The weird silence of John McCain

[wombat_socho]

You would think that a man so quick to squash negative ads and sorta-kinda-could-maybe-be considered derogatory remarks about his opponent would have opened his trap sometime in the last two days to tell his bitter, opportunistic staffers to lay off the VP candidate he himself chose. Sadly, no...the silence from our presidential nominee has been deafening.

Which is why a lot of us conservatives are identifying with this Michael Ramirez cartoon these days. Especially since, you know, it seems that McCain and some of his staffers are copping this attitude.

Comments

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

The polls support this line of thought -- they show his campaign going steadily downhill since Palin started talking to the press in earnest.

Correlation is not causation, as you should know.

People have been saying that the alliance of social conservatives and fiscal conservatives is dead every two years since 2000, but I notice that the only time the GOP really fails at the Presidential thing is when we nominate the "moderates" the commentariat is always braying for. Bush the Elder lost when he went along with the Dems and raised taxes. Dole lost because nobody believed he was anything but just another Washington insider. McCain, too, was a moderate and lost seven million votes off the base.

[nornagest.livejournal.com]

W was running as a moderate in 2000, too; it just isn't as obvious, because he was more willing to moderate his fiscal conservatism than his social conservatism. And you can just look at the national debt figures to see where that got us. Actually, you could say the same for just about anyone described as a neoconservative, at least post-Reagan.

Anyway, you'll note that I never said the alliance between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives is weakening, because I don't think it is. I do think the social-conservative wing of the Republican party is getting smaller, though, mostly because it's based on a set of demographics that tends to skew elderly and (a few religious sub-demographics aside) reproduces at below replacement rates.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Yes, he was, but he didn't wait until the last minute to bring Cheney on board as his VP candidate, and Cheney was a known quantity to the fiscal conservatives. "Compassionate conservatism" was an attempt to soften what some people thought were the harsher, Social Darwinist edges off the Republican image, and at least initially was understood to be slightly more expensive than the existing welfare state. However, what really killed us was Tom DeLay and the K Street crowd thinking we could pork our way to dominance in the same way the Democrats had. Stupid bastards.

The social conservative wing of the GOP tends to consist mainly of evangelical Protestants, Mormons, and conservative Catholics, plus Orthodox Jews and some other denominations. All of these groups have rates of childbirth well in excess of replacement rates.

[nornagest.livejournal.com]

I agree that those religious groups represent the core of the GOP's social-conservative wing, but I don't think they have the numbers to dominate it -- there are only about six million Mormons and less than a million Orthodox Jews in the US, not all of which are guaranteed to belong to the GOP (although most do). It's harder to count conservative Catholics or evangelical Protestants, since those groups don't map directly to religious affiliation, but some parts of those demographics seem to have high rates of attrition between generations.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

The most visible actors in the so-con wing of the GOP tend to be the Catholics and evangelical Protestants, because of the sheer numbers. As you point out, there aren't that many Mormons and Orthodox Jews in the total population, and not all of them are Republicans. (Harry Reid, for example, is a Mormon.) The bottom line is that these people represent a healthy chunk of the base vote, and one which McCain has never done much to endear himself to.