The Right’s “Purity” Strawman

I’m starting to see a very persistent meme developing around various bloggers and pundits on the right. It centers around the words “ideological” and “purity”. It goes something like this:

Conservatives like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Robert McCain, Dan Riehl, Dan Collins and Jeff Goldstein, and me who are openly bucking McCain are petulant “purists” who absolutely refuse to give a chance to a man who differs only on niggling little issues “on the margins”. We are being infantile and digging in our heels on little side issues that aren’t really important and we’re not willing to give Johnny Mac a fair shake because he’s not 100% Grade A Conservative.

The problem with it is that it’s a strawman, and a pretty lazily-constructed one at that. It’s not reality.

Let me give you a few examples of the meme in action (all emphasis is mine):

Here’s John Podhoretz:

McCain would, there is no question, be a lousy leader of an ideological movement. But the Republican party is not an ideological movement.

A.J. Strata:

The worst part of listening to conservatives tell us how pure and true they are is how they attempt to wrap themselves up in the clothes of Ronald Reagan. The irony and duplicity of these claims is incredible…

I would be more than happy to ally with conservatives who can respect others who may disagree on the margins. But those who berate others who disagree on the margins simply end up on the margins themselves.

John Hinderaker:

Of the principal Republican candidates this year, John McCain was one of two (Fred Thompson was the other) who could plausibly claim to be a life-long conservative. Is he “pure”? No, but who is? Certainly not Mitt Romney. Not me, either, for that matter…

It’s worth remembering, too, that since Calvin Coolidge, exactly one conservative ideologue has been elected President. In that context, the “nominate a purist or I’ll go home” attitude of too many conservatives is short-sighted at best.

Roger L. Simon:

Speaking bluntly, it may be that the search for ideological purity anywhere on the political spectrum is a fool’s game (unless you’re trying to sell books or drive ratings). Anyway, it’s clear from Tuesday’s returns the Republican electorate isn’t buying it. Across much of the country, the man advertising himself as the perfect conservative ran a poor third to a “maverick” Republican and a Southern populist. And that purist of purists, Ron Paul, simply disappeared from view.

Of course, this pure conservative (Romney) may not have been the best standard-bearer for conservatism. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that he was a notably bad one (a long history of flip-flops).

But that should only prove my point about purists. No one is good enough for them. When Rudy Giuliani came on the scene and was running high in the polls, for the most part they sat there with their arms folded, waiting for him to make ideological bows in their direction. And when he did, they still didn’t jump on his bandwagon. Even Fred Thompson, supposedly a pure conservative himself, wasn’t good enough.

Simon’s piece is so incredibly wrong on so many points that it may well deserve its own post, but I’ll keep it here for now.

There are two problems with this narrative. First, McCain’s differences with conservatives are neither rare nor minor. Let me list a few issues where Johnny Mac has loudly and publicly diverged from conservative beliefs in the past few years (many points thanks to Mark Levin).

• McCain/Feingold, which limits the rights of all of us to engage in political speech.
• McCain/Kennedy, which would have provided instant and indefinite amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and provided no credible emphasis on enforcement or border security.
• Reimportation of Prescription Drugs, which would seriously impede the ability of pharmaceutical companies to research and test new drugs as well as place state-controlled limits on what those new drugs cost using foreign socialized medical plans to do the heavy-lifting
• McCain/Kennedy/Edwards, which was a “patients’ bill of rights” proposal that would have left employers vulnerable for lawsuits based on the medical coverage they offered.
• McCain/Lieberman, which would have instituted a ludicrous “cap and trade” system on American industry and would have placed even more onerous regulations on American companies under the auspices of stopping global warming. (EDIT: Oh, did I mention higher gas prices thanks to a tax increase per gallon of somewhere around 50 cents?)
• Opposition to the President’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts on the ground that they were “tax cuts for the rich”.
• His demand to immediately close Guantanamo Bay and force suspected terrorists into the American court system, automatically (and for the first time in history) granting suspected hostile combatants the same rights that US citizens enjoy.
• His Anti-Torture Amendment which would have hung our interrogators out to dry and put off-limits a specific technique which we already know has saved lives and is only used in extremely rare circumstances (a total, actually, of three times). He worked rather closely with the ACLU on this one.
• His Gang of 14 which prevented Republicans from ending the use of the filibuster as a common, even preferred, means of stopping proper judicial nominations. In fact, the agreement forced several highly-qualified conservatives nominees to withdraw their nominations because they had been kept from a vote for years. I believe there are still nominees being held up by members of the Gang of 14.

Is this the description of someone who “may disagree on the margins” or the record of someone who “could plausibly claim to be a life-long conservative”? Hardly. This is the record of someone who, if you didn’t know he was a Republican, you would strongly suspect was not. Step back for a moment and imagine that record belonging to, say, John Edwards of Hillary Clinton. I’d imagine they’d be touting that on the campaign trail right now. And they’d be right to do so, because it’s a darned solid resume for any politician on the left.

Yet those who would chide me for being a “purist” think these are all simply aberrations. They hold out McCain’s ACU rating as proof that’s he’s a conservative. Okay, let’s look at that.

John McCain’s rating is 82.3 over his career in the Senate. That sounds pretty good until you start comparing to the entire Senate. His rating makes him the 39th most conservative person in the Senate right now. There are only 16 Republicans in the Senate less conservative than he. That doesn’t sound very good.

How about his voting record in 2006? His rating was 82 and he finished 47th out of 55. In 2005 his rating was 80, good for 46th out of 55.

So maybe that rating isn’t nearly as important as where he places among his own party’s Senators. Indeed, his record places him above other Democrats, but in the Senate, that’s not such a great accomplishment. There’s a certain scale to the rating that you can’t appreciate much until you look at who is clustered around the middle of the scale: George Voinovich, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter. I doubt you’ll find many folks who think of those Senators as the “center” in any way, shape, or form.

The picture gets even more clear when you compare Johnny Mac to members of his own delegation. Of the ten members of Congress, he is seventh in lifetime rating and in 2005 and 2006. Worse, his rating was barely ten points out of slipping him into eighth in his own state.

Again, does that sound like someone who is a “life-long conservative”? I agree that it places him “on the margins”, but not as intended. Indeed, his rating puts him on the leftmost margin of his own party.

It is simply silly to say that I, or anyone who has prominently opposed John McCain is seeking some level of “purity”, as if he differed on the tariff rate on imported widgets from Durkadurkastan. John McCain has made a recent career of pointedly and deliberately walking away from conservative values and I’m honestly baffled how someone could seriously contend otherwise. Indeed, you have to work awfully hard to find two examples of John McCain working with conservatives to advance any conservative principle in the past decade. On the other hand, he seems to be pretty darned eager to put his name in lights alongside some of the most liberal Democrats the Senate has seen in my lifetime. It’s hardly a plea for “purity” to ask that, when he picks his fights, he not pick the fights with us. There’s no argument that he’s worked very hard to turn his anger against conservatives. That’s not the behavior of someone with minor or petty disagreements and if folks like Strata and Hinderaker think it is, I don’t know what to tell them. They seem to be willing to forgive much even though Johnny Mac has shown no inclination at all to want such forgiveness.

None of us are asking for a Conservative White Knight. We’re not stupid nor are we neophytes. What we are asking is that our candidate at least make a game attempt to show some fidelity to the conservative principles that made America strong, proud, and prosperous. We don’t require a perfect ACU rating, but neither do we think it’s too much to ask for a candidate who is in the Top 20. Insisting that we want otherwise is a pretty flimsy strawman. I’m disappointed that they felt the need to build it.

(several links via Instapundit)

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