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Who Can Cross the Partisan Divide?
by Christopher Chantrill
July 24, 2006 at 4:32 pm
AS CONNECTICUT Democrats get ready to sink their liberal Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, Debra J. Saunders wonders if he isn’t the Democrats’ version of John McCain. In talking to some Democrats she told them:
I appreciate McCain's efforts to curb Washington's runaway spending.. What is more, I think McCain in the White House could go a long way in healing the country's ugly partisan divide.
Then again, I added, Democrats have their own maverick — Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.
But is John McCain really the Republicans’ Joe Lieberman? Joe Lieberman is a good loyal Democrat, except that he is not willing to join the fever swamp in abandoning the War on Terror. John McCain ran against the Republican base in 2000, has authored the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold limitation on political activity, and has seemed until recently to be always looking for ways to stick it to President Bush and garner some cheers from the mainstream media.
There is something missing in John McCain. I call it class.
But there is a potential Republican presidential candidate who does have class and who does have a record of healing the partisan divide. That man is Rudi Giuliani, the Republican who was elected twice as mayor of Democratic New York City.
And according to Ryan Sager Rudi, the gay-friendly, pro-choice Republican, does just as well among the conservative Republican base as McCain. Actually, the idea that Giuliani could not win conservative votes has come principally from the mainstream media, who for months have been writing on
a willful adherence to a false storyline that social conservatives could never accept a Giuliani candidacy.
How would they know? I mean, who would be the last group in the country to have a clue about who social conservatives would vote for? Exactly, liberal MSM journalists.
Here’s my prediction. John McCain will burn up like straw. There are too many Republicans that just don’t like him.
John McCain is no Joe Lieberman. John McCain is John McCain. And he just doesn’t have what it takes to be nominated as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party.
Sphere: Related Content | | printChristopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Holy Families
Revelations cannot be sustained and transformed into successful new religions by lonely prophets... Indeed, new religious movements based on revelations typically are family affairs.
Rodney Stark, Exploring the Religious Life
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