The Upside Of McCain
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OK, so maybe I spoke too soon about Romney rising in Florida. The 5 polls released today, all of which include Sunday in the polling range have McCain either up by a few points or tied with Romney (exception: this freaky Datamar poll that has Romney up by 13%.) We might call this McCain's Charlie Crist endorsement bounce (or it could be a "McCain's blatantly lying about Romney's stance on Iraq withdrawal" bounce.) Whatever the case, what's clear is that, as we've seen with other primaries this year, the race is volatile and still quite fluid, even one day out from voting.
As I've written, my stance has been that I would much prefer to run against Romney because, in my view, he'd be much easier for the Democratic nominee to draw distinctions from; it would be a breeze to pit Romney as the candidate of the Republican Party's regressive policies and the Democratic nominee as representing the party of mainstream values. But with McCain, like him or not, it's hard to deny that he actually shares some of our values.
I'm rethinking this theory somewhat in light of a fascinating panel discussion hosted by The Nation (featuring Naomi Klein and Bob Scheer) that I attended yesterday. I suspect I'll write more about the discussion, whose purpose was to explore the 2008 election in terms of what happens next for progressives in a post-Bush era, but I just wanted to offer an interesting point raised by Scheer during the talk.
Scheer's point essentially is that if McCain is the nominee, the very fact that he holds similar stances on issues such as global warming, torture and immigration to those held by the Democratic nominee will force our nominee to run to the left in order to draw distinctions. For example, on global warming, McCain is actually quite sane, acknowledging its existence and even placing the blame on human behavior (sadly, a rare thing for a Republican) but his solution is more nuclear power. In a fight against McCain, our nominee would be forced to take a stronger stance not only against nuclear power but also perhaps to go further than a cap and trade system, which McCain also favors, to get tougher on capping emissions.
This all presumes, of course, that our nominee will embrace the progressive moment in which we find ourselves and, unlike our two previous nominees, seek to shine a light on the differences between the parties rather than blur them. It will be our job to make sure our nominee does exactly that and, as odd as it sounds, a McCain nomination may very well aid us in that goal.
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