High-profile Republicans abandon John McCain

Lately, there have been an increasing number of pretty serious Republicans deserting John McCain.

In early September, it was former Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, caught on a hot mike after an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd. “It’s over,” she said, while discussing McCain’s pick of running mate Sarah Palin. Noonan quickly wrote a column saying it was all a misunderstanding, but the damage was already done. (C’mon, Peggy—it wasn’t like we weren’t all thinking it, anyway.)

A few weeks later, conservative commentator George Will wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post entitled "McCain Loses His Head", which took McCain to task for his impulsiveness and unpredictability. “Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections,” Will wrote, “but the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.”

Will goes on to say, “it is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency”.

Last week, former George W. Bush assistant and speechwriter David Frum wrote in The Week, “the McCain campaign has been ghastly. It cannot decipher what ails the U.S. economy and it offers no remedies”.

Then the grumblings turned to defections.

First there was Christopher Buckley, another former Bush speechwriter and columnist for the National Review (and son of conservative icon William F. Buckley), who actually endorsed Barack Obama. Bemoaning McCain’s fall from grace, Buckley wrote “a once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises....Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?”

The came the corker: former chair of the Joint Chiefs under Bush One and secretary of state for Bush Two, Colin Powell. “I think he is a transformational figure, he is a new generation coming onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I’ll be voting for Senator Barack Obama,” said Powell.

While all this has the air of the GOP abandoning a sinking ship, the fact is that they were never really on board with McCain to begin with. He was too moderate, too liberal for the conservative wing of the party, and not the standard-bearer they had hoped for.

And although we shouldn’t count McCain out yet—two weeks can be an eternity in campaign time—you can already see the beginnings of a post-mortem. To wit, Frum writes: “it’s not even a failure of strategy. It’s a failure of the Republican Party and conservative movement to adapt to the times”.

In the coming months, get ready to witness a battle for the soul of the American Right, as its conservative and moderate wings each look for a transformational figure of their own.