McCain: The Anti-Republican?

I will not dispute the growing conventional wisdom that John McCain's very good standing in the polls has a lot to do with his reputed "maverickness." As Vaughn Ververs points out, the fact that voters cannot saddle John McCain with the Republican Party's baggage is making all the difference in an election year in which a generic Democrat is preferred to a generic Republican 50 percent to 37 percent. If I am a betting Dem, I like those odds.

But McCain defies the odds.

All the years he has spent being a perpetual pain in the ass to his fellow Republicans are finally paying off. His apostasy on taxes, on immigration, on the 1st Amendment...these are becoming the stuff of legends. And for that apostasy the media will repay him handsomely.

But there is an irony here that is being overlooked. John McCain's contrarian stands -- with the exception of his steadfastness on the issue of federal spending -- have all come at the expense of traditional conservatives, not today's Republican Party. The media would have us believe that traditional conservatives and today's GOP are on in the same. They are not.

Since the 1994 Republican Revolution, the Party has been sliding slowly leftward. Over the course of the last 13 years, the Party has ceased to be what it once was. It has abandoned the principles that made it great. The revolutionaries that came to Washington to change it became part of it -- and they liked it.

And as the Party has moved leftward on issues like immigration, taxes and the 1st Amendment, it has become more in line with McCain while being out of step with traditional, mainstream conservatism.

Don't forget, the media's favorite issue to cite as exhibit A of McCain's maverick status is immigration. But on that issue he had the backing of most of the GOP establishment. Remember, the bill only failed because a handful of conservatives hijacked the Senate floor to stall the bill's passage. This stalling bought time and forced the bill to crumble under the weight of its many inadequacies. So McCain was not so much out of step with his Party on the issue as he was with the American people in general.

At a time when the Republican Party promotes bills like this, it is traditional conservatives who deserve the maverick label more than John McCain. McCain is less of a maverick than he is a party unto himself.