This is an excellent column by David Frum, regarding Republican strategies during this election and after.
First off, I think this sums up how a lot of people, myself included, feel about John McCain:
I’ll be voting for the man who was right about the surge, who holds clear-eyed views about terrorism and America's enemies, who has fought for leaner government over 20 years, who maneuvered the Roberts and Alito nominations through the Senate, who was right about Vladimir Putin, and who has throughout his career shown a personal candor and humility unusual in national politics.
Like a lot of Republicans, I’ll be swallowing a great deal in order to cast my vote. I’ll be swallowing objections to McCain’s views on issues from immigration to campaign finance reform. I’ll be swallowing doubts about personality and temperament. And above all, I’ll be swallowing some fairly intense suspicions that a McCain administration would veer quite sharply to the left – as McCain reverts to a career-long practice of pandering to conservatives during elections and then apologizing to liberals afterward.
I’ll do all this because I’ll be voting as much against Barack Obama – the most liberal Democratic presidential nominee since Walter Mondale – as for John McCain.
When I picked John McCain as my choice for president back in January, it wasn't because I agree with John McCain's views on all the issues. It was because I agree with him on the issues that mattered most to me at the time (the war and judges) and I thought he was the most electable of the Republican choices. There was an astonishing amount of terrible, terrible nastiness directed at McCain from talk radio and conservatives, but most people voting for the GOP were not sold on Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. Perhaps a lot of people were like me, pragmatic as opposed to idealogical.
Frum goes on to point out that Bill Clinton's 1992 mantra, it's the economy, stupid! is more true now than at any point in my lifetime.
American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.
We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.
I don't think it's that Republicans don't care about pocketbook issues; it's that we have the same answers that worked before. The problem is that Republican behavior when it ran the legislature and presidency was abominable to conservative values. A Congress that spent our money in such a wasteful manner, coupled with a president who couldn't find his veto pen, was a disaster. What it told a generation--my generation--was that all those words from Ronald Reagan about the wisdom of fiscal restraint and individual liberty and responsibility were just slogans from pols looking to get your votes. But once elected, these guys would behave exactly as the other guys did.
Perhaps it will take four or eight years of liberal craziness for us to come to our senses. I can tell you that in a time of economic uncertainty, Americans aren't rational enough to accept that you can't promise Christmas to 95% of the populace and think it will be paid for by 5% of the earners. That those earners won't accept the idea that they should have to pay for everything with even more of their hardwork and skill. If Americans think the economy is faltering, it has to be the rich guy's fault (and there's plenty of blame there, btw) because it can't be that way too many people thought they could get the American dream on a credit card.
Apart from all that--that Republicans should be accepting the fact that Americans are more concerned that someone tell them something they want to hear regarding the economy rather than pointing out the questionable judgment of the other candidate--Frum ends with a warning that I think it behooves us to remember:
Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for the next president, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.
I told Aphrael on another thread that I am concerned about where race relations will end up after this election. This comes from someone who was among the first white people to attend an integrated school, so it isn't like I didn't grow up with this stuff. Quite frankly, growing up at the time I did, I honestly thought we were largely past the racial divide. So many people from my generation, and the generations that have followed us, do not look at race as something that disqualifies a person from anything, whether it be employment, housing, marriage material, education, or whatever.
But when my son asked me why "brown people" couldn't be elected president, I knew that there was a real problem with race in this country that had nothing to do with opportunities, but rather, had more to do with the perception of opportunities. I don't want the Republican Party to end up with such a stench of racism that no one will consider conservative principles and values because of our opposition to Barack Obama. And make no mistake about it: the Left will try very hard to make sure my children--and your children--think any opposition to Obama was about the color of his skin rather than his policies.
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