Takeover (25 page)

M
any conservatives began the 2008 primary season with a strong sense that the “Bush fatigue” that the establishment media had turned into a constant theme on the nightly news wasn’t necessarily bad for our cause—if the right conservative candidate stepped forward to run for president.

The early front-runner in the race was New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani was the favorite of Republican moderates and neocons for his liberal positions on the social issues and unabashed support for President Bush’s “war on terror,” despite the threats to civil liberties that conservatives saw in it and regularly protested.

Giuliani pursued a rather bizarre strategy of passing on many of the states early on the Republican primary calendar to put most of his energy and money into Florida. While Florida has many retired New Yorkers that might have provided Giuliani with a natural base of support, it is not Iowa, where you can campaign across the whole state as if you are running for county commissioner.

Florida spans two time zones and a dozen media markets, some bilingual, and Giuliani was off the front page and out of the national
TV news cycle while he drained his bank account campaigning almost alone in Florida.

Many social conservatives tended to pin their hopes on Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, had a good record of winning in an Old South state that had begun to trend Republican, but he was certainly not an economic conservative or small-government conservative. I think of Mike Huckabee as a Christian socialist; a nice man, caring and compassionate, but not someone who is going to reduce the size of government.

Huckabee’s policy of granting ill-conceived pardons to violent criminals, who returned to society to commit further crimes (including murder and rape), also left him open to Willie Horton–style attacks from other candidates and negative commentary from Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin.

Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses, did not do well in New Hampshire, and pinned the hopes of keeping his campaign alive by winning South Carolina to set up a strong showing in other Southern “Super Tuesday” states.

Social conservatives seemed divided on the Huckabee candidacy. Huckabee went on to win the Super Tuesday states of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia, and later a lightly contested Kansas race. Although Governor Huckabee said in late February, “I may get beat, but I’m not going to quit,” and vowed to stay in the race until the convention, when Huckabee came in second to Senator John McCain in South Carolina, the likelihood of a Huckabee victory became remote at best.

Congressman Ron Paul ran on his platform of libertarian-oriented policies and made significant inroads for his cause, particularly among younger voters. But the Paul movement was not yet mature enough to field the organization necessary to threaten the front-runners. Even though he came in second to Mitt Romney in Nevada, Dr. Paul came in fifth in South Carolina, and won only one county in Iowa, and one in New Hampshire.

Senator Fred Thompson was also briefly a contender in the race, mostly on the basis of the fact that he wasn’t one of the other candidates. Thompson’s “good old boy” Southern demeanor and fairly conservative voting record made him attractive to those who were turned off by John McCain and his long-running antagonism toward the conservative movement and its leaders and by Mitt Romney’s record.

But Thompson never made a compelling case for his own candidacy. A Thompson speech, rather than being an eloquent statement of conservative principles, was more often the rhetorical equivalent of watching a possum wander along on his rounds of the neighborhood garbage cans, knocking them over and making a lot of noise, but not turning up much to sink his teeth into.

Thompson never won a primary and was out the day after he came in third to McCain and Huckabee in South Carolina.

That left Senator John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as the two leading contenders for the 2008 Republican nomination.

Believe it or not, Romney ran as the conservative alternative to John McCain and garnered a lot of conservative support along the way. Conservative commentators like Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh—even if they didn’t give him their official endorsements—talked him up. Pro–traditional values Senator Rick Santorum gave Romney an official endorsement that, we might add, came back to haunt Santorum during his 2012 campaign against Romney.

Rush justified his supportive commentaries about Romney by saying that McCain represented the GOP’s national security wing, Huckabee represented its social conservative wing, and Ron Paul represented the economic conservative wing, but that Romney (version 2008) was the one candidate who represented all three.

Many other conservative leaders and commentators, including me, weren’t buying it.

In the fall of 2007, I attended a meeting with Gov. Mitt
Romney and twenty or so conservative leaders in Salt Lake City, Utah. Romney went around the room and invited each attendee to talk about their issues, and what they thought were going to be the important concerns of conservatives in the 2008 campaign.

Each attendee spoke passionately about their particular organization’s area of expertise or concern. When it became my turn, I said that with all due respect to my friends, they are wrong. “The most important issue, Governor, is personnel—who is going to populate your White House and administration?”

Who you walk with tells me a lot about who you are. When Ronald Reagan was running for president, every time I saw him, and I saw him quite a bit, he was surrounded by people I knew from conservative politics: Senator Paul Laxalt, Jeff Bell, Lyn Nofziger, Marty Anderson, Dick Allen, Judge Clark, Ed Meese, etc. If you haven’t walked with conservatives for the past ten or fifteen years, how can we expect you to have a conservative administration if there are no conservatives around you now?

Romney’s reply, somewhat like the government bureaucrats in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, was that we should not worry; he would hire “the best people” for jobs in his administration. In other words, he planned to staff his administration with his friends from Big Business and Wall Street, not the conservative movement, which meant our conservative issues would never see the light of day.

We looked at Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts and his personal choices—such as to give money to Planned Parenthood—and didn’t see a principled conservative. What we saw was a typical Big-Business, nominal Republican.

And then there was Senator John McCain.

McCain had gone from being the frontrunner to having his political obituary written and back to being the front-runner in the space of less than a year.

During the 2008 campaign Senator John McCain’s lifetime rating of 82.3 percent from the American Conservative Union was often cited as proof of his conservative credentials. As Randall
Hoven pointed out in an article for the
American Thinker
, an ACU rating of 82.3 percent is not really particularly high.

A rating of 82.3 percent put Senator McCain in thirty-ninth place among senators serving back then. For the years leading up to the 2008 primary season, McCain’s record was spotty at best: in 2006 he scored only 65 percent, in 2007 he scored 80 percent, and in 2008 he scored only 63 percent. Other Senate “mavericks,” such as Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who went on to serve as President Obama’s secretary of defense, scored 75 percent in 2006, 79 percent in 2007, and 73 percent in 2008.

The Arizona senator was also one of the darlings of the influential neo conservative writers and intellectuals who constantly urged a strong national defense and an aggressive US national security posture and could legitimately lay claim to being a “foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” as he put it.

This, coupled with McCain’s record as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, gave McCain a certain amount of credibility with patriotic grassroots conservatives who were critical of or disillusioned with George W. Bush’s conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They somewhat uncritically assumed McCain saw things their way when he criticized Bush, even if their real ally in the debate over the future of American national security policy was more likely to be libertarian-minded congressman Ron Paul.

McCain was also the darling of the establishment media, who ate up his regular criticism of President George W. Bush, his rival in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries. McCain’s base, to the extent that he had one, remained the national press corps and its hunger for any story of Republicans criticizing other Republicans.

It wasn’t always McCain’s positions that caused friction with movement conservatives; he maintained a 100 percent rating with National Right to Life. Further, McCain, like New York governor Nelson Rockefeller before him, seemed to relish picking fights with the leaders of the conservative movement. This alone might have doomed his candidacy, but McCain had one other thing going for him—it was “his turn.”

The Republican vote has a strange royalist streak in it, and even though grassroots Republicans had rejected McCain eight years earlier, they began to slowly acquiesce to his candidacy as the 2008 primary cycle built to its climax in February and March 2008.

McCain also made another move that had short-term benefits in helping him sell himself to the GOP establishment, but, in the longer term, doomed his candidacy—he began to hire George W. Bush’s staff and consultants to run his campaign.

Nevertheless, conservatives remained fiercely opposed to McCain. After Super Tuesday, “exit polls showed that only in Connecticut did Mr. McCain actually win a plurality of self-identified conservative voters, barely topping Mr. Romney in the Northeastern state. In every other state, he trailed one or both of the other candidates.

“Even in his own home state of Arizona, Mr. McCain trailed badly among conservative voters, with just 36 percent to Mr. Romney’s 47 percent. And in California, Mr. Romney won nearly half of conservative voters, with 48 percent, according to the MSNBC exit polls,” reported the
Washington Times’
Stephen Dinan.
¹

McCain seemed to recognize that he needed to find some kind of peace with conservatives to have any chance of winning in November, but his only effort in that direction during the primaries came at CPAC, where he held out the olive branch to conservatives, saying:

I know I have a responsibility if I am, as I hope to be, the Republican nominee for President, to unite the Party and prepare for the great contest in November … I am acutely aware that I cannot succeed in that endeavor, nor can our party prevail over the challenge we will face from either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama, without the support of dedicated conservatives whose convictions, creativity and energy have been indispensable to the success of our party that it has had over the last quarter century.
²

That was all well and good, but McCain seemed to be trying to get our support on the cheap. After the bruising primaries, where
he savaged Mike Huckabee, we felt the next step was up to McCain. We conservatives wanted to see if he would reach out—and we were waiting to see who he picked as his running mate.

Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, went so far as to publicly state that he would not vote for McCain. Jim Dobson later softened his rhetoric somewhat, but he remained critical of the Arizona senator throughout the campaign.

“I have seen no evidence that Sen. McCain is successfully unifying the Republican Party or drawing conservatives into his fold,” Dobson said in a written statement released in May 2008. “To the contrary, he seems intent on driving them away.”

Despite conservatives making clear where they were coming from, McCain failed to reach out and sell himself one-on-one to conservative leaders or actually make a commitment to run as a conservative and pursue a conservative agenda if elected. Instead, he promised conservatives a “kinder, gentler” version of John McCain if they would abandon their principles and support him.

As I’ve said before, personnel is policy. You couldn’t find a leader of the conservative movement anywhere near the top leadership of the McCain campaign.

Who you walk with says a lot about who you are, and if Senator McCain wouldn’t surround himself with conservatives during this campaign, when he desperately needed them, why should we think that he would have conservatives making critical decisions in his White House?

By the time Freedom Fest rolled around in July 2008 (this is an annual gathering of libertarians and free-market lovers), I surveyed the state of the campaign in a speech and concluded that conservatives were so depressed over the state of the McCain campaign—particularly its failure to include conservatives and enthuse the grassroots conservative Republican base—that the attendees should began preparing themselves for a monumental GOP defeat in November.

John McCain had the Republican nomination sewn up for five
months and had done little to convince conservatives they should come off the sidelines and fight for him.

Things were so bad that some conservatives were considering voting for Barack Obama, because they feared McCain as president would destroy what was left of the Republican brand and would finish off the conservative movement. Their mood was that of the fatally ill patient who says, “Let’s get this over with.”

All that changed—at least temporarily—when McCain announced Alaska’s boat-rocking conservative governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate.

Conservatives had refused to fall in line behind the Republican Party’s grudging choice of McCain as the nominee—those of us who maintained our independence, at the price of being ridiculed as “cranky” or “impossible to please,” had made it clear that, without a strong, principled conservative on the ticket, we would vote for it—but do little else.

We were subjected to some pretty harsh criticism, but as I saw it, we were the ones responsible for John McCain’s brilliant, game-changing selection of Sarah Palin.