On The Nature Of John McCain

02 Jan, 2008 by John Hawkins

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Over the last few weeks, people have been focusing heavily on Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee while giving John McCain a pass. During that time, he has managed to get back into contention and now has an excellent chance to capture the nomination.

With that in mind, there are three things that people should not forget about John McCain.

1) Not only was John McCain the driving force in the Senate behind the amnesty bill, he is one of the two remaining candidates in the race (the other being Giuliani) that still supports amnesty.

What that means is that if John McCain wins the nomination, the spin will be, without a doubt, that conservatives are no longer opposed to amnesty. Would that be true? No. If McCain wins the nomination, his pro-amnesty stance will be the biggest hurdle he would have to overcome.

While McCain is making a run at the nomination, expect the amnesty talk from his supporters to be kept to a minimum, but if he wins, expect the same old amnesty and open borders crowd that pushed the immigration monstrosity last year to get cocky and start planning their next big push for 2009, whether McCain wins or not.

2) There are generally thought to be three legs of the Republican Party — social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and foreign policy conservatives — and of course, there is a lot of overlap amongst those three groups.

Different candidates tend to appeal more to different groups. For example, Mike Huckabee appeals more to social conservatives, Rudy Giuliani appeals more to the foreign policy conservatives, and Fred Thompson has a message designed to appeal to fiscal conservatives.

However, John McCain’s support doesn’t come primarily from any of these three groups. Although the inside-the-beltway Republican establishment crowd likes McCain, his main base of support comes from the mainstream media. They’re the ones endorsing him left and right. They’re the ones talking up his candidacy right now and if he wins, they will be the ones that are primarily responsible for it.

The danger in this for Republicans is that candidates generally make a great effort to keep their core supporters happy and in John McCain’s case, his core supporters are MSM outlets like the New York Times, CBS, and MSNBC.

This leads us to…

3) Conservatives cannot truly trust John McCain — not on fiscal conservatism, not on the war on terror, not on judges, not on anything because the only way he can make the mainstream media happy is by infuriating conservatives.

The bigger the betrayal of conservative principles, the more his pals in the MSM will laud him as a brave maverick. He has built his entire career around that one principle and putting a man like that in the White House would be extremely dangerous for conservatives.

If you decide to back McCain — and you very well may given how deeply flawed Huckabee, Romney, and Giuliani are — just understand EXACTLY what you are getting.