Arizona Senator John McCain is signaling--with the jerkiest semaphore strokes imaginable--that he wants to own the Conservative Christian wing of the Republican Party come primary time. In the past few weeks he has proclaimed himself a Baptist, declared that “the constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” and equivocated as to whether he thought a Muslim would make a good president. The senator has made his move. These remarks have created the uproar that they were predictably supposed to create. He has officially said ta-ta to all those swing voters in the Blue States who just a few years back thought that the guy was kind of, you know, simpatico. There is no turning back. While some argue that McCain has lost his bearings, I believe that his statements—regardless of how disturbing they might be—make good tactical sense. For starters this is most likely his last stab at high office. To use a football metaphor, John McCain is in the fourth quarter of his political career. His recent provocations, while not quite a desperation Hail Mary Pass, are tantamount to the brisk running of the two-minute drill with 14 minutes left in the game. Pick it up. Focus. Stop kidding around.
He is trailing in the polls. His numbers are static. Unless he does something now, right now, his January campaign will be the functional equivalent of what the sportscasters brutally refer to as “garbage time.” He will be prattling on about the importance of "public service" and "doing for others" and all those other themes that politicians strike when they are about to get rolled.
McCain has the misfortune of competing with Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney for exactly the same lucrative chunk of the Republican base. His relations with Christian Conservatives, as I noted last week, have always been difficult. His handlers appear to have decided that now is the time to get their attention--all the better to remind them that he has the most solidly pro-life record of any Republican on the ticket. Indeed, personality conflicts aside (and the McCain-Feingold bill too), the senator has more ideological affinities with White Evangelicals than their leadership has ever been willing to concede.
In the short term, at least, McCain’s gambit seems to have paid off. It has generated the buzz, the outrage, the heart-a-fluttering Op-Eds that rarely came his way this past summer. Save Rudy Giuliani’s assault on moveon.org, McCain has dominated the news cycles for the past few weeks. All that remains to be seen is whether the senator’s lurch to the (Christian) Right impels Thompson and Romney to roll up their sleeves, crack open their Bibles and try and outdo him.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
