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McCain Loses Control |
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September 17, 2008
No, this isn’t about John McCain’s infamous temper. It’s about the Republican presidential nominee losing control of his party.
While continually claiming his maverick persona, John McCain succumbed to reinventing himself as a right-wing extremist. In fact, his campaign has done things in reverse and, from their perspective, done it successfully. Common logic dictates that candidates appeal to the base while seeking the nomination and then move to the center during the general election cycle. McCain has done the opposite.
Starting as more of a centrist, he has since shifted more and more to the extreme right. His lukewarm campaign was energized by the pick of Sarah Palin as the V.P. nominee. Palin, an obscure mayor of a town of less than 6,000 became governor of a state with a population of 670,000. A fascinating comparison for me is that I reside in a small suburb of St. Louis, a municipality with a population of 7,500, located in St. Louis County, which has a population of just over one million. (A former mayor of my little town quipped, “Gee, I guess this means I’m one position away from qualifying as a Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States!”)
But in picking Palin, McCain tossed aside qualification and experience in favor of the red meat provided by her right wing extremist views. Palin believes that the right of control over American uteruses lies with government, and not the women in whose bodies those uteruses reside. She believes this so fervently that she opposes the option to abort even in cases of incest and rape. Palin “sought advice” from her local librarian regarding the process for banning “objectionable” books. And when the librarian stood firmly opposed to the banning of books, Palin fired her. She opposes sex education and supports “abstinence only” programs as substitutes. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools. And revealing her belief in her ability to know God’s will, she was caught on video tape expressing how God wanted her to build a new pipeline through the state of Alaska.
Red meat indeed.
Does this sound like the pick of a maverick? To the contrary, this has the Rove brand stamped all over it. Certainly it came as no surprise when the announcement was made that Karl Rove was actively engaged in McCain’s campaign. Actually, it was more of a confession since he was (supposedly) a political analyst for “Fair and balanced ‘Fixed Noise.’” If anyone knows how to energize the extreme right, it’s Rove, who admitted that McCain’s pick of Palin was “not a governing decision, but a campaign decision.”
By itself, that comment is frightening enough, but for me, all the extremism is compressed into a single line in the Republican platform:
We call for a ban on human cloning and for a ban on the creation of or experimentation on human embryos for research purposes.
It’s worth reading that twice and letting it sink in. After the third time you’ll realize that the latest Republican position makes the restrictive Bush policies appear left wing by comparison.
The Republican Party no longer makes the argument that, “Embryonic stem cell research is fine so long as it’s privately funded. We just don’t want our tax dollars allocated for this.” No, its new official position is that all embryonic stem cell research should be banned – period. This is the platform upon which John McCain, the self-described maverick, will run; the same John McCain who twice voted in support of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act.
McCain has been clear that he would support a ban of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT), despite the benefits it should provide by creating stem cells genetically matched to patients and therefore negating need for immuno-suppression therapies. That already represented a substantive difference between the Republican presidential candidate and the Democratic ticket. But now, the Republican Party has mandated that McCain’s previous position of supporting research on leftover IVF-derived embryos – those slated for incineration as medical waste – is to be verboten. In the view of the extremists – and now the official platform of the Republican Party – it’s morally acceptable to incinerate those embryos as medical waste, but immoral to use them to find cures for those living among us with currently incurable diseases and injuries.
There are other relevant factors to consider as well. Remember when Bush vetoed the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, surrounded by those “snowflake babies?” Those children, a sample of the 130 or so in the “snowflake” category, were the result of in vitro fertilization, born from experiments on human embryos.
IVF has produced over a million children for otherwise infertile couples. Under the guidelines of the new Republican platform, research to improve the IVF process would necessarily come to a halt.
In their zeal to halt embryonic stem cell research, the extremists of the Republican Party have mindlessly offered up a doctrine so restrictive that some medical research in the United States could be set back forever. Moreover, McCain has opted to lose control of his party – in order to win an election.
- Jeff Eisen
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