Bill Clinton, who never sacrificed for the public good, who used the Lincoln Bedroom for partisan fund-raising and the Oval Office for private gratification, and whose vision of public policy consists of doling out favors to Americans divided into innumerable niche interests...

...But in the helter-skelter of the McCain campaign, two core themes are discernible, themes that could form the foundation of a new Republican approach to governing...

...It's about changing how we view our democracy...

...These two fundamental elements—reform for the sake of citizenship and leadership in the service of American greatness—undergird a not yet fully developed program...

...For a time it seemed that the Republican party would not need an insurgency...

...McCain closed his New Hampshire campaign with two ads...

...What's striking is that both of these elements have been absent from most current political discourse...

...A decade later, Newt Gingrich led an insurrection, first against the Bush budget deal and then against Bob Michel and the Republican congressional establishment, which culminated in the Republican landslide of 1994...

...They went on to run a typical establishment campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992...

...It is no accident that McCain has emerged after a decade dominated by two politicians, Clinton and Gingrich, clever but not self-sacrificing, who never served in the armed forces...

...McCain, the Vietnam hero, is the final renunciation of all that...

...By the end of New Hampshire, compassionate conservatism was a memory...

...For McCain, the president is, above all, these two things: citizen reformer and commander in chief...

...The issue that gave the McCain campaign its initial boost was Kosovo...

...Now we are witnessing a third insurrection...

...Their failure opened the way for conservatives—led by Gingrich, who had dissented from the budget deal—to take over the party...

...Bill Clinton seized the initiative...

...we should serve the public good, not merely private interest...

...That's why Bush's decision to press the tax cut issue was so ineffective...

...The conservative establishment turned out to be almost as out of touch with real conservatives as the GOP establishment was with the Republican rank and file...

...First, all of McCain's talk about campaign finance reform, special interests, and shaking up Washington— some of it hyperbolic and demagogic—can be understood as part of a more comprehensive ambition to reinvigorate citizenship...