The new conventional wisdom is that John McCain’s victory in South Carolina last Saturday is proof that the “conservative establishment” in general, and Rush Limbaugh in particular, are not the political force they once were. In Sunday’s Washington Post, for example, we read this:
From Rush Limbaugh to Tom DeLay, voices that once held sway over the Republican rank and file unloaded on John McCain over the last week, trying to use a conservative electorate in South Carolina to derail the Arizona senator's quest for the Republican nomination. But though McCain failed to persuade many of the old Republican power brokers, he wrapped up the Republican establishment where it counted most, South Carolina… Limbaugh led the way with a verbal blitz, not just against McCain but against his closest rival in South Carolina, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it," Limbaugh fumed on his radio show Tuesday. It was a line of argument that he kept up all week long.
New York Times columnist David Brooks makes a similar case in his column on Tuesday. After mentioning Limbaugh, Brooks writes: Conservative voters have not followed their conservative leaders. Conservative voters are much more diverse than the image you’d get from conservative officialdom… While various conservative poobahs threaten to move to Idaho if Huckabee or McCain gets the nomination, the silent majority of conservative voters seem to like these candidates… The fact is, this has been a bad year for the conservative establishment… Regular Republican voters don’t seem to mind independent thinking. There’s room for moderates as well as orthodox conservatives. Limbaugh, Grover Norquist and James Dobson have influence, but they are not arbiters of conservative doctrine.
I have several thoughts in response:
1. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, whom Brooks said created a “political earthquake” with his win in Iowa, seems to be sinking quickly, having never broken through and branched out his support beyond his evangelical base. In the aftermath of Huckabee’s win in Iowa, Brooks wrote, “He took on Rush Limbaugh, the free market Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.” That pronouncement looks less accurate now than it did then — and the demise of Huckabee can be attributed in part, I think, to the concerns raised about him by Limbaugh and others. The “political earthquake” Brooks thought he witnessed two weeks ago turns out, perhaps, to have been more like a political tremor.
2. It’s not clear to me that grassroots conservatives are ignoring, at least in large numbers, the counsel of Limbaugh and other “conservative poobahs” when it comes to Senator McCain. Obviously some conservatives and Republicans are voting for him — but certainly not in massive numbers. As the Washington Post wrote on Monday:
McCain has yet to clearly win the Republican vote in any contest this year. In South Carolina… the senator's margin came from independents, who represented one-fifth of the vote. The same pattern occurred in New Hampshire, where McCain and Romney evenly split Republicans and McCain won by a big margin among independents. In Michigan, Romney decisively won Republicans on his way to victory there.
Michael Barone makes a similar point when he writes, “[McCain] hasn’t been winning self-identified Republicans by any significant margin even where he has won, in New Hampshire and South Carolina. He has been running behind his 2000 percentages everywhere (though then he was in what was essentially a two-candidate race).”
CONTINUED 1 2 Next >
