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McCain 2008
by Faith Popinjay
November 2004
The best case scenario now is McCain in 2008. And no, not McCain as a converted Democrat. John McCain is smart. He did not become a Republican in some drunken fraternity haze. Party affiliation is one of the primary reasons the Senator from Arizona is so popular. The Republicans have a proven, viable brand, a Coke to the Democrats's Corvair, and McCain displays it with charming, flip flopping, corporation-lambasting inconsistency, in much the half-earnest way a tousled record store clerk sports a pair of Nike Vandals. You, too, can display this brand. If there is anything to learn from the recent rise in polo shirt collars, the chart-busting Q-factor of Reaganite stronghold Orange County and the lasting appeal of martinis, it is that the co-opt generation can, and should, co-opt the GOP brand. Change your registration, participate in Republican primaries and start influencing, in the subtle way you perhaps once influenced the headwear choices of your grammar school classmates, the right-leaning masses. Because, as the recent election has shown, the masses are leaning right. A Democrat has not won a majority of the popular vote for president since Jimmy Carter, and if talk of Hillary Clinton's hopes for the nomination is anything but wishful rightist thinking, the party is not about to recover its brand equity anytime soon.
Let us not forget what a banner year it was for GOP iconoclasts. First was anti-war elder Bush adviser Brent Scowcroft, then disgruntled Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and My Party Too author Christie Todd Whitman. There was reformed neocon Francis Fukuyama, Reagan speechwriter and chuckling Ron Suskind source Bruce Bartlett, and longtime log cabin pundit Andrew Sullivan, and countless lower-level ambassadors, officials and opinion makers.
More recently and notably there was Arlen Specter, our senior senator in Pennsylvania. A composite of Specter's quarter century voting record at Issues2000.org spit out this description of his politics: “Moderate Liberal Populist.” His is a dying breed within the Republican Party. Just this week, Specter's chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee was hurled into doubt when he referred to the right to an abortion as “inviolable.” Why aren't more senators backing him up, cutting the old coot some slack? Why not start with our other senator in Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. In 1993, when prominent state Republicans were deciding who was going to challenge Sen. Harris Wofford, a Democrat who'd won the space left open by the 1991 death of moderate Republican Senator John Heinz, in 1994, Santorum was not everyone's first pick. Specter tried to recruit Teresa Heinz, who decided against it. By early 1994, Santorum was virtually unopposed.
So perhaps you weren't around to sway the future Heinz-Kerry before her party was overrun with Contract With America types in pleated Dockers and shirtsleeves. And you probably didn't vote for Specter in the general election. All this matters less than the fact that, in these desperate times, you probably didn't so much as mull lending support or time to our senior Senator in his tragically close primary battle against the fervently pro-life National Rifle Association poster child Pat Toomey. Most Independent readers, I have found, have developed—and this year reaffirmed—a near-slavish brand loyalty to the Democratic Party that not only belies their mottled consumption patterns and eclectic music tastes, it defies reason. What, pray tell, have the Democrats in this city done for you that didn't involve a meaty campaign contribution?
In Philadelphia, to be somebody in the Democratic Party you've got to first meet every Democrat in the 400 houses surrounding yours and unseat your committeeman, throw at least a grand into each of the oft-dueling spheres of influence commanded by Mayor John Street, State Senator Vince Fumo and Congressman Bob Brady, and show up to every fifty-dollar-a-plate fundraiser the insipid John Dougherty of the Electricians' Union hosts. Not only is this an incredible investment of effort and money, it involves spending hours upon hours with union leaders, with their knockoff Timberlands and their shamelessly studied use of terms like “youse,” and their misinformed disdain of any BYOB that opened after the Rizzo era, the preposterous Vatican-like secrecy with which they shroud all events leading up to the filming of the Real World, and the general conspiratorial tones they adopt when discussing things as pathetically insignificant as whether Frank DiCicco will win back his ward leader position, and their terrible jukebox selections.
You, dear reader, have about as much in common with the average Local 98 member as you do with the average Bob Jones trustee. The difference is that the Bob Jones trustees are on the winning team; they are sponsored by a viable brand. You can be, too. Enough old-school iconoclasts in the Grand Old Party could send the Evangelicals voting for a Third Party Perot type and jump-start the Democrats on their Firestone tires. At the worst, we'd have McCain. In four more years, we'll likely have more important concerns than brand loyalty.
Faith Popinjay studies the future.
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