The OttO Show

That person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally; NOT a 20 percent traitor. - Ronald Reagan, 1972

There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs in every election season. It’s promoted by the confused, the depressed, the cynical and most evidently, by the youth. The disillusioned young represent new voters who approach politics to escape the cynicism and feeling of no control in their own burgeoning adult lives. Then they become disillusioned with politics because it doesn’t offer them the comfort and absolutism that they were seeking. Some morph into radicals and fringies and irrational ideologues, slaves to their own ideals or torch-runners for their various loony college professors.

On the conservative side, they tend to reject mainstream politics and hang out in the cold shadows of the third parties. On the left, they are very much a component of the mainstream, which is why they listen to the political gospels of the likes of Sean Penn and Pearl Jam and are courted by get-out-the-vote initiatives pushed most prevalently by leftist organizations and campaign drives by the Democratic Party.

And these folks, on either side, are never happy. They never will be.

“Well, it’s human nature for people not to realize how good they have it, and there’s an instinctive aversion some people have to having it good. What I mean by that is that there are deeply rooted psychological factors at play which go beyond opinions and positions on political issues. It’s as if there’s a sort of unconscious death wish among many in the party that it’s time to crash and burn. They’ve been riding high for too long, they’ve become corrupt, and because pride goeth before the fall, a Democratic administration is needed in order to teach them a lesson so they can buckle down and get back to the business of being Republicans.”

- Classical Values 02/03/08

I was berated recently by a conservative friend of mine (one whom I truly admire and respect) for attacking conservatives who blindly parrot talk-radio platitudes and talking points and basically threaten to see to it that a Democrat is elected president in November because of the illusion that John McCain isn’t a conservative.

I want to clarify for the record that identifying this kind of position as “immature” was wrong for me to do. It may be hysterical, it may be wrong, it may be short-sighted, it may be self-destructive and it may be childish and self-absorbed, but it is certainly not immature. Of the hundreds and hundreds of things John McCain has signed his name to, voted for or voted against, it is really deep and substantive for everyone from Newsviners to Ann Coulter to rehash the same four or five things over and over again (which we could never do with Mitt Romney).

Coulter has dug herself a nice little niche in recent months trying to ensure that conservatism sits on the backburner for years to come, under the justification that it will only make conservatives stronger at some point in the future. Interesting that she believes so little in conservatism that it only thrives when things are at their worst.

Coulter has started a rhetorical effort to campaign for Hillary Clinton if (and it now seems, when) John McCain is nominated. The truth is that no one is conservative enough for Ann Coulter:

Mike Huckabee:
“Liberals adore Huckabee because he fits their image of what an evangelical should be: stupid and easily led.” - 12/19/07

“I guess Huckabee is one of those pro-sodomy, pro-gay marriage, pro-evolution evangelical Christians.” - 12/19/07

Mitt Romney/Rudy Giuliani:
“If Republicans end up with a divided convention between Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, I say we pick Gen. Pervez Musharraf.” - 11/14/07

All four GOP front runners (including Mr. Conservative, Fred Thompson):
“Conservatives unhappy with our Republican presidential candidates seem to be drifting aimlessly toward Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee in the misguided belief that these candidates are more conservative than Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. This is like breaking up with Bobby Brown so you can date Phil Spector.” - 10/10/07

Ann Coulter has grudgingly endorsed Mitt Romney (though she has yet to actually promote this endorsement in her columns). Romney…who is little bit Hillary on health care and a little bit Kerry on abortion. When McCain upsets the right-wing, McCain Derangement Syndrome kicks in high gear because he’s a traitor to the cause or because he’s really a liberal. When Romney does it, according to Coulter, it’s simply to “trick liberals” [CPAC/2007].

Coulters Treason is hands-down one of the best contemporary political bestsellers out there. In the pages of this book, she defends Ronald Reagan for blowing off his enraged conservative base after he negotiated and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev (whom Coulter clearly despised). A large portion of Treason was devoted to Ronald Reagan but no where did she chide him for some his anti-conservative acts. Ann Coulter is selective in which flawed conservatives upset her.

In her most recent diatribe, she again embarks on a fest of platitudes, hyperbole and frankly, lies.

John McCain has supported amnesty almost as many times as Reagan has - in fact, he wasn’t yet in the Senate when the country was succumbed to Reagan’s amnesty program. That was over twenty years ago. Since then, the hard-right immigration zealots have redefined the word ‘amnesty’ to mean amnesty, plus a bunch of other things. So now if a politician uses the word ‘amnesty’ in describing policy, we really don’t know if he means real amnesty or the new, expanded, convenient definition of amnesty.

Demagogues like Coulter can repeat the lies of an “open-border, amnesty” McCain all they want…so long as they don’t actually do a little research and find it no where in his voting record.

Coulter goes after McCain for his ‘Gang of 14′ stunt, describing it on the confusing premise that it was in opposition to Vice President Cheney using his tie-breaking vote in the Senate. In reality, the ‘Gang of 14′ served conservatives well while preserving a Senate tradition. Even I was incessant about the ‘Gang of 14′. Then a few months later I discovered that McCain was right and he was brilliant in doing so. Coulter mentions that John McCain opposed the nomination of Sam Alito. Alito, who was very much being lined up in the sights of a judicial filibuster, was nominated because of the swift act of the ‘Gang of 14′. Oh, and…McCain actually voted for Alito to the SCOTUS (in his tradition of supporting every conservative judicial nominee).

Coulter espouses yet another unsupported claim that McCain was just a heart beat away from becoming John Kerry’s 2004 running mate. The Kerry campaign claimed that McCain was considering the offer. My own recollection (which I can’t link to, sorry) is that McCain flat-out said “no” and it was a big embarrassment for Kerry. McCain has never supported a Democrat and in 2004 he was campaigning vigorously for his arch-rival, George W. Bush. Or maybe he did consider it and along the subjective reasoning of Ann Coulter, he was simply out to “trick liberals”.

So Ann Coulter thinks that supporting Hillary Clinton will strengthen conservatism.

And when does this work? The 2006 experiment didn’t create a tidal wave of conservative embracing in the GOP in 2008 (as the ideologues at the time predicted). In 2000 conservatives supported George W. Bush, a moderate Republican governor who prided himself in his relationships with Texas Democrats and sought the same relationships in Washington. In light of the 9/11 attacks, I don’t think there are many conservatives who could look back and say that an Al Gore win in 2000 would have been a good thing (or Kerry in 2004 for that matter), despite how many liberal initiatives Bush engaged in.

Republican splits cost conservatives the White House on two occasions in the 1990s in pluralities that went to Bill Clinton, the president who brings Ann to her knees frothing at the mouth (no pun intended).

George H.W. Bush would probably have had a difficult time passing the current right-wing litmus test. But in 1988, the people made the best choice and ensured that there was not a President Hart in office when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Ronald Reagan was one of the few bona fide conservatives elected to office in the last century. Reagan, however, saw the Republican party as a vital instrument in getting conservative-minded people elected, even if they were moderates compared to him. Before his two landslide victories starting in 1980, Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the 1976 GOP nomination. And lost.

So naturally, Reagan decided to abandon the party that would nominate a moderate over him. For sure, he embraced a third party campaign to challenge Ford.

No, he didn’t do either. After losing to Ford in ‘76, Ronald Reagan turned around and campaigned for him, the same candidate who Reagan had just recently trashed as weak in foreign policy and in dealing with communist expansion. Reagan had enough sense and wisdom to not be overcome by bitterness, instead working toward supporting the Republican and trying to prevent the Jimmy Carter presidency.

At the 1976 National Convention, Reagan was besmirched and opposed by conservative hard-liners. Yes, Reagan ticked off the right-wingers when he announced a moderate running mate. Jesse Helms led the fight to oppose Reagan with another conservative candidate, Senator James L. Buckley. The result? Ford beat Reagan by a hair. And then Carter beat Ford…

Going by today’s rationales, was there really a difference between Ford and Carter? Apparently, Ann Coulter would be out campaigning for Carter. Double-digit-interest-rates-Carter; astronomical-inflation-Carter; gas-shortage-Carter; the same Carter who accused Americans of embracing an “inordinate fear of Communism” (1977); the Godfather-Of-Modern-Terrorism-Carter.

Ambassador Robert H. Tuttle, in 1964, predicted with some impressive accuracy that Reagan would win the governorship of California in 1966, serve two terms, win the presidency in 1976 and by 1985, Soviet Communism would be over [as cited in Treason]. I guess Mr. Tuttle didn’t take ideologues like Jesse Helms (and Ann Coulter) into consideration. Instead, we got four years of the Carter nightmare, the building blocks of today’s Islamofascist threat and an extra four years of the Cold War and Soviet brutality/expansion.

Conservative hard-heads cost Reagan the 1976 GOP nomination. Their punishment? Jimmy Carter.

Ann Coulter’s Treason laid out a case that Democrats have been behind every disastrous military and foreign policy since the start of the Cold War. What good are Coulter’s conservative principles when she promotes a Democrat at a time of war, merely out of spite? There is no war she fears, no amount of death or genocide she fears and no Democratic president she fears. But she fears John McCain.

I have some reservations about McCain, just as I have some about Romney and Huckabee. But they are all good candidates, good Republicans and good conservatives. I would have no problem backing any of the three remaining front runners in November.

As far as Ann Coulter? Obviously Ann Coulter believes that there is no stronger conservative than Ann Coulter - when is she throwing her name in the race? Wouldn’t that be more productive than suggesting that she is going to support the political family of whom she wrote a best-selling book against, High Crimes and Misdemeanors? (as further examples of the stability of the Coulter mindset, Fred Thompson is a liberal because he opposed Bill Clinton’s impeachment, which I guess is much more traitorous to the cause than voting for his corrupt wife as one of his successors - she may sell more books with a Hillary presidency)

And I will leave this with some passages from Jeff Jacoby’s Sunday Boston Globe column, A Conservative’s Case For McCain:

On the surpassing national-security issues of the day - confronting the threat from radical Islam and winning the war in Iraq - no one is more stalwart. Even McCain’s fiercest critics, such as conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, will say so. “The world’s bad guys,” Hewitt writes, “would never for a moment think he would blink in any showdown, or hesitate to strike back at any enemy with the audacity to try again to cripple the US through terror.”

McCain was never an agenda-driven movement conservative, but he “entered public life as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” as he puts it, and on the whole his record has been that of a robust and committed conservative. He is a spending hawk and an enemy of pork and earmarks. He has never voted to increase taxes, and wants the Bush tax cuts made permanent for the best of reasons: “They worked.” He is a staunch free-trader and a champion of school choice. He is unabashedly prolife and pro-Second Amendment. He opposes same-sex marriage. He wants entitlements reined in and personal retirement accounts expanded.

McCain’s conservatism has usually been more a matter of gut instinct than of a rigorous intellectual worldview, and he has certainly deviated from Republican orthodoxy on some serious issues. For all that, his ratings from conservative watchdog groups have always been high. “Even with all the blemishes,” notes National Review, a leading journal on the right (and a backer of Romney), “McCain has a more consistent conservative record than Giuliani or Romney. . . . This is an abiding strength of his candidacy.”

A perfect conservative he isn’t. But he is courageous and steady, a man of character and high standards, a genuine hero. If “the House that Reagan Built” is to be true to its best and highest ideals, it will unite behind John McCain.

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