Note to McCain: Don't Move Right
By Pierre AtlasWith John McCain declaring he will "wage war" against The New York Times for its questionably sourced and questionably timed article accusing him of improper behavior in the 2000 campaign, some of the conservative talk radio hosts who only days earlier were denouncing his candidacy, including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, are now rallying to his side.
It would seem that their animus toward that symbol of the liberal media elite trumps their hatred of John McCain - at least for now.
If there is no "smoking gun" behind the article's vague accusations from 1999 it is likely that the story will be only a short-term distraction. The focus of the media, the parties and the voters will once again turn to the 2008 election.
As talk radio was showering vitriol on the Arizona senator over the past few weeks, the conventional wisdom suggested McCain should move to the right on key issues to shore up and energize the party's conservative base for November. The temptation to do so might be even greater now, as the Times fiasco appears to unite McCain and hard-line conservatives in common cause.
But in the grander scheme of the 2008 election campaign, such a strategy would be a mistake. If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, any further rightward move by McCain will be both unnecessary and counterproductive. If Barack Obama is the nominee, pandering rightward will most likely backfire and cost McCain the general election.
Political scientists tend to view the political party as a rational team of office-seekers. The primary goal of political parties--and of their professional cadre of experts and activists--is to win elections. In a two-party system, a party must be able to appeal beyond its own (often narrow) base to attract the votes of independents and crossovers if it hopes to be victorious in a general election. Of course parties must stand for beliefs and policies to distinguish themselves from their rivals and to attract supporters. But no party can hope to implement any policies if it fails to win elections, and winning usually means appealing to the center and wooing the floating voter.
Should Hillary pull off a comeback on March 4 and obtain the Democratic nomination, the conservative factions aligned with the GOP will be shored up and energized in ways that no level of McCain pandering could ever achieve. With Hillary as the Democrats' standard bearer, dollars will pour into GOP coffers and will fuel anti-Clinton "527" groups, and Republicans will flock to the polls to vote against her.
If Clinton wins the nomination in a bitterly contested convention fight or through unseemly intervention by superdelegates, many disgruntled and disillusioned Democrats might be willing to vote for McCain over Hillary--assuming McCain has not twisted too far to the right. In the most optimal scenario for the GOP, the anti-Hillary vote combines with the pro-McCain vote, taking the Arizona senator to the White House with a broad electoral mandate.
If on the other hand, Barack Obama becomes the Democratic nominee (which appears more likely as of this writing), he should be able to do what Hillary can't--unite the Democrats and draw independents and even some Republicans to his side. The contest between McCain and Obama will be fought in the middle. Whoever attracts the most swing and crossover voters will win.
But if McCain, who most Americans already recognize as an authentic conservative, moves further to the right on torture, immigration, taxes, life or other litmus test issues in order to placate conservative activists, he will unilaterally disarm himself against Obama. He will alienate independents who have always respected and valued his "straight talk"-- and Obama will gleefully jump on McCain's painfully obvious flip-flopping.
Eleventh-hour pandering by McCain will not likely earn him the enthusiastic support of the talk radio pundits, despite their temporary defense of him this week. McCain's most ardent attackers view the GOP not as a political party that seeks to win office in democratic elections, but rather as a "social movement" that should be controlled by inflexible ideological purists.
Those who had been leading the conservative charge against McCain on talk radio and the blogosphere - and may quickly do so again once the Times' story blows over--were undermining the Republican Party's ability to win in November. And they didn't seem to care. Some have gone so far as to advocate a Democratic victory in order to prove their point that McCain is not conservative enough. In other words, they are willing to "burn the village in order to save it."
There is always tension between a party's professionals and its "amateur" ideological activists. The "rational choice" for a party in a two-party system is to dive toward the center to attract the most votes, while the purists act as ideological anchors keeping one party from morphing into the other. The party that usually wins the general election is the one best able to balance this tension in a way that energizes the activists without alienating party moderates and crossover voters. Sometimes a candidate comes along who can excite both the party base and the broader, general electorate. The last such candidate was Ronald Reagan. Obama hopes to do it in 2008.
If McCain listens to the conventional wisdom and tacks rightward, he may take the Republican Party into the political wilderness on Election Day. For the pundits of the right, that might not be such a bad thing. But most rank and file Republicans would no doubt disagree. They don't want to burn down their own village.
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