Why Liberals Love McCain

By Michael Kinsley

Republicans have pulled some dirty tricks before: Swift Boats, Watergate, you name it. But this time they have gone too far. In its desperate hunger for victory at any cost, the Republican Party is on the verge of choosing a presidential candidate, John McCain, who is widely regarded (everywhere except inside the Republican Party itself) as honest, courageous, likable and intelligent.

Have they no shame?

More important: Have they no principles? In a properly functioning two-party democracy, each party is supposed to nominate a person whom members of the other party will detest. Ordinarily this is not a problem. In recent years, the basic principles of each party have been anathema to the other. If a candidate in addition has a personality that gives the opposition fits, or a few character flaws it deplores, that is gravy. Indeed, since Ronald Reagan (who last ran for office a quarter-century ago), the parties haven't even liked their own candidates all that much. The dilemma of liking the opposition candidate just hasn't arisen.

There is a word for it when a political party chooses a presidential candidate with more appeal in the opposition party than in his own. That word is cheating. For heaven's sake, if the Republicans want to keep the White House that badly, why don't they just nominate Hillary Clinton and be done with it?

As a lifelong Democrat, I have wallowed in the luxury of voting against some of the most unappealing politicians in American history, starting with Richard Nixon and ending (so far) with George W. Bush. I am surely going to vote against McCain, but it is going to take work, and there will be moments of doubt. This will be no fun. Doubts are for independents.

Only a couple of years ago, there were noises that McCain might admit he was much too nice to be a Republican and might run for President as an independent--or even as a Democrat. Democrats swooned and said they would vote for McCain because he was "honest." McCain is perceived as authentic, which is a deeper form of honesty than mere truth-telling. He says he's antiabortion? Oh, he doesn't mean that. Among current or recent figures in American public life, only Colin Powell shares McCain's mystical ability to make liberals believe he secretly agrees with them, no matter what he actually says. And Powell has to work at having it both ways. For McCain, it's a gift. Mitt Romney demonstrated that there are limits to how many brazen flip-flops the voters will tolerate. But when people believe you are telling the truth if you agree with them and lying if you disagree, you don't need to flip-flop.

What a brilliant bluff the Republicans have been acting out these past couple of years! It's like the elaborate hoax in the movie The Sting. They had us convinced that their nominating process was some version of the Salem witch trials, testing the candidates for any sign of heresy and hanging or drowning the ones who flunked. Then they choose the very guy many Republicans most suspect of being a witch. If you doubt that the whole thing was staged, just consider who the runner-up was. How could a party truly dedicated to self-destruction through ideological purity end up with the choice of McCain or Romney?

If the Democrats nominate Hillary, both parties will have chosen candidates who are intensely loathed by more than a few of their own members. But the parallel stops there. McCain is widely admired among Democrats, and many Democratic Hillary haters will be happy to vote for him. By contrast, there is no constituency for Hillary among Republicans who can't stand McCain. Nor, for that matter, will many of them vote for Barack Obama.

If it's Hillary, people's growing dislike of Bush, his horrible war, his crumbling economy, his tiresome smirk, will help McCain. Even though McCain is the candidate of the President's party and even though he is the biggest supporter of the Iraq war outside of the Administration, McCain is the one who will seem like a new broom that sweeps clean. Hillary, meanwhile, has been transformed by the Washington press corps in the past few weeks from the first woman with a serious chance of becoming President into a two-headed monster always referred to as "the Clintons."

I cannot believe that a man as fine and decent as McCain would want to become President by the underhanded tactic of accepting the nomination of a party that loves him only for his appeal to the opposition. If McCain were half the principled gentleman he pretends to be, he would drop out now in favor of Rush Limbaugh. Now there's a Republican you can sink your teeth into.