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Mark Steyn’s weekly OC Register column reviews the campaign to date.
… it should be noted that the defining McCain moment came back in the fall when he responded to Hillary Clinton’s support for public funding for a Woodstock museum. If you’re under 70 and have no idea what “Woodstock” is or why it would require its own museum, ask your grandpa. But McCain began by saying he was sure Mrs. Clinton was right and that it was a major “cultural and pharmaceutical event.” Which is a cute line. And McCain wasn’t done yet: “I wasn’t there,” he said of the 1969 music festival. “I was tied up at the time.”
And the crowd roared its approval. It’s not just a joke, though it’s a pretty good one. It’s not merely a way of reminding folks you’ve stood up to torture and you can shrug it off with almost 007-cool insouciance. But it also tells Republican voters that, when Sen. Clinton offers up some cobwebbed boomer piety, you know a piñata when you see one, and you’re gonna clobber it. …
If you want Mark with a little more bite, we have a Townhall link to his CPAC speech. Twenty-eight minutes of fun.
So how did McCain do at CPAC?
John Fund liked McCain’s appearance.
Democrats, and even a few Republicans, have suggested that John McCain may not wear well as a candidate, with many making comparisons to Bob Dole, the former war hero and longtime senator who was the uninspired GOP nominee in 1996 against Bill Clinton.
But Mr. McCain put many of those doubts to rest yesterday with a thundering speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. …
John Podhoretz did too.
What John McCain delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference was a nearly perfect political speech in a nearly perfect setting. The rhetorical dynamic was to present McCain as an “imperfect servant†— first of his party and then of his country. This had the effect, first, of creating a mood of rueful modesty, which are the necessary critical grace notes for any speaker trying to make a case before a partly hostile audience. Any hostility shown him by the audience — and there was some — seemed unreasonable and ugly-spirited given the outstretched hand of the speaker.
The purpose of the speech was for McCain to make the case that he is a conservative, and indeed, it was a speech rooted in conservative philosophy, featuring two (count-’em) quotes from Burke on the nature of liberty and the threats to it. But he did far more. …
Jennifer Rubin, also in Contentions.
McCain did himself a lot of good in his CPAC speech. The crowd gave him a very friendly welcome. The only boos I could discern came during his discussion of immigration reform. Throughout the speech he was interrupted several times by healthy applause. Specifically, he did six smart things:
First, he did not deny there are real differences between him and the assembled. …
The Captain’s first post today is on the McCain speech.
… McCain focused the latter part of his speech on the big issues that he says will define the election — the war, the Democratic insistence on statist policies, and entitlement reform. He concluded that part of the argument with this (emphasis mine):
These are but a few of the differences that will define this election. They are very significant differences, and I promise you, I intend to contest these issues on conservative grounds and fight as hard as I can to defend the principles and positions we share, and to keep this country safe, proud, prosperous and free.
We have had a few disagreements, and none of us will pretend that we won’t continue to have a few. But even in disagreement, especially in disagreement, I will seek the counsel of my fellow conservatives. If I am convinced my judgment is in error, I will correct it. And if I stand by my position, even after benefit of your counsel, I hope you will not lose sight of the far more numerous occasions when we are in complete accord.
If conservatives hear that carefully, that is an invitation to the table. They should accept that invitation and start seeking to fill the seats. …
He also posts on MSNBC going in the tank for Obama.
… What? MS-NBC biased? Oh heavens, could that possibly be? Before the Left gets particularly outraged by that particular idea, let’s recall that this is the network that airs Keith Olbermann, who saw Peter Finch’s performance in Network and didn’t realize it was satire. Their supposed news anchor spends every night ranting about conservatives and Republicans, daily issuing them the title of “The Worst Person In The World”, which ignores people like Richard Ramirez, Ali Khameini, Osama bin Laden, the Castro brothers, and so on.
And yet, Republican presidential candidates have regularly appeared on MS-NBC, despite the almost relentless bias against them on the cable channel. They haven’t even demanded Mr.Meltdown recuse himself from the proceedings. Apparently, they don’t feel as though the pettiness and rancid commentary at MS-NBC can knock them off their stride. Hillary feels differently — shouldn’t that say something about her candidacy? …
And he speculates on the source of Clinton’s $5 million dollar loan.
Neal Boortz comments on McCain.
… But .. McCain is the guy. He’s going to be the nominee unless something really bizarre happens. If you don’t support his candidacy .. if you sit out the election .. just how much influence do you think you are going to have during his presidency? That is …if your actions don’t put Hideous Hillary in office.
Charles Krauthammer tells us how we got to McCain.
… The story of this campaign is how many Republicans felt that national security trumps social heresy. The problem for Giuliani and McCain, however, was that they were splitting that constituency. Then came Giuliani’s humiliation in Florida. After he withdrew from the race, he threw his support to McCain — and took his followers with him.
Look at the numbers. Before Florida, the national polls had McCain hovering around 30 and Giuliani in the mid-teens. After Florida, McCain’s numbers jumped to the mid-40s, swallowing the Giuliani constituency whole. …
… Bush muddied the ideological waters of conservatism. It was Bush who teamed with Teddy Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind, a federal venture into education that would have been anathema to (the early) Reagan. It was Bush who signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. It was Bush who strongly supported the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. It was Bush who on his own created a vast new entitlement program, the Medicare drug benefit. And it was Bush who conducted a foreign policy so expansive and, at times, redemptive as to send paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan and traditional conservatives such as George F. Will into apoplexy and despair (respectively).
Who in the end prepared the ground for the McCain ascendancy? Not Feingold. Not Kennedy. Not even Giuliani. It was George W. Bush. Bush begat McCain. …
VDH has a call to arms.
… The alternative is a Republican loss, and likely increased Democratic control of the Congress and soon a trifecta with the Supreme Court.
We would witness a new generation of European-like tax increases, unnecessary new programs, negotiated or unilateral surrender in Iraq, loss of what has been achieved in preventing another 9/11 (a return to the Sandy Berger/Albright response to terrorists in the late 1990s when our embassies were leveled and Pakistan got the bomb), 2-3 far Left Supreme Court justices, and the race/class/gender industry given official sanction.
The idea that feuding conservatives would each not make some sort of concessions to prevent all that is lunatic.
Gerard Baker of the London Times says the Dem race is Dunkin’ Donuts against Starbucks.
I’m not sure when the term latte liberal replaced the old champagne socialist as the favoured term of derision for the well-heeled leftie but it looks an increasingly useful metaphor for understanding how the deadlock in the Democratic presidential primary election might be broken.
The two candidates have fought themselves to a standstill. In the closest race in any US presidential primary campaign in decades, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are more or less tied in total votes received and in delegates elected for the party’s nominating convention.
Super Tuesday, when almost half the country voted in the nearest thing ever to a nationwide primary, was supposed to break the logjam but has merely tightened it.
The reason the race is so close has nothing to do with policy differences. I’d wager that not one voter in a hundred could name with any confidence a single difference between the two candidates’ stances on the war in Iraq, healthcare, taxes, public spending, abortion or anything else. That’s because there isn’t one. …
IBD Editors say it’s time to prepare for global cooling.
According to Popular Mechanics, a truck was the Auto Show big hit in Chicago. Navistar introduced its new big rig.
At what was by far the most jam-packed unveiling of the entire show here so far, Navistar International today took the wraps off its new flagship truck, the LoneStar. This monster is the big-rig equivalent of a Harley-Davidson dresser, with a huge chrome grille and lights galore. But there’s some green poking through that smoke: As part of Navistar’s Advanced Classics line of Class 8 trucks designed with advanced aerodynamics, the LoneStar is projected to be 5 to 15-percent more fuel efficient than traditional trucks. …