McCain has his FAULTS, but ...

Wynton Hall:

Republicans have a decision to make: Do they want a Barry Goldwater–style bloodletting that sacrifices political victory on the altar of ideological purity? Or do they want to beat the eventual Democratic nominee come November, even if the candidate best able to do that is the dubiously conservative senior senator from Arizona, John McCain? Barry Goldwater, the patriarch of the modern American Right — who was so ideologically untainted that he came to be called “Mr. Conservative” — drove the Republican Party off the electoral cliff in 1964, winning only six states and 38 percent of the vote. John McCain, the perennial sandspur in the conservative sandal, may be precisely what it will take for a post-Dubya Republican to win the White House.

To be sure, McCain has made an art of putting conservative and Republican noses out of joint. For many, the punch list is hard to read. 2002’s McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill banned so-called “soft money,” limiting the freedom of political speech. McCain opposed President Bush’s tax cuts in both 2001 and 2003, on the grounds that they did not include cuts in spending. What’s more, he was a member of the infamous “Gang of 14”; he led the fight for an immigration-reform bill that included the much-maligned “path to citizenship” (a.k.a. “amnesty”); he has supported gunlocks and gun-show background checks; he now favors Congressional action to reduce global warming; and he once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance” (a statement, it must be added, that pales in comparison to Barry Goldwater’s suggestion that “every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Fallwell’s ass”: there must be something in the Arizona water).

And yet . . . .

...

The second paragraph covers most of the reasons why I do not expect to vote for him and would be troubled by his election. He is just dead wrong on all those issues and has hurt Republicans by supporting most of them. Hall goes on to make the electibility argument, and he has a point, up to a point. That was the same rationale for the Kerry candidacy in 2004 and it did not work out for the Dems, but Dean would have been a disaster of McGovern proportions which would have made the 2006 comeback they made more difficult for them.

If McCain winds up being the guy, we have to get it through to him that he does not have a mandate for the items in paragraph two above. We can do that by making his nomination as close as possible and letting him know that his primary mandate is to win the war and cut spending. Those are the two issues he is good on.