Florida Mccain Over Romney - Road to the Middle Class

IT SEEMS incredible that the “maverick” Senator John McCain is the Republican frontrunner. How could this moderate senator from Arizona be leading the the fight for the nomination in the conservative Republican Party?

The answer, I think, came in South Carolina when non-activist conservatives seemed to be going for McCain out of buyer’s remorse. Voters were wondering if they were really right to choose George W. Bush back in 2000. The sensible thing to do seemed to be to vote for McCain.

Anyway, write Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, McCain can win and Romney can’t.

McCain has a much better chance of winning the election than does former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

And they are probably right. Conservatives may think of President Bush as a not very conservative president, but the American people think of him as conservative, right-wing, and Republican. After all the ups and downs of the past seven years, they think it is time for a change, and they are right.

So it is time to think strategically. If, as seems likely, the Republican candidate loses in November, would it be better to lose with a full-spectrum candidate like Romney or a maverick, media favorite like McCain?

In my view, the voters need a dose of Democrat. Republicans aren’t going to get a chance to do real conservative reform until the current promise of “Change” has passed its sell-by date.

Democrats don’t stand for Change. They stand for more government, more bureaucracy, more subsidies, more waste. In another four years voters will have been robustly reminded of this.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: Ed Wallis on 01/31/08 2:06am

"Democrats don't stand for change." SURE THEY DO; STATISM INVADING THE PERSONAL SPHERE MORE+MORE IS A CHANGE. "In another four years voters will have been robustly reminded of this." BUT THEY MAY BE AS UNABLE TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT BY THEN, AS PEOPLE ARE STILL UNABLE TO SUBSTANTIALLY DISMANTLE LBJ's "GREAT SOCIETY." ...not to mention after a Dem selects the next 2-to-4 Supreme Court justices. I find the author makes a fatal flaw in vanity thinking. It's much more than "let the public get mad at THEM for awhile, then they'll come back to us."

Posted by: Jack Coupal on 01/30/08 3:27pm

It seems premature to say that John McCain is the Republican frontrunner. The weird politics of the states holding the earliest caucuses and primaries don't include one Red state. Neither North Carolina nor South Carolina is a Red state.

Posted by: Kenny on 01/30/08 8:30am

You say America needs a dose of Democrat. Maybe. That�s how it worked when the country suffered with Jimmy Carter from 1976-1980. It was so bad we eventually got Ronald Reagan. But this is risky business. It�s akin to being overrun in Nam and calling in artillery fire on your position. It might work, but it might obliterate you. _____ PS: You gotta do something about how your �response block� treats typing into it. It is awful.

Posted by: JaF on 01/30/08 7:59am

You are so right. As a country, we will have to hit rock bottom before we can begin the climb back to "The American Way".

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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