Earlier this week, Steve Sailer speculated on where neocons, who had backed Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid with considerable enthusiasm, go now that the former mayor’s campaign has finally been put out of its misery. (via publius)
So, are all the neocons who got jobs in the Giuliani campaign, like N. Podhoretz, Frum, Rubin, going to jump ship and join the McCain campaign? A lot of them supported McCain back in 2000. And will they be greeted with open arms by the McCain campaign, or will they be told they’re losers — as shown by the Giuliani steamroller — and should stay away. My guess is the former, mostly because neocons are harder to kill than Rasputin. No matter how often everything they touch turns to ashes, they, personally, pop right back up with nice new sinecures in influential institutions.
Quite right. The entirety of Giuliani’s national security campaign team was Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Thomas Joscelyn, and Michael Rubin, four of the leading neocons in the country, and four advisors who gravitated to Giuliani, thanks to his willingness to launch several new wars. As far as I can tell, none of the four have officially made the switch to their next favorite Republican — Giuliani just dropped out on Wednesday afternoon — but it’s hardly a stretch to consider where they’ll go.
Matt Welch noted the other day that John McCain is “a potential commander in chief who makes Bush look gun-shy.” That’s exactly why it’s only a matter of time before Podhoretz & Co. get on board with McCain — his trigger finger is just as itchy as Giuliani’s.
A lot of political observers seem to forget this, but McCain has always been a neocon favorite. In 2000, when most of the Republican establishment was quickly coalescing around George W. Bush, Bill Kristol led the neocons towards McCain — and it wasn’t because of his position on campaign-finance reform. McCain had been calling for a more “muscular” (i.e., invasion-happy) foreign policy in the Middle East for years, and the necons assumed if anyone were to help execute their vision, it was McCain, not Bush, who at the time, was talking about a more “humble” approach to foreign affairs.
Stephen Bainbridge wrote this week:
McCain has a lot more in common with TR and Bill Kristol than Ronald Reagan. And that’s damned scary. Why? If the Bush era has taught us nothing else, it is that we must be skeptical of interventionist foreign policies whether grounded in the national greatness “conservatism” of a Teddy Roosevelt or the neo-“conservatism” of a Bill Kristol. It produced a foreign policy quagmire that eviscerated any opportunity to advance the conservative agenda at home, as I’ve complained in more detail elsewhere. Importantly when it comes to McCain, his interventionism is fundamentally contrary to the traditions of mainstream conservatism. We can complain about various McCain positions, like McCain-Feingold, but in a sense those are tactical issues. Here is where, in my opinion, McCain fundamentally goes off the reservation.
This need not be complicated. Those who approve of the neocon worldview, discredited and disgraced though it may be, will just love a McCain presidency. When the senator talked about keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for another 100 years, it was exactly what the neocons wanted to hear.
Giuliani’s candidacy is obviously no more, but the torch has been passed to another neocon who’s just as offensive.