McCain/Romney Ticket Logical

INTERVIEW – Vice-presidency, Supreme Court, economy, foreign policy… With just over a hundred days left until the election, Vincent Michelot, specialist in American institutions and political life, decrypts John McCain’s strategy in the face of the conservative electorate.

JC: What kind of conservative is John McCain?

VM: The conservatism of John McCain is the conservatism of Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican President (1901-1909) who spearheaded a large set of antitrust regulations. It’s a fiscal conservatism (with a true belief in tax reduction) that, at the same time, condones a very activist federal State that doesn’t hesitate to regulate when it’s in the citizens’ interest. If he were President today, he would support by example the rescue of banks in difficult straits after the sub-prime crisis.

But there are other issues about which McCain is an ideologue who has never distanced himself from the most conservative position. On the abortion question, for example, he has an impeccable record for abortion opponents.

And here, he is a strict conservative, which will have an impact on one of the next themes of the campaign, the Supreme Court, because the next president will doubtless have at least one nomination, maybe two, or even three. And given the current ideological balance of the Supreme Court, one, two, or three nominations could shift the Court into an extremely conservative camp. Further, the justices are nominated for life and can stay for 20, 30, 35 years… So any nomination a president makes has a juridical impact long into the future.

And the Supreme Court takes stances on important questions, such as the separation of Church and State, the prerogatives of the executive branch in relation to Congress, the war against terrorism, the carrying of arms, and the right to privacy…we are dealing with critical issues that are very concrete in the lives of Americans.

JC: Will these be the themes with which McCain will try to attract the most conservative voters?

VM: One sees it very little from France, but John McCain made a series of very strong gestures on the religious question, gay marriage, abortion,…

He lost the Republican nomination in 2000 against Bush because he wasn’t far enough to the Right, not conservative enough, particularly in South Carolina.

So he really did undergo the full force of the vengeance that conservative Christians could exert on him, and now he is courting them very directly.

JC: At the risk of alienating the more moderate party members…

VM: Yes. But this remark would really be pertinent if this were an election with two candidates of equal standing. But in a campaign, even before going to win voters in the Middle, who are known from experience to be extremely fickle, it’s necessary to address the party base, here, the Christian fundamentalists-– because it is known exactly when and based on what issues they can be mobilized. For them, the decision isn’t between voting Democrat and voting Republican, but between voting Republican and staying home.

It’s one of the absolute lessons of Karl Rove (ex-“spin doctor” of George W. Bush): the Middle is good, but it’s anything but an election guarantee.

So, first off, one stabilizes the base of the party. And then, once that is secured, one goes on to the next stage, which is to open up to the Independents.

But this will also depend on the positioning of Barack Obama: these last few weeks, he has very emphatically moved to the Middle, because the Democratic base is already more mobilized. Since McCain is Obama’s challenger, he will position himself in response to Obama. Because it’s Obama who draws the line.

JC: How can McCain avoid giving the impression that his election wouldn’t lead to a third Bush term?

VM: It’s obviously the center of McCain’s strategy, but he can’t ignore the people who are still loyal to Bush. Because it’s important to distinguish between Bush’s overall unpopularity records and the Republican voters who will go to the polls on November 4, 2008. Among them, some are disappointed or angry, but Bush remains, among these voters, a very popular person. He’s a kind of hero of the conservative movement. So McCain needs, on the one hand, to distinguish himself, but, on the other, not to be too critical.

The Republicans know well that they will lose in certain regions, but the idea is to make up for these losses, to limit them, trim away at the Democratic electorate by talking about gay marriage to blacks, about abortion to Hispanics, about the right to bear arms to voters who are union members and have more traditional views on that question.

And in the far off suburbs, they will do their utmost to win 99% of the people identified as potential Republican voters. It’s an election which is extraordinary in these circumstances but that will play on super traditional themes, such as the capacity of the two parties to mobilize, their tactics and their organization, their “get out the vote” efforts, that is to say, going to find voters one by one, and the identification of three or four key states (Ohio, Arizona, Virginia, and even North Carolina). And, as the Americans say, afterwards, it’s politics as usual.

JC: Can McCain count on his vice president to draw the conservative electorate?

VM: You have to go back to 1960 to see a running mate have an impact on the result of a presidential election: that year, Kennedy clearly won because Johnson made him win in Texas. If not, Nixon would have become president that year. But that’s the last time a vice presidential candidate had such an important role in an election.

Furthermore, it’s important to emphasize that no vice president has ever been as powerful as Dick Cheney, and this comes in the wake of another powerful vice president, Al Gore under Clinton. So the function has become more important over time. Furthermore, McCain is 72. And, at some times, he really shows it. A recent poll actually showed that Americans are more preoccupied with his age than with Obama’s ethnicity.

JC: Mitt Romney has a lot of momentum among conservatives…

VM: Yes, a McCain/Romney ticket would be logical. Because if the Vice President is powerful, he needs to be able to function intimately in the circles of power and to have a degree of rapport that, for example, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton lack, but that Romney and McCain could build.

Both are pragmatic; they haven’t interacted regularly; they don’t come from the same arenas within the Republican Party. But they don’t have elements that make them incompatible. McCain is a sort of iconoclast within the party; Romney comes from the party’s business community. It’s a choice that would calm down the business interests, which are concerned because McCain isn’t reassuring from an economic standpoint. He would also satisfy a lot of Conservatives from the point of view of religion and values. And he’s someone with an aura of competence, and experience with local power. He’s someone one can imagine adapting quickly to the presidency.