Dan Calabrese

I bet John McCain thought, when he won the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, he was playing the most pivotal role he would ever play in the party. Apparently that was not the case. He now has an even more pivotal role. McCain has become a walking conservative litmus test.

Litmus test.

Because it’s an article of faith among conservative activists that McCain is a dastardly Republican In Name Only, said activists consider it a test of your “true conservative” bona fides that you must support his primary challenger, former congressman and radio host J.D. Hayworth, in this year’s Arizona Senate race.

Already, Sarah Palin has broken the hearts of true believers everywhere by heading to Arizona to campaign for McCain, although many write Palin’s decision off to necessary loyalty since no one would have ever heard of her without McCain.

But now Mitt Romney is tempting the same fate. Romney’s decision to endorse McCain over Hayworth likewise has activists looking for the highest window ledges from which to plunge. Rush Limbaugh has declared Romney’s choice to be “suicidal” in terms of any 2012 presidential aspirations he might have.

The conservative base at the moment is on a mission to rid the party of so-called RINOs, and McCain is the poster boy for their ire. This is not without some justification. McCain’s past support for free-speech-restricting campaign finance reform, his opposition to the Bush tax cuts and his blocking of a Republican attempt to end Senate filibusters against Bush judicial nominees deserved the criticism they received.

On immigration reform, I agreed with McCain and disagreed with the base, but I guess that just means I’m not a “true conservative” either. I’ll live.

But if you’re a philosophical conservative, and your goal is to get policies enacted that are most crucial to the nation from the conservative point of view, it doesn’t necessarily stand to reason that the best way to do it is to toss out every RINO in a primary and replace him with a so-called “true conservative.”

There is a good case to be made for conservative support of McCain:

- Right now, from a conservative point of view, the nation’s two most crucial priorities are restraint of federal spending, stopping health care reform (Obama-style anyway) and national security. On all three of these issues, McCain is solid. Granted, he voted for the TARP bailout – as did a lot of conservative heroes, like Congressman Paul Ryan – but McCain has long been an advocate of cutting federal spending, and has been one of the few senators who has refused to ask for earmarks for his state. Hayworth, by contrast, was quite the profligate earmarker during his years in the House. How exactly does that qualify him, in the minds of the base, as a “true conservative?”

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On national security, McCain has always backed, and proposed during his presidential campaign, the very strategy most conservatives believe Obama has erred by not pursuing. If McCain were president, we would still be putting a missile shield in Eastern Europe. We would be taking a hard line on Iran. We would not be bending over to let the Taliban back into the political process in Afghanistan.

On health care, McCain has been a consistent and effective voice against Obama’s proposals throughout the past year, and his own proposals in 2008 would have moved the nation toward the sort of consumer-directed system we need, not the sort of top-down system we already have, and that Obama would make worse.

- Because of his seniority and standing with the media, McCain can be an effective voice for the conservative positions on the above-mentioned issues. Many conservatives have criticized McCain for making too nice with the media over the years, and not without some justification, but at this particular point in time his having done so can come in very handy. It’s precisely because they do regard him as something other than a blustering partisan that his criticisms of Obama carry weight and get air time.

- J.D. Hayworth shows signs of not being a serious person. His big-spending, earmarking track record, we’ve already covered. His past ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff should give any one concerned about ideological principle serious pause. His recent statement demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate puts him in league with some of the kookiest fringe elements of the right wing.

And those who listened to his radio show before he left it to challenge McCain say he spent the vast majority of his time on that show railing against illegal aliens and ranting about border security – not that this is not an important issue, but it doesn’t suggest a guy who is well-rounded and serious about policy in a broad sense.

Surely there are plenty of reasons for conservatives to be upset with McCain about his past track record. But no election held in 2010 is for the purpose of repeating the past. It’s to put the best people in place to make the best decisions for the nation going forward.

Whatever his faults on other issues, McCain is for the right things on spending, health care and national security. His seniority and bipartisan credibility put him in a good position to advocate effectively for these things. And it just might be that, while Hayworth could make the case that he is the “true conservative,” Palin and Romney recognize the results for the nation – from a conservative point of view – might very well be better if McCain is the guy Arizona sends back to the Senate to get them done.

What good does it do to elect a “true conservative” if he can’t achieve what conservatives think is important? Unless you’re just doing it to spite the guy who made you mad in the past. Tell me, “true conservatives,” is that the real reason you’ve made McCain your walking litmus test?

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