MR. RUSSERT: Your hero, Theodore Roosevelt. Let me show you a picture of him. This is from Fargo, North Dakota, in September 1912. Mr. Roosevelt was then running as the bull moose candidate for president. He tried to win the Republican nomination; lost to Senator Taft. If John McCain ran for the presidency in the Republican primaries, carried the Independents, carried the crossovers, but didn't receive the Republican nomination, would you ever consider running as an Independent?Seems a bit inconsistent, doesn't it? He's devoted to the party because Roosevelt is his role model. Not very convincing. (Thanks to John for pointing this out.)
SEN. McCAIN: No, I don't think that that would be possible, number one. And number two is I keep emphasizing I'm of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. I see no other reason. By the way, a new book is out on Roosevelt's post-presidency year. It's very excellent. And one of the things he was seriously thinking about was running again in 1920. So...
MR. RUSSERT: You would never run as an Independent?
SEN. McCAIN: I cannot imagine a scenario where I would because, again, I would be leaving the party that I've been a part of and loyal to and worked for for all my political life.
UPDATE: John cites the New Republic article "This Man Is Not a Republican."
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Funny you should put it that way, Gerry. We had that argument here. I was assuming that McCain really is conservative and that it's just deluded for liberals to like him so much and I was argued down on the subject. My son took the postion that McCain really is a liberal Republican and that he's shown it again and again. Who's right?
I have several reactions to your ruminations on John McCain.
First: TR remains a Republican hero and, I would say, a conservative Republican hero, who stands in the tradition of Lincoln and of the GOP ancestors, Washington, Hamilton, and Clay. Each advocated the establishment of a national economy, national identity, and strong national defense.
TR advocated reforms that buttressed those principles in a world that was rapidly changing. His 1912 run on the Bull Moose Party ticket came precisely because his White House successor, William Howard Taft, departed from vital conservative Republicanism and instead embraced dead traditionalism.
Second: After the 1912 election, TR and the GOP leadership mended their fences. Just before his death, it had become apparent that Roosevelt was the prohibitive frontrunner to receive the Republican nomination in 1920. That's how complete the reconciliation between him and the party regulars who, in 1912, had backed Taft out of deference to the party.
Third: As between Bush and McCain, there is a strong argument to be made that the senator from Arizona is the actual conservative and not the President. Bush has embraced judicial activism that mocks strict constructionism; a Wilsonian foreign policy that upholds a penchant for military intervention and eschews traditional Republican realism; an acceptance of porkbarrel spending worthy of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Byrd; and deficit spending of breathtaking proportions. Viewed in this way, McCain is seen as the conservative and Bush as a big government royalist, as both Sullivan and Phillips have argued.
Fourth: Buttressing McCain's conservative credentials is that he clearly stands in the tradition of another Arizonan, Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater believed that government ought to live within its means, ought to care about the environment, and ought to respect people's privacy. All conservatives seemed to believe in these principles until they started routinely getting majorities in the Congress and regularly winning the White House by forging coalitions with the Religious Right.
Fifth: I believe that if the Republicans nominated McCain in 2008, there would be a collective sigh of relief from the GOP's grown-ups--people like Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Colin Powell, Bob Dole, Mike DeWine, George Voinovich, and even Bush the Elder--and that he would expand the current Republican majority to Reagan proportions in the general election. But I don't think that he can emerge as the nominee from the sort of savaging to which he was subjected in 2000.
Sixth: I further believe that he will not make a third party run and I believe that for two reasons. (1) He's too much of a realist. The guy who played a central role in brokering the judicial filibuster deal proved that he knows how to count. If Theodore Roosevelt was unable to win the presidency as a third party candidate, John McCain knows that he can't do it either. (2) He is a loyal Republican. To find evidence of this, all you have to do is look at all the work he put into campaigning for Bush, a man toward whom he might well feel bitter, in 2004.
The only lessons I ever draw from Teddy's 1912 run are: 1. He never should have given up the office to Taft (especially considering Taft's lack of antitrust credentials dating back to the 1890 Pullman strikes). 2. His running was not so much a triumph for third parties but the handing of the White House on a platter to Wilson.
The first doesn't really apply to McCain, but the second certainly does. A split Republican vote would be very hard for even the Democrats to mess up, and McCain's chances would be even weaker if the Republicans nominated, say, Guiliani, who would also draw outside the base.
Not to mention the possible effects a split ticket would have on the House and Senate balance, and gubernatorial races.
Gerry:
I have to say that I disagree. Roosevelt was certainly not McKinley in his foreign policy. TR was an internationalist, whereas McKinley was an advocate of the primitive projection of American power summarized in his phrase, "manifest destiny." While Roosevelt certainly toyed with such rhetoric and his taking of Panama is an example of it, the balance of his foreign policies actually were marked by subtlety: action where possible, restraint where necessary, and, again except for Panama, respect for international cooperation. This is why he won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between Russian and Japan. This is why foreign policy realists, like Henry Kissinger, regard Roosevelt so highly.
Wilson, on the other hand, undertook repeated military interventions during his administration. This has been a hallmark of Democratic presidencies, going quickly to the use of the military, perhaps an extension of the big-government mindset. It was true of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton to the max. Interestingly, FDR and Carter departed from this partisan norm. FDR only acted militarily, of course, when it was forced upon him by the invasion of Pearl Harbor, although he certainly felt by that time, that some US role in WWII was inevitable.
jdasilva:
TR certainly regretted giving up the presidency with the 1908 election. He was so wildly popular, there is no doubt that he would have won re-election and may have become the first Roosevelt to be elected four times. Who knows?
But on election night of 1904, Roosevelt, in the magnanimity often created by victory, made a very public pledge not to run in 1908. He felt duty-bound to keep that promise.
Furthermore, Taft, although clearly an unimaginative plodder, had been a loyal friend of TR's. Roosevelt had little reason to believe--and certainly little desire to believe-- that Taft would settle into the sedentary traditionalism that marked his administration.
I think that people have made some great points here in this discussion.
If I remember correctly, for much of the 2000 presidential campaign, McCain was the media darling of the republican nominees.
But as soon as it was clear that he was really pulling ahead, it seemed like there was an abrupt shift in focus to allegations that he had "anger issues" and was possibly even mentally unbalanced, presumably from his time as a POW. I remember leaning toward McCain at the time, and feeling like the media had turned against him as soon as he really started to gain momentum.
I could have been wrong, of course. But I do think this would happen again if he were to run. As long as he's a republican and speaks out against what are considered traditionally conservative policies, he is useful. But ultimately, he's perceived as a conservative, and will lose support if ever he seems like he might be a successful contender.
The problem is that if McCain ran for the Republican nomination (a near certainty, IMHO), and got it (a 30-40% chance, depending on various factors that are WAY too unpredictable at this point), there'd almost certainly be a Roy Moore type challenge from the right. While in a straight-up match, McCain could almost certainly beat any Democrat, putting that third-party into play likely puts much of the deep South into a three-way race where the winner of each state may wind up with not much more than 35% of the vote, making it possible to turn a chunk of the South blue. Assuming the Democratic nominee holds the industrial NE and CA, that'd be enough to win.
Gerry:
I agree with you that McCain is more conservative than the left understands and perhaps that is the most important conclusion I wanted to derive, irrespective of our varied views of Wilson and T. Roosevelt.
Mark
Mark, thanks for the note on Teddy's public pledge regarding 1908. I was not aware of that and it certainly explains some things.
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