I had a few thoughts about John McCain while walking on campus today. A lot of people seem to think that John McCain is just the kind of change conservatism needs, that conservatism needs to be brought into the 21st century by moving left on global warming, immigration, and other issues. The evidence that people want John McCain to take the Republican Party in a new direction: exit polling data show that Romney won voters who were "enthusiastic" or "satisfied" with President Bush by 3% and 4%, respectively, whereas John McCain won voters who were "dissatisfied" or "angry" with Bush by 20% and 33%!
The irony here is that there may be no presidential candidate closer to Bush's policy views than John McCain.
It strikes me that although McCain voters ostensibly want a change from the status quo, they aren't getting anything new, really. John McCain is simply a return to the days of the country-club Republicans. He's in the mold of Nixon, Ford, and Dole, not Ronald Reagan. Throughout the Seventies, when the Republicans were solidly entrenched in the New York/D.C. axis (just heard that useful term on Rush Limbaugh...thanks, Rush), Ronald Reagan threatened to overturn the party elite. Finally in 1980, circumstances allowed Orange County and our beloved late president to succeed and launch a veritable revolution. John McCain, although a self-proclaimed Reagan conservative, threatens to return us to that stagnant era when the Republican Party was a big-government alternative to big-government liberalism.
That isn't an alternative I'm going to buy.
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