I'm rooting for John McCain. Now hold on. Hear me out.
McCain's only hope following his campaign implosion is to recapture his "straight talk" mojo. It's getting late early in this campaign but it's not closing time yet. Job No. 1 should be to call out the religious right leadership for their kiss-the-ring coronation mentality -- like he did in 2000 when he said this at a campaign stop in Virginia:
[P]olitical intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. The political tactics of division and slander are not our values, they are...
(APPLAUSE)
They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.
Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.
I'm rooting for that candidate. Because he could make the GOP primary very interesting.
That McCain was long ago killed by strategists who had convinced him that he needed to embrace the religious right. To position himself accordingly, McCain made a return trip to Virginia in May 2006. But this time he went to Falwell’s Liberty University to deliver the commencement address.
It was a nakedly calculated act of contrition, and was rightly seized upon as a symbol of McCain selling out. South Florida Sun-Sentinel cartoonist Chan Lowe penned this beauty:
And Arianna Huffington put it this way in an ABC News story:
"Watching a true American hero hang a For Sale sign on his principles is a profoundly sad thing," [Huffington said.]
Huffington, a former conservative, and now a liberal, said she finds "it deeply ironic that, at a time when voters are desperately longing for a political leader with authenticity, a man who defined the authenticity brand has now decided to screw with the formula. The New McCain is the political equivalent of New Coke -- and will meet with the same disastrous results."
Indeed, acts of selling one's political soul don't usually convince anyone. Least of all those you're most trying to feel the love from.
In January 2007, James Dobson said:
"Speaking as a private individual, I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances."
In a Sacramento Bee article in June, this was said:
McCain "seems to have a difficulty in discussing [his faith] in terms that people relate to," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a leading conservative evangelical organization. "I think people want a sense of where someone stands in their relationship with the Lord. I think George Bush was able to do that in the way he communicated, using terms that evangelicals are familiar with."
Conservative evangelicals want nothing to do with McCain. Many of these are the same build-a-fence-around-America conservatives who despise his position on immigration. (Of course, many progressives dislike his position on immigration as well, but for usually other reasons).
The only hope for McCain is to issue a declaration of independence from the religious power brokers and to seek to recapture the moderate conservatives and GOP-leaners whom Rudy Giuliani has so far corraled. Giuliani has genuflected to conservative evangelicals without overly flipping on his positions. If McCain decried agents of intolerance with the same conviction as in 2000 -- and I don't for a moment think he's changed his true feelings -- then he'd offer a GOP model unlike anything offered by Giuliani, Mitt Romney, or Uncle Fred. I don't know if McCain can win, but he'd make it interesting.
McCain should take a week away from the campaign, and then give a defining speech in which he says, point blank, that he got lost in the wilderness for too long. He needs to say that now the scales have fallen away, and the straight talk McCain is back. And then he needs to provide evidence. If he were to do this, the news media would love him. It would be a riches-to-rags-and-maybe-back story that all journalists and Americans are suckers for.
McCain is conservative, no doubt about it. Nonetheless, I think we all -- especially progressives -- should be rooting for him to speak truth to religious power once again.
Crossposted at streetprophets