Romney Wins Maine Republican Party Caucuses By A Wide Margin
McCain, Romney and the Future of the Republican Party
Although it is too early to be a harbinger of Super Tuesday, I found the news of Mitt Romney’s win in Maine to be very encouraging for those conservatives in the Republican Party who don’t think it is a splendid idea to have a de facto Democrat capture the GOP nomination. Romney won handily over McCain with heavy voter turnout. Is Romney’s win significant?
I think it is.
Maine is a state with a sizable bloc of independent voters. Its two Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, are John McCain’s ideological soul-mates —both are RINO’s to the core. It has been reported that during the caucus, when Snowe spoke on behalf of McCain, she was booed. Could it have been a reaction to his snarky, insufferable and self-righteous performance at the debate last Wednesday? Perhaps. Or maybe it was the recent, and rather damning revelation, that McCain expressed — on more than one occasion — a desire to join the political party more attuned to his natural ideological inclination (see, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, signing on to the global warming hysteria bandwagon, and Sandbagging his fellow Republicans in their attempt to nominate conservative justices).
Over the years, I’ve grown weary of McCain’s posturing as a “Maverick” to the adulation of a fawning liberal mainstream media, whose attention he eagerly and shamelessly solicits. He excoriated those who opposed his giving the store away with his horribly misguided Amnesty Bill, and to this day, he hasn’t changed his tune on securing the border. Witness his evasive non-answer during the debate when asked if he would sign his Immigration Bill as president. So much for The Straight Talk Express. His bus clearly has run off the road into a gully and is careening out of control.
Outside of his unstinting support for the War on Terror, it is hard to see in what sense McCain is a core conservative. He not only exhibits contempt for conservatives, he rubs our faces in the dirt with his tiresome sanctimony. Exhibit “A” is his loathing of those who dared question the wisdom and philosophical basis of his far-fetched and far-reaching Immigration Bill, which in essence, was an effrontery and a debasement of the whole civic notion of American citizenship. To crown him as the standard bearer of the party, given his left-leaning political views, which are anathema to far too many in the Republican Party to me is an unnecessary act of self-immolation.
I find it perplexing as well as incomprehensible that McCain should be the Republican Party’s nominee, when the fact of the matter is that to date, he has failed to garner anything approaching a plurality of Republican voters. Why this does not cause dismay and consternation amongst the party’s elders is a distressing sign of the sorry state of the leadership of today’s Republican Party.
John McCain is the establishment candidate. The embrace of McCain by the national party apparatus demonstrates just how diffident the current managers of the party are of a Romney victory. As a demonstrable Democrat-wanna-be, the idea that McCain would be a more electable candidate against the Democratic nominee in the general election is wholly specious. As the saying goes, given a choice between a Democrat and a Democrat, the voters will choose the democrat every time…
It is fitting that McCain should bring Senator Joe Lieberman on the campaign trail with him, for both men, are, truly political homeless persons: Lieberman is a Scoop Jackson Democrat, and here is the rub, so is McCain. But, as Lieberman’s humiliating banishment by his party attests, the party of Scoop Jackson is but a distant memory. Which raises an interesting question, why therefore, would McCain want to join their ranks? An interesting question, indeed…
Nominating a man who enjoys poking a stick in the eye of not only true conservatives, but also who has engaged in treachery by sabotaging a party who won a national election from attempting to implement its stated agenda would be an act of unrivaled political suicide. A question arises: given all the trouble he has caused the party, is McCain the best man for the nomination?
Must we accept a man that continues to openly disavow the conservative principles that once distinguished the Republican from the Democratic Party?
Peggy Noonan was correct. Through the vehicle of a squishy and pristinely undefined brand of “compassionate conservatism,” under the tutelage of George Bush, the Republican Party has been ruined. Mitt Romney is the last best chance to stave off a dispiriting, and perhaps, irreversible decline of a party that has nobly served as a bulwark against the ever increasing leftward tilt of the Democrats.
They say that half a loaf is better than none. The sad truth is the nomination of John McCain isn’t half a loaf, it’s bread crumbs that will be strewn on the heap of what was once a Grand Old Party.
Go Mitt, Go…
Beacon Street Journal
Sunday, February 3, 2008
By John Kinsellagh
