A Party of Mavericks

St. Paul

When Representative Kevin McCarthy of California introduced the Republican platform to the party's convention last week, he had this to say: "Yes, we are a party of mavericks." The next night, a video extolling Ronald Reagan was screened with the disclosure that Reagan had been a maverick. And in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain mentioned in passing that he'd been called a maverick, too. "Sometimes it's meant as a compliment and sometimes it's not," he noted.

One thing it's never meant as, though, is a coherent set of political ideas or a strategy for governing. Nor is there a maverick ideology that might compete with conservatism or liberalism or even libertarianism. If there were, we'd have heard a good bit about the virtues of maverickism during the four days of the convention.

Of course we didn't. And the reason is that, in politics, a maverick merely suggests someone with a certain attitude and image or, as McCain put it, "someone who marches to the beat of his own drum." Indeed he's just such a person, McCain said. "I don't work for a party," he declared. McCain said this right after accepting the Republican party's presidential nomination "with gratitude, humility, and confidence."

As far as I could tell, no one at the convention or in the Republican hierarchy or in Congress was bothered by this contradiction. Yet having as president and head of the Republican party someone who proudly strays from party orthodoxy or ignores the party entirely--that's a recipe for difficulties in Washington. And Sarah Palin wouldn't be ready to offer immediate help. As governor she's clashed with Republicans in Alaska as frequently as McCain has with Republicans on Capitol Hill.

If the McCain-Palin ticket loses, the governing problem will vanish. Congressional Republicans will be on their own. But if McCain wins--and his chances improved considerably when he chose Palin as his vice presidential running mate--he'll have a tricky task to accomplish. As a Republican president facing a hostile Democratic Congress, McCain would need Senate and House Republicans as reliable allies. And most of them, by the way, aren't mavericks.

President Bush was confronted with exactly this circumstance--Democratic control of Congress--after the election of 2006. Without solid Republican backing in the Senate, his controversial troop surge that has turned around the situation in Iraq would have been jeopardized or halted altogether. Though many Republican senators were wary of his Iraq policy, Bush kept their support in part by accommodating them on other issues, such as earmarks.

Should McCain try to impose his every wish on congressional Republicans, he'd risk alienating them. If he brushed them aside in pursuit of bipartisan compromises with Democrats, that would make matters worse. It would split Republicans and wipe out hopes of a full recovery by the party from its collapse two years ago.

According to a former Bush administration official who worked closely with congressional Republicans, McCain would begin his White House term with "less good will and felt loyalty" among members of his own party than any president in memory. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, once referred to McCain as a "bridge burner." That's not a compliment.

But without near-unanimous backing by Republicans in Congress, McCain's two top priorities would be doomed: reform of spending practices, including deep cuts, and an aggressive foreign and national security policy. "I will cut government spending," McCain said in his acceptance speech. Only with Republicans and some renegade Democrats on board would he be able to keep that promise, however, since the vast majority of Democrats would reject a pared-down McCain budget out of hand.

Eric Cantor, the deputy Republican whip in the House, believes President McCain would implement an "ideology of accountability," acting "like a sledgehammer" to get rid of unneeded or unjustified spending. Democrats would not only object strenuously to that sort of budget process, they'd attempt to block it.

Imagine what Democrats thought when they heard McCain last week boast of "having fought the big spenders" as a senator and vow to fight them all the more vigorously as president. They must have figured he was talking about them, and he was. Again, to prevent Democrats from gutting his plans, McCain would need Republicans on his side, lots of them.