PJB: Why Did John McCain Lose?

[November 7, 2008]

November 7, 2008

         

PJB: Why Did John McCain Lose?

                          

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Why did John McCain lose?

Let’s start with those “headwinds” into which he was flying.

The president of the United States, the leader of his party, was at Nixon-Carter levels of approval, 25 percent, going into Election Day.

Sixty-two percent of the nation thought the economy was the No. 1 issue, and 93 percent thought the economy was bad. Two-thirds of the nation thought the war McCain championed was a mistake, and 80 percent to 90 percent thought the country was on the wrong course.

As a political athlete, measured by charisma and communications skills, McCain is not even in the same league with Barack Obama. He was outspent by vast sums, and his political organization was far inferior.

It is a wonder McCain was even competitive, dealt such a hand.

Yet, by Sept. 10, McCain, thanks to Sarah Palin, whose selection had proven a sensation, had come from eight points behind to take the lead, and Joe Biden was wailing that maybe Hillary would have been a better choice for Obama.

Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, McCain’s assertion that the economy was fundamentally sound, and his panicked return to Washington to assist Bush and Hank Paulson push through a wildly unpopular bank bailout — using 700 billion in tax dollars to buy up rubbish paper the idiot bankers had put on their books.

The Establishment’s Man had come to save the Establishment.

Suddenly, it was McCain who was down 10 points, as the feline and feral press went on a wilding attack on Sister Sarah. He never recovered, though the McCain-Palin final push left egg on the faces of pollsters who were predicting a double-digit triumph for Obama.

Perhaps no Republican, in these circumstances, could have won, especially with that month-long bloodletting on Wall Street that wiped out $4 trillion to $5 trillion in stock and bond value, ravaging IRAs and 401Ks, portfolios and pensions alike.

Yet, McCain might still have won had he not, like his three fellow establishment Republicans Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, been inhibited by the Mainstream Media and his own Beltway beliefs.

Consider. In California, where a liberal judiciary had ordered the state to recognize homosexual marriages, voters, by 52 to 48, slapped the judges across the face and ordered the ban reimposed and placed in the California constitution. Arizona and Florida also voted to outlaw gay marriage, by landslides.

The New York Times deplored the “ugly outcome” of these three referenda and said voters were “enshrining bigotry,” thus calling the majority of Californians, Arizonans and Floridians bigots and their Bible-rooted Christian beliefs nothing but bigotry.

Good to know what they think of us. Yet, McCain, who might have been out front on these moral and cultural issues, paid only lip service — and lost Florida, and California by a landslide.

In Missouri, where McCain eked out a victory, a proposal to make English the official state language carried six to one. In Nebraska, a proposal to ban affirmative action carried 58 to 42, but lost in a 50-50 tie in Colorado.

Parental notification won 48 percent support in California, a far higher share of the vote than McCain got, while a measure to outlaw abortion except in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother got 45 percent in South Dakota. Had McCain made an issue of Obama’s support for a Freedom of Choice Act that would eliminate all state restrictions on abortion, he could have forced Obama to defend what yet remains a radical and extreme view in America.

While Barack was locking up black America, McCain failed to hold onto Bush’s share of the white working class, though Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate and long associations with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and ’60s bomber William Ayers.

Perhaps fearful his “good guy” reputation with his old buddies in his media “base” would be imperiled, McCain ruled Wright off limits and seemed hesitant even to go after the Ayers connections. Lee Atwater would not have been so ambivalent. Leo Durocher put it succinctly: “Nice guys finish last.”

Ultimately, however, the Beltway Republicans are losing Middle America because they are ideologically incapable of addressing two great concerns: economic insecurity and the perception that we are losing the America that we grew up in.

Economic insecurity is traceable to NAFTA-GATT globalization, under which it makes economic sense for U.S. companies to close factories here, build plants in China and export back to the United States. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. jobs.

Social insecurity is traceable to mass immigration, legal and illegal, which has brought in scores of millions who are altering the character of communities and competing with U.S. workers by offering their services for far less pay.

These are the twin causes of death of the Reagan coalition, and as long as the Republican Party is hooked on K Street cash, it will not address either, and thus pass, blissfully addicted, from this earth.

[Stephanosenvista]

Stevus,

 

We may not agree on this one.

 

Buchanan’s analysis is full of his bias’ towards his neo-con Reagan affiliation and left of the right of his right of right stance - most of the time. His conservatism is conditioned by his career, which to be fair, he appeared to pursue in a straightforward fashion, and I also must say, he is a gentleman in his persona. Besides the neo-con Reaganesque prejudice, the other problem is his pragmatism. The analysis is not moral but applied pragmatism.

 

Reagan is more responsible for the economy today than anyone outside of the Fed. His Voodoo economics have never been recovered from in this country and they are only the U.S. Federal version of the GATT NAFTA repeal of borders via economics that is the implementation of anarchic destruction of the Nation-state throughout the world. That is part of the Judeo-dialectic of Political Science that is in fact Communist and pre-Communist Socialist in the history of European disintegration (I refer to 17^th through 20^th century). GATT, it should be remembered, goes back to U.N. documents in the mid 1950’s and has a strictly U.N. Socialist basis.

 

Defending McCain is impossible. Quite true, Obama is the died in the wool race and class jealousy anarchist that he appears to be and totally abortionist and therefore I am sure we can presume that religiously he is Gramscian in the indifferentist fashion in the extreme. But McCain, while pretending to be pro-life ( I am right to life and not merely pro-life) said in the middle of his campaign debate that he didn’t oppose stem cell research; i.e. not all baby murdering is the same is his belief. True, some stem cell collecting does not harm babies, but the way McCain said what he said in the debate was in fact pandering to the baby murder abortion crowd. It has to be noted that any Congress (I mean both houses of our bi-cameral system) can invoke the “no judicial review” clause in the U.S. Constitution (which is used by them all the time for pork barrel bills) and end abortion with a simple majority vote any time they want to. It hasn’t been done BECAUSE they don’t want to. Bush and the Republican lawmakers could have done it and didn’t. McCain is the pragmatist that Buchanan would have him to be, just not as effective in the applied details as Buchanan suggests he could have been. Behind that is the moral indifferentism that allows him to only appear to be staunchly right to life in the eyes of some, when he isn’t. As to McCain’s patriotism and POW service to his country, he has been richly, monetarily, repaid for that over the years. Great investment on his part.

 

Right to Life includes standing against unjust war and neither McCain nor Obama has done that at all. The manufactured excuse and expedition into the Middle East for expanding Israel’s racist and imperialist expansionist policies and the looting of the Middle Eastern resources for a slave dependent empire that the U.S. is being turned into is unconscionable and indefensible. Both McCain and Obama support this evil that, let it be remembered, murders a lot of babies and adults.

 

McCain lost because God wasn’t on his side. Obama won as a punishment for the rest of us.

 

 

 

See the below from St. Irenaeus of Lyons 180 A.D.

 

Against Heresies

 

CHAP. XXIV.--OF THE CONSTANT FALSEHOOD OF THE DEVIL, AND OF THE POWERS AND GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD, WHICH WE OUGHT TO OBEY, INASMUCH AS THEY ARE APPOINTED OF GOD, NOT OF THE DEVIL.

1. As therefore the devil lied at the beginning, so did he also in the end, when he said, "All these are delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will I give them."(2) For it is not he who has appointed the kingdoms of this world, but God; for "the heart of the king is in the hand of God."(3) And the Word also says by Solomon, "By me kings do reign, and princes administer justice. By me chiefs are raised up, and by me kings rule the earth."(4) Paul the apostle also says upon this same subject: "Be ye subject to all the higher powers; for there is no power but of God: now those which are have been ordained of God."(5) And again, in reference to them he says, "For he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, the avenger for wrath to him who does evil."(6) Now, that he spake these words, not in regard to angelical powers, nor of invisible rulers--as some venture to expound the passage--but of those of actual human authorities, [he shows when] he says, "For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God's ministers, doing service for this very thing."(7) This also the Lord confirmed, when He did not do what He was tempted to by the devil; but He gave directions that tribute should be paid to the tax-gatherers for Himself and Peter;( because "they are the ministers of God, serving for this very thing."
2. For since man, by departing from God, reached such a pitch of fury as even to look upon his brother as his enemy, and engaged without fear in every kind of restless conduct, and murder, and avarice; God imposed upon mankind the fear of man, as they did not acknowledge the fear of God, in order that, being subjected to the authority of men, and kept under restraint by their laws, they might attain to some degree of justice, and exercise mutual forbearance through dread of the sword suspended full in their view, as the apostle says: "For he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, the avenger for wrath upon him who does evil." And for this reason too, magistrates themselves, having laws as a clothing of righteousness whenever they act in a just and legitimate manner, shall not be called in question for their conduct, nor be liable to punishment. But whatsoever they do to the subversion of justice, iniquitously, and impiously, and illegally, and tyrannically, in these things shall they also perish; for the just judgment of God comes equally upon all, and in no case is defective. Earthly rule, therefore, has been appointed by God for the benefit of nations,(9) and not by the devil, who is never at rest at all, nay, who does not love to see even nations conducting themselves after a quiet manner, so that under the fear of human rule, men may not eat each other up like fishes; but that, by means of the establishment of laws, they may keep down an excess of wickedness among the nations. And considered from this point of view, those who exact tribute from us are "God's ministers, serving for this very purpose."
3. As, then, "the powers that be are ordained of God," it is clear that the devil lied when he said, "These are delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will, I give them." For by the law of the same Being as calls men into existence are kings also appointed, adapted for those men who are at the time placed under their government. Some of these [rulers] are given for the correction and the benefit of their subjects, and for the preservation of justice; but others, for the purposes of fear and punishment and rebuke: others, as [the subjects] deserve it, are for deception, disgrace, and pride; while the just judgment of God, as I have observed already, passes equally upon all. The devil, however, as he is the apostate angel, can only go to this length, as he did at the beginning, [namely] to deceive and lead astray the mind of man into disobeying the commandments of God, and gradually to darken the hearts of those who would endeavour to serve him, to the forgetting of the true God, but to the adoration of himself as God.
4. Just as if any one, being an apostate, and seizing in a hostile manner another man's territory, should harass the inhabitants of it, in order that he might claim for himself the glory of a king among those ignorant of his apostasy and robbery; so likewise also the devil, being one among those angels who are placed over the spirit of the air, as the Apostle Paul has declared in his Epistle to the Ephesians,(1) becoming envious of man, was rendered an apostate from the divine law: for envy is a thing foreign to God. And as his apostasy was exposed by man, and man became the [means of] searching out his thoughts (et examinatio sententioe ejus, homo factus est), he has set himself to this with greater and greater determination, in opposition to man, envying his life, and wishing to involve him in his own apostate power. The Word of God, however, the Maker of all things, conquering him by means of human nature, and showing him to be an apostate, has, on the contrary, put him under the power of man. For He says, "Behold, I confer upon you the power of treading upon serpents and scorpions, and upon all the power of the enemy,"(2) in order that, as he obtained dominion over man by apostasy, so again his apostasy might be deprived of power by means of man turning back again to God.

 

 

[MeaMaximaCulpa]

PJB was on EWTN talking with Raymond Arroyo.  I always enjoy listening to him, but I really can't stand to watch MSNBC (one wonders why he even works for them).  I agree with him, that Sarah Palin helped unite the base.  However, I hope she goes back to Alaska, and doesn't come around for 2012.

She still represents the neo-con movement, and everything that's wrong with the GOP.  Hopefully they'll learn from their mistakes, and come back in two years as an actual conservative party.

Maybe PJB will run in 4 years?  Hey, if McCain could be a candidate in his 70s, then perhaps the GOP could put up another one.