McCain and Social Conservatives

As Rudy Giuliani goes gentle into that good night , it’s worth remembering what he was taken to represent, once upon a time. Or, at least, what Frank Rich told us he represented in the October 28, 2007, issue of the New York Times .

At that moment, Giuliani was on the top of all the polls, and “the most obvious explanation,” Rich explained,

is the one that Washington resists because it contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.

These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream. They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.

Giuliani meant, in other words, that the social conservatives were a spent force—in fact, that all concern with values was dead. National security and the war in Iraq have forever trumped abortion, and on those issues, Giuliani was the victor (despite “the mad neocon bombers” shaping Giuliani’s “apocalyptic” foreign policy, Rich felt compelled to add, just to be sure no one thought him capable of actually praising a Republican).

Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way. Perhaps the social conservatives never really had the ability to impose their candidate on the national party. Certainly they don’t have it this election cycle, as the campaigns of Brownback and even Huckabee show.

But the fiscal conservatives and the strong foreign-policy advocates don’t have that power either, and without at least a good percentage of social conservatives to form the third leg of the Reagan coalition, no candidate has much chance of winning the Republican nomination. And rightly so, for without a great deal of willingness from social conservatives to come out and vote in the national election, the Republican nominee has no chance of winning in November against the Democrats.

As it happens, lots of conservatives don’t like McCain, for a variety of reasons, some reasonable and some unreasonable. But at least, unlike Giuliani, the man genuinely does oppose abortion, and in the end, that has made a difference.

There is a measure of actual weakness in the national pro-life organizations here, if Frank Rich is still looking for one. Ever since 2002, most of those organizations have insisted that support for campaign-finance restrictions—particularly of the McCain-Feingold sort—is a black mark on a politician’s pro-life record (on the grounds that pro-life advertising would be unfairly limited during campaign seasons). But they have been mostly unable to persuade ordinary pro-lifers to go along.

McCain’s second blot, for the pro-life organizations, is his role in the Gang of 14’s settlement on judges. This is a more serious complaint: The battle over abortion is fundamentally a battle over the judiciary, at this point. George Bush found this out to his cost when he nominated Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, and McCain must make clear to voters that he wasn’t compromising the pro-life position when he joined the Gang of 14. Still, this wasn’t a failure to support the good candidates for the Supreme Court, which is of primary importance, and McCain has room to maneuver and explain.

Add it all up, and McCain looks like a candidate whom social conservatives could support in reasonably good conscience. He’s not their favorite—but he ain’t Rudy Giuliani, either. The three-part coalition of the Republican party remains alive, and in John McCain it seems to have found the candidate that everyone can live with. That’s not enthusiasm, of course, but it’s a long way from the New York Times ’ vision of Rudy Giuliani doing a victory dance on the grave of social conservatism.