A Body Blow to the McCain Campaign

I about fell out of my chair when I read this piece from conservative blogger John Hawkinsentitled, “Why I Will No Longer Support John McCain for President.” Hawkins is not a raging looney or an intractable, “I want it all my way” type of guy. He wasn’t a huge fan, but he adjusted. He writes:

After McCain took Florida and was practically a lock to capture the nomination, in keeping with my belief that it benefits conservatives to support the most conservative nominee, I wrote two columns called, Why You’re Going To Vote For John McCain In November And Like It! & There’s Nothing Conservative Or Principled About Helping A Democrat Beat John McCain In November.

I also got myself invited to McCain’s teleconferences, raised money for him through Slatecard, and believe it or not, even contributed $25 to his campaign.

Admittedly that was tough for me because I wasn’t a fan of the guy, but I believed that I had a responsibility, for whatever it was worth, to try to set an example. That was despite the fact that fighting amnesty is extremely important to me and John McCain was the chief Republican proponent of amnesty.

Of course, McCain claimed that he had changed his tune. Yes, he still supported amnesty, but he said he had heard the message that the American people were sending him and that he had been convinced that we needed security first, before we pursued an amnesty.

I heard McCain make this claim. Unlike Mike Huckabee, McCain didn’t tie himself up in anti-amnesty pledges. However, this week with the Feinstein-Craig amnesty proposal before the Senate, McCain flip-flopped-flipped back to supporting and pushing for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Based on McCain having claimed to learn his lesson during the primary and then switching back in the general, Hawkins declares:

Put very simply: John McCain is a liar. He’s a man without honor, without integrity, who could not have captured the Republican nomination had he run on making comprehensive immigration a top priority of his administration. Quite frankly, this is little different from George Bush, Sr. breaking his “Read my lips, no new taxes pledge,” except that Bush’s father was at least smart enough to wait until he got elected before letting all of his supporters know that he was lying to them.

Under these circumstances, I simply cannot continue to support a man like John McCain for the presidency. Since that is the case, I have already written the campaign and asked them to take me off of their mailing list and to no longer send me invitations to their teleconferences. I see no point in asking questions to a man who has no compunction about lying through his teeth on one of the most crucial election issues and then changing his position the first time he believes he can get away with it.

Moreover, I genuinely regret having to do this because I do still believe the country would be better off with John McCain as President as opposed to Obama or Clinton. However, I just cannot in good conscience cast a vote for a man who has told this big of a lie, for this long, about this important of an issue.

That being said, although I cannot back John McCain, encourage others to vote for him, or contribute any more money to his campaign, I’m not going to tell you that you should do that same thing. What McCain has done here is a bridge too far for me, but others may not have as big a problem with being told this sort of lie. That’s their decision.

-5 McCain points for Hawkins. This is a huge blow, particularly in the blogosphere. Despite Hawkins not telling other people what to do about this election, this is still bad news for McCain. What Hawkins represents is a reasonable traditional conservative who wanted very much to come out and back the party’s nominee, and in fact did so for nearly 4 months. This same Hawkins just repudiated McCain in the most blunt and straightforward terms I can think of. The problem is not just Hawkins’ significant readership, but that there are thousands of people who don’t have extremely popular blogs that are thinking the same things. The goal of a traditional Republican campaign is to run to the center without jettisoning your base. McCain seems to be willing to jettison his base in order to win enough votes from the center. Yeah, good luck on that.

See also McCain’s rejection of the endorsementsof Pastors John Hagee and Rod Parsley. While you can make the argument that he should have rejected both endorsements, if this is the case, he really shouldn’t have accepted them in the first place as these two men’s controversial statements were on the record. What this indicated is that he wanted the twosome’s endorsement to win Ohio and Texas, no matter what their statements, and then threw them under the bus when it became became inconvenient. Looking at Hawkins’ statement, it seems possible that not only could McCain lose, but do major damage to the Republican Party in the process.

UPDATE:

John Hawkins’ piece generates an earthquake of Blogospheric responses. Ed Morrissey points outthat no matter how bad McCain is, Obama is worse.  That may be true, says the Ace of Spades (another top right wing blogger) but…

I held off on this last night because I didn’t know what to do. I guess my heart is with Hawkins, though my brain says Morrissey’s right… Obama would be (marginally, I think) worse than McCain.

But Obama hasn’t really flat-out lied to me.

That counts for something.

Hawkins in a follow-up writes:

Additionally, some people have pointed out that refusing to vote for McCain actually helps the Democratic nominee and that whether it’s Obama or Clinton, the country would be better off with McCain.

That’s very true.

But personally, I think that there has got to be some kind of line in the sand that these politicians cannot be allowed to cross. In McCain’s case, he lied about the single most important issue in determining many people’s votes, is the Republican Party’s nominee only because he told that lie, and now he has publicly shifted positions in a way that reveals he was lying the whole time — and he did so before the election. Here’s a man who has so little respect for conservatives that he doesn’t even feel compelled to wait until he’s elected to reveal that he wasn’t telling them the truth about an issue they care desperately about.

If we’re willing to put up with that, is there any line that he can’t cross and get away with it? If McCain shifts on a dime tomorrow and says that he’s only going to appoint pro-Roe Supreme Court justices, are conservatives just going to say, “Well, I’m not happy but he’s still better than Obama.” If he decides that the war is too much of a liability for him in the polls and he’s just going to pull out like Obama and watch the country collapse into genocide, would that be Ok, too? If those things were to happen, I’d hope the answer would be, “No, that isn’t OK with us.”

Actually, if one is thinking only of: McCain not being as bad as Obama (i.e. the lesser of two evils,) John McCain has considerable room to maneuver. The question I think we’re going to see answered is how much are conservatives going to let him get away with.