How does the conservative base feel about John McCain? The introduction that Senator Tom Coburn gave McCain on Thursday afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC tells you all you need to know.
As he prepared to hand over the podium to his colleague, who in the wake of Mitt Romney's withdrawal earlier today is the presumptive Republican nominee, Coburn announced that he would be "happy to debate anyone who thinks staying home or supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is a better option" than backing McCain. What's telling is that here, at the Woodstock of the American right, he might find quite a few takers.
In past years, the very mention of McCain's name has evoked boos from the CPAC crowd. At CPAC 08, one of the many booths peddling conservative kitsch on the exhibition floor is hawking a t-shirt declaring "I'd rather be waterboarded than vote for McCain". And a band of "Republicans Against McCain" gathered in the lobby of the Omni Shoreham Hotel brandish placards condemning McCain's support for "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.
Rather than paper over this latent hostility, McCain - playing to his "straight talker" image - has sought to address it head-on, and even attempted, by a bit of rhetorical jujitsu, to transform it into a selling point of sorts. After garnering scattered boos (despite a room packed with McCain supporters) for a reference to his stance on immigration, the Arizona senator proudly declared: "I will not obscure my positions from voters who I fear might not share them." Subtext: since I've proven my willingness to infuriate the conservative base when my own convictions differ from theirs, you can be confident that I'm not merely pandering on other issues.
McCain's other central argument was that given the chasm separating him from his Democratic opponents, it would be petty to dwell on a handful of policy disagreements. "Often elections in this country are fought within the margins of small differences," McCain said, "This one will not be.... This election is going to be about big things, not small things."
The "big things," he argued, would be his own bedrock commitment to the conservative value of liberty (which, he implied, you're in no position to question until you've been locked in a Vietcong prison), his support for limited government and fiscal responsibility at home, his plan for aggressive prosecution of the war in Iraq--and, of course, Democrats' putative opposition to these goals.
McCain is not entirely convincing when he sings the praises of limited government: He seems far more comfortable offering paeans to "service," which on his conception means that individuals subsume their narrow personal identities in the oceanic embrace of the nation.
Still, many skeptics appeared swayed by McCain's conciliatory approach. And if "skeptics" were all he had to worry about, McCain would be in good shape going forward. For the hard core whose attitude toward McCain is not ambivalence but open contempt, however, the speech changed little. And when dark-horse candidate Ron Paul mocked McCain's friendly relations with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate later that afternoon, there were no shortage of listeners who responded with emphatic jeers.
Now, McCain faces a dilemma. He can continue attempting to prove his conservative bona fides in hopes of winning over more of the base. Alternatively, he can begin a move to the center, as is traditional for candidates shifting their focus from primaries to the general election. The former seems bound to alienate the independent voters among whom McCain has found strong support; the latter will confirm all the worst suspicions of the base. His chances in November will depend upon how deftly he can thread that needle.
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