Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review March 9, 2000 / 2 Adar II, 5760

George Will

George Will
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
David Corn
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Arianna Huffington
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Debbie Schlussel
Sam Schulman
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports
Newswatch

Econophone

Trakdata


And Now Back to Republican Business


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- BY MONDAY, the last day of John McCain's plausibility as a presidential candidate, his campaign had become a protracted snarl. Time and television had done their work, and the nation had seen him steadily and seen him whole, and had seen an angry man.

If on Monday he had not been angry about the "sleazy money" of George W. Bush's "Texas cronies," it would have been something else. Anger is McCain's metier. It was said of Dwight Eisenhower (and could have been said of Ronald Reagan) that his smile was his philosophy. It is not clear what McCain's philosophy is, other than disdain for "interests" of the "special" sort, but it certainly is not summarized in a smile.

The nation has elected only one president defined by his anger. But Andrew Jackson, he of towering rages and durable grudges, would not wear well in a wired age, when television forces Americans to live in intimacy with presidents. Furthermore, McCain would have brought to the presidency something of Woodrow Wilson's brittle temperament at the time of his struggle with the Senate over ratification of the Versailles Treaty, when Wilson was convinced he had cornered the market on righteousness and would brook no compromise. McCain was the most entertaining candidate in memory, and a McCain presidency would have been as entertaining as Wilson's war with the Senate, but perhaps there should be some limit to the sovereignty of entertainment values in politics.

Journalists created John McCain (one of his top campaign aides candidly called the media McCain's "base") in their own self-image--almost supernaturally honest and virtuous and witty and irreverent--and they worshiped their creation. So it was perhaps to be expected that the McCain episode, being largely an artifact of the media, would wind up absurdly overanalyzed and preposterously overinvested with epochal significance.

Tactically, McCain's campaign has been skillful and novel, brilliantly exploiting the rules of the Republican nominating process--open primaries--and the new fact of saturation political journalism. But ideologically his campaign has been much more a recrudescence of late 19th-century populism than a rethinking of late 20th-century conservatism.

Conservatism is being redefined by exigencies faced by 30 Republican governors governing about two-thirds of the American people. (In 1998 Republican gubernatorial candidates got 4 million more votes than their Democratic opponents.) These governors have principal custody of the principal issue (so far)--education. Which tells you how far along the redefinition of conservatism has progressed: In five years Republicans have gone from vowing to abolish the Department of Education to boasting about giving the department hundreds of millions of dollars more than President Clinton requested.

The last half of the last decade of the 20th century saw the exhaustion of political rhetoric. No serious liberal still believes that conservatives aim to roll back the welfare state, and no serious conservative believes that today's omnipresent government has been imposed by stealth on a reluctant nation in the dead of night.

The next few months will see a repositioning of Bush, a course correction compensating for his rightward swerve to rally conservatives against McCain. Bush, not an angry man, saw his campaign colored darkly by some angry allies. One question Bush must weigh between now and the Philadelphia convention at the end of July is whether his enhanced credibility with conservatives will earn him more latitude in moving toward the center, with policies and perhaps in selecting a running mate.

In 1996, probably for the first time, a president was elected while losing ( by one point) the male vote. Which means Clinton won with those most put off by angry politics--women. McCain's capacious anger, the targets of which include a substantial portion of his party, is just one reason why Bush will be a stronger general election candidate than McCain would have been. Another reason is that McCain, unlike Bush, has 18 years of House and Senate votes for Al Gore to dredge up and misrepresent (as Gore misrepresented, with devastating effect in an Iowa debate, a vote Bill Bradley cast on disaster relief for farmers, and as Bush misrepresented McCain's record on breast cancer research).

In three months Bush has been transformed from someone to whom much seemed to have come a bit too easily--someone whose swift ascent seemed to be a function of lightness--into someone who has shown toughness in earning something.

The country, like Bush, is moderately conservative. Eight months is a long time for Al Gore to pretend to be. senator.



Comment on JWR contributor George Will's column by clicking here.

Up

03/06/00: As the Clock Runs Out on Bradley
03/02/00: Island of Equal Protection
02/28/00: . . . The Right Response
02/24/00: Federal Swelling
02/22/00: Greenspan Tweaks
02/17/00: Crucial Carolina (and Montana and . . .)
02/10/00: McCain's Distortions
02/10/00: The Disciplining of Austria
02/07/00: Free to Speak, Free to Give
02/02/00: Conservatives in a Changing Market
01/31/00: America's true unity day
01/27/00: For the Voter Who Can't Be Bothered
01/25/00: The FBI and the golden age of child pornography
01/20/00: Scruples and Science
01/18/00: Bradley: Better for What Ails Us
01/13/00: O'Brian Rules the Waves
01/10/00: Patron of the boom
01/06/00: In Cactus Jack's Footsteps
01/03/00: The long year
12/31/99: A Stark Perspective On a Radical Century
12/20/99: Soldiers' Snapshots of the Hell They Created
12/16/99: Star-Crossed Banner
12/13/99: Hubert Humphrey Wannabe
12/09/99: Stupidity in Seattle
12/06/99: Bradley's most important vote
12/03/99: Boys will be boys --- or you can always drug 'em
12/01/99: Confidence in the Gore Camp
11/29/99: Busing's End
11/22/99: When We Enjoyed Politics
11/18/99: Ever the Global Gloomster
11/15/99: The Politics of Sanctimony
11/10/99: Risks of Restraining
11/08/99: Willie Brown Besieged
11/04/99: One-House Town
11/01/99: Crack and Cant
10/28/99: Tax Break for the Yachting Class
10/25/99: Ready for The Big Leagues?
10/21/99: Where honor and responsibility still exist
10/18/99: Is Free Speech Only for the Media?
10/14/99: A Beguiling Amateur
10/11/99: Money in Politics: Where's the Problem?
10/08/99: Soft Thinking On Soft Money

© 2000, Washington Post Writer's Group