Is McCain Inevitable?

The Democratic presidential candidates seemed to be jumping to conclusions tonight when they all touted themselves as the person best capable of debating John McCain during a general election. Apparently being a full-time politician doesn't immunize you from falling for media hype. In this case, McCain is now the Republican front-runner, apparently, because he got one-third of the vote in the South Carolina primary, barely beating Mike Huckabee, on the same day that he trailed Ron Paul in the Nevada caucuses. Yes, there are polls that put McCain on top nationally, but what have we learned about the Republican campaign? All we need is for Mitt Romney to win something again and he'll be the front-runner once more, and if Rudolph Giuliani actually wins Florida, he might become the front-runner, and Huckabee still has a chance.

We can't expect the Republicans to rush to crown McCain, because many of the same elements who have desperately opposed Huckabee also oppose McCain, and possibly with more vehemence. That'd be because McCain has a longer record of heresy in daring to speak out against corporate influence in politics. Some conservatives appear to require a groveling attitude toward corporations. George Will represents this faction as well as anyone, and in the column that appeared in today's Albany Times Union he anathematized McCain for daring to question corporate profits. For Will, the case is simple:

McCain's evident aim is to reduce pharmaceutical companies' profits. But if all those profits were subtracted from the nation's health care bill, the pharmaceutical component of that bill would be reduced only from 10 percent to 8 percent -- and innovation would stop, taking a terrible suffering and premature death.

Do you understand? If corporations can't maximize their profits, people will die! Consider all the people who would not be living today, Will invites, if not for corporations.

Republicans are supposed to eschew demagogic aspersions concerning complicated economic matters. But applause greets faux 'straight talk' that brands as 'bad' the industry responsible for the facts that polio is no longer a scourge, that childhood leukemia is no longer a death sentence, that depression and mental illnesses are treatable, that the rate of heart attacks and heart failures has been cut more than in half in 50 years.

Notice that this faction of conservatives must even downgrade individual achievement in order to give due praise to the great and good corporation. When I was a kid, we were taught that Dr. Jonas Salk was responsible for the end of the polio scourge, but George Will would have us understand that he was only a cog in a necessary machine, without which no worthwhile medical innovation would have emerged, and we might have spent our childhoods in iron lungs. Somehow this sounds like communism to me, which may only go to show that all ideologies eventually converge.

A few weeks ago Will was emptying similar rounds at Huckabee for similar sins. Who in the real world doubts that McCain or Huckabee would be better friends to corporations than any of the Democratic candidates with the possible exception of Senator Clinton? And yet because they show insufficient love for their betters, Will suggests that McCain specifically should join the Democratic party. No doubt Rush Limbaugh feels the same way about the Arizonan. Their great hope was Fred Thompson when Huckabee was their great fear. I don't know who they'll choose to save them from McCain, -- their choices seem to be down to Romney and Giuliani, -- but I can't imagine that they'll concede the nomination to him without a bitter fight. The Democrats better be careful of whom they train for.