It's no secret that John McCain is disliked in conservative circles. Whether it is because of his pro-amnesty stance on illegal immigration, his reputed hotheaded temper when dealing with interns and staffers or the media's unexplainable fetish for covering the travels of the McCain Straight Talk Express bus, McCain has a definite problem proving to conservatives that he is one of them. The thing is, though, if you have to remind and prove to people that you're a conservative (or a liberal, for that matter), you're probably not one.
However, for one Cincinnati radio commentator, the final nail in the Straight Talk Express's tire came last week. Enter Bill Cunningham, host of WLW 700's The Big Show with Bill Cunningham, on the AM dial. Cunningham, along with former Cincinnati-area Congressman Robert Portman, opened for McCain's campaign stop in the Queen City last Tuesday. Cunningham, in a horrible act of insensitivity, said Obama's full name! Oh, my stars and garters. He called Obama Barack Hussein Obama instead of Barack Obama or, as it seems Democrats have taken to calling him, Messiah. As if that was not enough reason for Cunningham to commit hari-kari right then and there, he then went on to say that the media needs to stop coddling Obama and start to peel the bark off of him.
As soon as McCain left the stage, he spoke with his favorite supporters, the national media. In a move that did Casca and Cassius ' the prototypical back-stabbers from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar ' proud, McCain denounced Cunningham, and assured the media that he had nothing but warm, fuzzy feelings for Senator Obama. Is this what someone who is trying to convince conservatives that he is one of them would do? Does John McCain even care about the fact that he needs the conservative Republican vote in order to win the election? Let me shake my Magic Eight Ball of Politics here G? Well, the answer it gave is all signs point to no. For both questions.
Really, it seems like the only issue on which McCain is conservative is the war in Iraq. He likes to call himself one of the foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution
but what would the Gipper think of the McCain-Feingold law's restriction of political speech? Would Reagan applaud McCain's global warming fear-mongering bill, the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act? How about McCain's calculated opposition to President Bush that changed as soon as it became politically advantageous? It's things like this that make me wonder if McCain is an escapee from a mirror universe, one where conservatives are buddy-buddy with flaming liberals such as Obama and Clinton, the most widely recognized leader of the conservative movement would have liked cap-and-trade carbon credits and draconian arbitrary restrictions on political speech, and straight talk means saying whatever the audience wants to hear. If McCain ever decides to grow a beard, I'll be convinced that McCain is an evil mirror double. For now, however, it'll have to remain a pet theory of mine.
John McCain's strategy appears to go along the lines of I'm going to win the Republican vote without getting the conservative vote. By constantly shifting his views with the tricky, fickle Independent winds, McCain is pinning his hopes on gaining more votes from the unwashed unaffiliated masses than he's lost from the conservative base. In essence, he's hoping to rob Peter to pay Paul. This is a bad strategy, one that may have worked in past years, but one that definitely won't fly in a race against the Democratic rock star, Barack No Middle Name Here Obama.
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Jesse Hathaway
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