Boosted by his big night, John McCain asked his loudest conservative critics Wednesday to “calm down” and support his Republican presidential candidacy….<\/p>\n
McCain was referring primarily to radio talk show hosts and other pundits of the right when he appealed for unity now that he has a leg up in the nomination race.<\/p>\n
“I think they’ve made their case against me pretty eloquently,” he said, adding wryly, “if that’s the right word.” He asserted that the pundits’ conservative hero Ronald Reagan — and his — reached across the aisle to Democrats just like he wants to do as president.<\/p>\n
“I do hope that at some point we would just calm down a little bit and see if there are areas that we can agree on for the good of the party and for the good of the country,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For what it’s worth, I doubt the anti-McCain contingent wants to be told to “calm down.” Indeed, as far as I can tell, when hysterical people are having a fit, the last<\/i> thing they want to hear is the person they’re mad at telling them to “calm down.”<\/p>\n
I’m curious, though, what McCain’s next move might be.
\n
\nA few months ago, it looked as if the Democrats would pick a nominee fairly quickly, while a divided Republican party would fight on through the spring. Now, the landscape appears to have been reversed. It’s unexpected, but this offers McCain an opportunity: now he has time to convince angry right-wing leaders that he’d be a reliable ally in the White House, while Dems fight it out amongst themselves.<\/p>\n
But this is risky, too, isn’t it? For decades, GOP candidates have followed an overly-simplified adage: run to the right during the primaries, run to the middle during the general election.<\/p>\n
And yet, McCain seems to be in a position in which he’s poised to do the opposite. He’s let Romney and McCain fight it out on the right, but now that he has what appears to be an insurmountable lead, he has to double-back — assuring Limbaugh and Malkin that he’ll be a conservative Republican if elected.<\/p>\n
This, of course, would be a welcome development for Dems, who want to convince Americans that McCain’s reputation as a moderate is completely unfounded. The more he moves to the right to heal the party’s rifts, the easier it will be for the Democratic nominee to pick up independents who want a break from eight years of Republican failures.<\/p>\n
There’s one possibility that would be the most fun of all: McCain could forget about pleasing the base and just Sister Souljah the whole lot of them. The senator may do the math and figure that the unhinged far-right that takes Coulter, Dobson, and Limbaugh seriously isn’t worth the effort, and their attacks make him appear more moderate anyway. In this scenario, he blasts them all as “agents of intolerance,” figuring there are more votes in the middle than the right-wing. (This would increase the chances of the far-right running some kind of third-party candidate, which would be even more hilarious.)<\/p>\n
It should be interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
John McCain is not oblivious to his predicament: he’s the first presumptive Republican nominee in the modern era to ascend despite opposition from the party’s far-right base. Indeed, after a month of contests, McCain has done quite well without the support of conservatives and traditional GOP voters, much to the party’s consternation. Going forward, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}