National Review

This week, John McCain is the cover story for National Review, the journal of American conservative thought.

The Case for McCain by Ramesh Ponnuru - The Coming McCain Moment: Taking a second look

Here are some excerpts:

"I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today,” says Sen. John McCain, holding a copy of the paper with his picture on the front page. “McCain firm on Iraq war,” it says above the fold. He flips it over to show the rest of the headline: “despite cost to candidacy.” “I can’t worry about it,” he says. “With something like this, you just can’t let it concern you. The issue is too important.”

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“I think the important thing is you look at people’s voting record,” says McCain, “because sometimes rhetoric can be a little misleading.” Over the course of his career, McCain has compiled a pretty conservative voting record. Neither Giuliani nor Romney, as McCain implied, has a record to match. An objective observer looking at Bush and McCain in 1999 would have had to conclude that, based on their histories, McCain was the more conservative of the two.

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McCain was one of a few Republicans to vote against Bush’s tax cuts. He said that the tax cuts were fiscally reckless and too skewed to the rich. But he now accepts those tax cuts as a done deal. Reversing them now, or allowing them to expire, would constitute a tax increase, and McCain has never voted for a general tax increase. When I ask him whether there were any circumstances in which he would accept a tax increase, for example to get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts, he says, “No. None. None.” It seems pretty clear that a President McCain would seek spending cuts before tax cuts. But if you take him at his word — and he is a man who takes honor seriously — he won’t raise taxes.

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McCain gets a bad rap from social conservatives. He opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment on the theory that states should set their own marriage policies. But he opposes same-sex marriage, too, and says that he would support a constitutional amendment if the federal courts ever tried to impose it on reluctant states. As a practical matter, it is hard to see how any president could get such an amendment enacted without that type of provocation.

The senator has been rock-solid on abortion. Unlike anyone else in the race, he has a pro-life record stretching back to the early 1980s. Like President Bush, he says that the Supreme Court made a mistake in Roe; he goes further than Bush when he adds that the Court should overturn it. He voted to confirm all of the sitting conservative justices, plus Robert Bork.

McCain muddied the waters with one foolish remark in 1999. He was trying to make the point that the country is not ready for abortion to be prohibited, but in the course of trying to say that he said that the country wasn’t ready for Roe to go. He corrected himself quickly, but that lone remark has been used to portray him as a secret pro-choicer or a flip-flopper.

He really has broken ranks with pro-lifers twice. In the early 1990s, he voted to fund research using tissue from aborted fetuses, and he now supports federal funding for research on embryos taken from fertility clinics. But he draws the line at stem-cell research involving cloned human embryos. He says that he would prohibit that, even mistakenly claiming that he has co-sponsored legislation to that effect.

Social conservatives think that Republicans have repeatedly betrayed them. At the highest levels of national politics, that’s not true. The reason that social conservatives haven’t achieved many of their objectives even though they have helped to elect a lot of Republicans over the last generation is that those objectives are hard to achieve. It has been slow work to fight the pervasive liberalism of the elite legal culture. But when President Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy and the first President Bush appointed David Souter, they weren’t trying to betray conservatives; they didn’t know how those justices would turn out. McCain thinks that type of mistake can be avoided if presidents pick nominees who don’t just say the right things, but have track records of judging soundly. He’s right. Conservatives’ reception of McCain shouldn’t be colored by historical mythology.

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But McCain’s merits are considerable as well. He has been tough on spending, and been willing to ally with the most conservative members of the Senate to fight earmarks. He has been a stalwart free trader: “Since Phil Gramm left, there’s no greater free-trader in the Senate than I am.” (McCain supported Gramm’s presidential campaign in 1996, and Gramm is supporting his now.) Curbing the growth of entitlements, he says, will be one of his top priorities as president. He has long supported personal accounts.

Leave all of that aside for a moment. For a lot of conservatives, the War on Terror is paramount. That’s why some of them are willing to overlook Giuliani’s faults. But if toughness on terrorism trumps everything else, with toughness defined as competent execution of the administration’s basic strategy — and that’s the way it has to be defined for this argument to work for Giuliani at all — then McCain is hands down the best candidate. He has better national-security credentials than Giuliani, having been involved in foreign policymaking for more than two decades while the latter has barely been involved at all. More than any other candidate, he has shown a commitment to winning in Iraq. He has supported it, indeed, more vigorously than Bush has waged it, and he has put his career on the line.

McCain has the moral authority to get a country that has grown tired of the war to listen to him, an authority President Bush has seen slip away. That isn’t just because he is a former prisoner of war with one son serving in the Marines and another in the Naval Academy — although that helps. It is because he is not seen as playing politics with the war, as most Democrats and Republicans are, and he never will be.

Conservatives may need to reach some understandings with McCain before throwing their support to him: on the vice-presidential nominee, on immigration, maybe even on the number of terms McCain will serve as president. (He is 70.) But he can win both the nomination and the election. He is plenty conservative. And he deserves a long second look.

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Until you read the whole thing, here is a piece from National Review Online by Senator Jon Kyl you might also find interesting: "Right on McCain: John McCain's conservative record is excellent"