Aaron Keith Harris
2008-02-22 08:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Barack Obama’s electoral rout of Hillary Clinton continued with runaway wins in Wisconsin and Hawaii on Tuesday. But Clinton is still well within striking distance.

She may stagger toward the August convention in Denver, where the superdelegates are in play and the game is completely different.

So why did Mike Huckabee, at 37 percent, glean about the same percentage of the vote against a certain winner that Clinton, with 41 percent, took on the Democratic side?

Because John McCain is, for a sizable chunk of the Republican Party’s most faithful and essential supporters, a disappointing choice for presidential candidate and party leader. Voting for Huckabee, or the plucky libertarian Ron Paul, is the only way to register that dissatisfaction at this point.

The problem for conservative Republicans isn’t that McCain isn’t conservative enough, although that is a problem, as his positions on several issues are in line with Democrats, even liberal Democrats.

The real issue is that the Republican establishment and the news media are telling conservatives their ideas are, instead of the proper foundation for a political party, nothing more than an outmoded set of ideological fetishes.

Times have changed, they say, and conservatives need to change with the times.

Fareed Zakaria’s Feb. 25 Newsweek column, “The End of Conservatism,” lists several conservative positions that, according to the polling data he cites, are far less popular than in the 1970s and 1980s when conservatism “proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age — a time when socialism was still a serious economic idea, when marginal tax rates reached 70 percent” and when government regulated much more of the economy.

Zakaria argues President Bush would be even less popular had he pressed forward on more conservative issues like tax cuts, and that demographic groups like women, college-educated professionals, youth and minorities have become solidly Democratic.

In such an environment, John McCain, Zakaria says, would be good for conservatives because he “seems to understand that a new world requires new thinking.”

With a Democrat-led House and Senate, which could soon be much more Democratic, McCain’s legislative successes, like Bush’s, would be on the issues where he already agrees with Democrats.

Aside from foreign policy, two solid Supreme Court choices and a set of tax cuts, Bush’s big wins have been No Child Left Behind, which increased federal spending on and involvement in education, and the prescription drug benefit for seniors, an expansion of entitlement spending that will cost trillions of dollars in our lifetime.

As president, McCain will have to fight Democrats in order to ensure victory in Iraq and in the war on terror. And his proposals to curtail spending and cut taxes, including lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, would be ignored at best.

But McCain would have plenty of liberal support to continue outlawing certain kinds of political speech, punish drug companies, health care providers and insurance companies with a so-called patient’s bill of rights, and further regulate businesses in the name of stopping global warming.

Most importantly, his proposal with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., last year to grant amnesty and perhaps citizenship to millions of illegal aliens would likely pass easily.

Far from being at “the end,” conservatism could very well be at a new beginning. The expansion of government certain to take place under either McCain or Obama will highlight the fact that governments and bureaucrats do almost nothing as well as markets and individuals. And a continued open-border policy will make more people realize the long-term implications of allowing millions of people who share neither this country’s language nor culture into the United States.

The conservative party or candidate that grabs hold of those issues will have a message millions want to hear.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.