quietlife.net

kerry/mccain

07 Apr 2004

The other day, a friend of mine casually mentioned how she thought a Kerry/McCain combination would make a “nice moderate ticket”, and that it was “good that things are moving toward the center”. After I was done spit-taking and emoting steam shooting from my ears, I pressed her for details, asking if she was, therefore, a fan of the status quo. Her response was “assuming you agree that the status quo is feeling very right-wing these days, a move toward centrism represents a political shift, not a maintaining thereof”.

This line of thinking simply floors me. Moving towards the center to compete doesn’t offset rightward leanings, it solidifies them. We have a rightward shift in the government, and a Democratic party, onstensibly representing leftward values, that is considering adopting right-wing values (and candidates) in order to compete. The slight leftward shift we’d see in the government as a result of a Kerry/McCain victory would be overwhelmed by the solidification of the rightward shift in general, along with a serious narrowing of the already considerably tight ideological spectrum. In a country already plagued by disaffected and discouraged non-voters, this is not what is needed.

Fortunately it appears I’m not the only one that thinks this. Eileen McNamara elaborates:

There is a sound and simple reason why John McCain should not be John F. Kerry’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in November. He is a Republican.

The distinction still matters, even in an era when both major political parties are fixated on the nonpartisan, centrist, independent voters who political consultants insist determine the outcome of federal elections.

…

McCain, the crowd-pleasing “straight shooter” who lost the Republican nomination to George W. Bush in 2000, has had no such record of vacillation in his 17 years in the Senate and four in the US House of Representatives. He is a social and economic conservative and proud of it. As McCain said himself when asked about speculation that the two Vietnam war heroes might join forces to deny Bush a second term, “It’s impossible to imagine the Democratic Party seeking a prolife, free-trading, nonprotectionist, deficit hawk.”

The trouble is, it’s not that hard to imagine the self-destructive Democratic establishment doing just that. Having convinced themselves that presidential politics is less about ideas than about money and personalities, the Beltway crowd is more than capable of underestimating the intelligence of the people.

This is what is scary to me, as well. It’s not that hard to imagine the party that brought us the DLC thinking it’s a good idea to run a ticket with a Republican. That said, I don’t think it will happen. She continues:

Voters might identify less intensely with party labels than they once did, but they still know the difference between Democrats and Republicans. The electorate knows, for instance, that choosing one’s ideological opposite as a running mate is not the same thing as constructing coalitions among competing interests. That takes a skill so long missing from Washington that Capitol Hill is locked in partisan gridlock on some of the most pressing issues facing the country, from the war in Iraq to the lack of affordable health care at home. How exactly would teaming up with a fine fellow who rarely agrees with him on public policy solve that problem for Kerry?

…

If talk of a Kerry-McCain ticket was intended to generate buzz, mission accomplished. Marketing the pairing as a bold move, however, will only generate another round of the same old question: What does John Kerry stand for?

As previously mentioned, I think the “John Kerry doesn’t stand for anything” line is a load of BS with no more substance than the “Gore is boring/a liar/invented the Internet” nonsense. Unfortunately, the media loves loads of BS, and I agree that nominatined McCain would be suicide in this respect – the opposition would never let him live it down. I don’t think Kerry is unprincipled now, but teaming up with McCain would change my mind. John Kerry, the Democrat that stands for so little, he ran with a Republican.

Comments

Erik — April 07, 2004 at 15:29 · reply

Seriously, Chris, you need to get out more. All she was saying is that it’d be better to have a middle-of-the-road pair in the White House than the current administration. That’s a statement you can disagree with (I know Ralph Nader does), but it’s not eye-poppingly, steam-shootingly controversial.

cwage — April 07, 2004 at 15:36 · reply

I need to get out more? What the hell does that mean? Hearing someone say “i think it’s good we’re moving to the center” is a bit jarring, which is why I joked about steam-shooting.

And I do disagree with that sentiment, which is .. why I wrote this post.

Erik — April 07, 2004 at 17:29 · reply

You know–take a walk, listen to the breeze whispering in the trees, make friends with a chipmunk.

Dude, seriously, you don’t think America should be moving toward the political center from where it is now? I’m not saying (and neither was she) that the center is where we want to end up, but it’d be several steps in the right direction.

Hark, I hear the sweet song of a thrush!

cwage — April 07, 2004 at 18:12 · reply

Dude, seriously, you don’t think America should be moving toward the political center from where it is now? I’m not saying (and neither was she) that the center is where we want to end up, but it’d be several steps in the right direction.

Yes, I think America should be moving toward the political center (and further, it goes without saying) from where it is now. The Democratic party should not (and that’s what we were talking about: Kerry/McCain, not America in general). It should be a counter-weight, and I see no reason it shouldn’t be, because I believe that counter-weight is reflected in a significant portion (if not a majority) of the people.

I’ll re-iterate what I said in the discussion we had previously. A “shift towards the center” or “forging a compromise” is what we should expect as the net result of democracy, not a political party. In our two-party system, the left and the right balance eachother out. If the “left” itself moves towards “the center”, by virtue of this, the center tilts towards the right. (The humor value in that we are reduced to such idiotically simplistic metaphors to represent our political spectrum is not lost on me. Oh how I long for proportional representation and preferential voting!)

You could make the argument (and I’m sure most on the right would love to) that the Democratic party’s shift to the right (by way of the center) is natural and is simply reflecting the country’s shift as a whole. But I don’t buy that the “shift to the right” in the government is reflected in the people. I think there’s a mixture of apathy and political defeatism (a la the DLC) that is responsible for this “if you can’t beat em, join em” attitude. I think it presents a false dichotomy: that we either introduce centrist/right-wing ideals in order to compete, or we lose.

Overall, yes, I think even a government that is firmly “center” is better than one that is “right”-leaning, but honestly if the Democratic party did (move much more towards the center), I think we’d have much bigger problems (and perhaps much grander solutions, who knows) than Bush in the whitehouse.

I think a Republican on a Democrat’s ticket would hopelessly splinter the left’s opposition to the right. Namely, into: 1) Those that would give up and find a third-party candidate much more appealing (Nader, unfortunately, has shown himself to be just as bad, pandering to anyone that will vote for him, so I wouldn’t see him being a likely choice, but who knows, people are dumb.), 2) people advocating sticking with the Democrats on the logic you cite (center being better than right), and 3) yet more discouraged people that don’t vote at all.

Anyways, to some extent this is moot, because Kerry will never pick John McCain as his VP. But I still think the issues it raises are important. Out of the democracies that hold presidential elections, the US ranks 55th out of 89 in voter turnout. We have a real problem with disaffected voters and political apathy in this country. It’s also tempered with a heavy dose of absent-minded complacency. I think this attitude that “it’s good things are moving towards the center” is a symptom of that.

The entire basis of my support for the Democratic party is that it’s much more pragmatic to work within its existing institution to help shape it to represent my ideals. If the success of this strategy becomes increasing untenable, you better believe I’ll become just as disenchanted.

But who knows, maybe a Republican running on a Democrat’s ticket for president is precisely the wake-up call we need to incite Americans to make some changes in our system to better represent a wider spectrum of ideals.

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