John McCain is an American hero. And he is also, albeit disputably, a conservative. The notion that he is something else - usually emanating from an anti-minority and rather regrettable wing of the conservative movement - is politically unsound and devoid of any realistic basis.
Conservatives of all types clamor for the "good old days" of Reagan at a time when the current GOP president is running up record debt and spending money on housing programs in a way that would have given Adam Smith and David Ricardo ulcers.
On the search for one mind-altering conservative leader, a subject on which so many of my colleagues seem to be wasting their time, Jeff Jacoby of the Globe said in February: "My point is simply that the immaculate conservative leader for whom so many on the right yearn to vote is a fantasy. Conservatives who say that McCain is no Ronald Reagan are right, but Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan either. Neither is Mike Huckabee. And neither was the real - as opposed to the mythic - Ronald Reagan."
This, however, is not to say that I blindly agree with many of McCain's policy prescriptions - I don't. On matters from illegal immigration to campaign finance to the Bush tax cuts to global warming, McCain has historically been too much to the left of what I would want in a Republican president. For these reasons, I supported Romney in the primary, until he conceded defeat to McCain.
What many anti-McCain conservatives like Coulter and Michelle Malkin don't see - or perhaps ignore in an effort to squeeze one more sound bite out of their otherwise irrelevant careers - is that McCain's behavior as president need not be identical to the way he voted as the senior Senator from Arizona, a state riddled by crime, uneven access to education and immigration concerns.
To be sure, the presidency and defense of the country bring with them more important and sobering challenges than the constituent-driven agendas of many Senators. And this is where and why Senator McCain bothers me a bit less, and President McCain excites me a lot more.
McCain is a political maverick who has been willing to vote and legislate across party lines in what he perceives as the best interests of the country. To Coulter, this makes him a "sellout" and less desirable a candidate than Hillary Clinton. To me, Coulter's rejection of McCain is just another reason to vote for him.
McCain is a man whose worldview is informed by so much more than his political education in the Senate. He was a prisoner-of-war for almost a decade at the "Hanoi Hilton" in Vietnam - a place that would make GITMO look like the North Apartments.
During this time, he refused both special treatment and release offered to him by the North Vietnamese because his father was a Pacific theatre admiral. As a consequence, he routinely endured brutal beatings and witnessed the extremes of human suffering. From these extremes, McCain has developed some "odd" notions of taking care of another and perhaps getting the government to act to protect the poor and the needy. To some, like Malkin and Coulter, this sounds "too liberal" and makes McCain a traitor who abandoned conservative principles long ago.
However, because McCain has lived through brutality that most Americans can hardly comprehend, I am willing to say there is something exceptionally refreshing in his willingness to break from contemporary conservative orthodoxy. It was this orthodoxy, you may recall, on which our current president ran his campaign in 2000 and quickly abandoned amid calls for the government to act. More importantly, it has made John McCain look like a refreshing post-Bush option.
If McCain's liberal social tendencies push away some old-style paleoconservatives, then his instincts on national defense and foreign policy should clearly be enough to pull them back in. As Jacoby of the Globe explains, "on the surpassing national-security issues of the day - confronting the threat from radical Islam and winning the war in Iraq - no one is more stalwart." In short, where Obama, Clinton and Pelosi would surely send diplomatic and fact-finding teams, a President McCain would send Marines and SEALs.
He would command an intensification of the international respect which he is already given and which his socialist opponents from the Democratic Party crave.
In an election cycle in which few things are certain, McCain's love for this great nation and his belief in both its inspirational greatness and moral rightness are profoundly indisputable. In Nov. 2007, the Boston Globe labeled McCain a national-greatness neoconservative in line with Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and David Brooks of the New York Times. Neither Kristol nor Brooks have ever been guilty of advocating for the Clintonian welfare state or Obamian socialization of healthcare.
In John McCain, conservatives would be getting a truly inspiring man whose life experiences serve to inform his thinking. He is, indeed, an American hero whose top priority will be to defend the soil and further the national interests of the country he has so selflessly served in both peace and war.
Unconvinced conservatives ought to let Clinton and Obama continue ripping each other apart. McCain's attention is and will remain on defeating our enemies in the Middle East, an issue on which he is fully qualified to lead the country. My vote goes to McCain.
Brad DeFlumeri is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at bdeflume@student.umass.edu.
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