John Dowd represented Sen. John McCain in his darkest hour, the “Keating Five” scandal. He supported McCain the first time he ran for president in 2000 and signed up to be a major fundraiser for him in this year’s presidential race. But when former senator Fred D. Thompson began thinking about running, the Washington lawyer changed his mind.
For McCain (Ariz.), who started off as the favorite to win the Republican nomination but now trails former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in most polls, Dowd’s move signals yet another threat to his struggling campaign. As Thompson (Tenn.) builds his team of major fundraisers such as Dowd, the challenge for McCain will be to collect the millions of dollars necessary to maintain a nationwide campaign and convince Republicans that he is their best bet to retain the White House.
So says Matthew Mosk in today’s Washington Post, [1] under the headline “Defections to Fred Thompson Pose a Major Threat to McCain.”
The attitude reflected in the headline is also reflected in the article. However, Mosk has this one wrong. Thompson isn’t a major threat to McCain. McCain is a major threat to McCain… the single biggest threat, in fact. Thompson is simply being Conservative, which will invariably beat someone like McCain.
Wanna know why Bush won the Republican primary in 2000, and not John McCain? It’s rather simple; Bush, Liberal has he can be, was by far the preferable choice to conservatives, as compared to John McCain.
This is further confirmed, currently, by Rudy Giuliani, who happens to be leading McCain in the polls by a significant margin at the moment. Once again, Giuliani as liberal as he is, and has a history of being, is to the right of John McCain. He is therefore more popular among voters…. And in the race between Thompson and Giuliani, Thompson wins for the same reason.
The lesson here is that, as I have said in these spaces many times previously, there is a genuine hunger for someone in the White House, and in Congress, who actually operates in the realm known as “right of center”. To the degree that Thompson qualifies, is precisely the degree to which he has gathered a following in this presidential race. Time, I think, has run out for Republicans in name only.
This is not a situation where, as John Dowd suggests in the Mosk article, the central issue is whether are not McCain’s campaign is being run well. The American people in general, and the Republican rank and file in particular, are not that stupid, so as to follow the best run campaign, IF the best run campaign doesn’t have any conservative substance to it. They have apparently decided (correctly, I think ) that McCain’s campaign does not in fact of the conservative substance to it. Indeed, it can be said that the reason McCain’s campaign is failing, is because it reflects the candidate too well. The McCain campaign doesn’t reflect any conservative substance, because McCain doesn’t have any himself.