Pandering in the Wrong Direction − McCain’s Path Forward

The GOP’s probable nominee is working hard to foster support among his party’s base, but he would be better served worrying about moderates and independents.

Having all-but sewn up the Republican Party nomination, Senator John McCain is busy rallying conservatives behind his bid for the White House. Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, is positioning himself as the suitable running mate for the GOP candidate many in the party are reluctant to embrace.

McCain needs to tread carefully. While shoring up support among Republicans is important during these early stages − if for no other reason than to create the illusion of unity − the Arizona senator risks out-flanking himself on the left if he steps too far over the fine line between energizing the Republican base and appealing to moderates and independents. Choosing Mike Huckabee as the Republican vice-presidential nominee would be an erroneous and unnecessary political maneuver on McCain’s part.

Should Hillary Clinton win the Democratic nomination, McCain will have little need to ferment support in his own party. Sen. Clinton is a Republican get-out-the-vote campaign all unto herself. Despite Ann Coulter’s claims to the contrary, no GOP stalwart will withhold support for their candidate in a presidential race in which the cost of losing is a Hillary Clinton White House.

Sen. Barack Obama will be less polarizing and will present McCain with a whole different set of problems, but the conservative faithful can hardly be expected to abandon a not-quite-Reagan Republican for an anti-war African-American Democrat whose middle name is Hussein. McCain, against either potential opponent, would find it more difficult to lose the support of Republican voters than to win it.

Karl Rove’s base strategy worked against a largely uninspiring Democratic nominee in John Kerry in 2004, but had the Democrats chosen Howard Dean as their candidate, the Bush II campaign would have aggressively targeted the swinging voters they claimed didn’t exist.

Among conservatives, the threat of a Howard Dean administration was always going to be more offensive than a John Kerry White House, New England liberal though he was. That was precisely the reason, of course, Dean did not get his party’s nomination − his beliefs were classic democratic dogma, but he was not considered electable. The appropriate political tactic against a polarizing opponent is to target swinging voters and independents, confident that your base will come out whether you appeal to them or not.

With a conservative base, then, shored up one way or the other, and especially so if Clinton is nominated as the opposing candidate, McCain’s biggest mistake now would be to choose Mike Huckabee as his running mate. It would be a knee jerk response to the concerns many conservatives are currently voicing. In Michigan on January 15 the former Baptist minister frightened a great many Americans calling for an amendment to the Constitution to reflect ‘God’s standards’. Huckabee’s dream run in the GOP campaign to date has benefited from his socially conservative values. These would only be liabilities on a presidential ticket.

John McCain, given his age, would be an unlikely two-term president, so whoever his running mate is will almost certainly be the Republican nominee in 2012. Just as Hillary Clinton and her grand ideas for socialized healthcare frightens Republican voters, Huckabee incites fears among Democrats in much the same way. The threat of his having any influence in a McCain White House and of possibly succeeding McCain would energize the left-wing faction of the Democrats and turn swing voters off in a way that Clinton or Obama could never hope to. McCain would do well to avoid those risks.

Republicans are right to be concerned about the relative poor showing in the primary elections, and correct to suggest it was a result of the absence − the insipid Thompson and Brownback campaigns aside − of a genuine conservative in the race. With either Sen. Clinton or Obama replacing Mitt Romney as his rival, McCain will find the Republican base much less difficult to inspire come November.