"Ask the gun grabbers
They were the ones creaming their jeans over McCain as a possible Dem VP candidate."I've seen more than one post in which you've made this allegation:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=118&topic_id=83410#83447"Yeah, I loved it when all the gun nuts were singing the praises of McCain
For the Democratic VP nomination."And so I've done a little search. And I just haven't been able to find any evidence of this jeans-creaming or praise-singing.
(I did find one poster musing briefly about the possibility, and of course I also found you accusing that poster, in another thread, of being someone he plainly wasn't, sugggesting that perhaps the explanation is that you (claim to) see things that aren't quite there:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=118&topic_id=64763)
Can you provide something to substantiate your allegation that there was some widespread groundswell of support for the idea of John McCain as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee among advocates of firearms control in this forum?
Do you agree that if you can't, it might be decent of you to stop making it?
I'd like to comment briefly on the broader question of cross-party approval.
I don't have to worry about this sort of thing too much myself. My party, the New Democratic Party of Canada, has a relatively clear agenda and doesn't tend to attract members or candidates who don't support it. People who don't like our policies don't often want into our tent -- and we don't fling the tent doors open to people who don't agree with our policies. We are both socially and economically
left, although degrees may vary.
The Liberal and Conservative parties here have more problems in this respect. In both cases, the leadership/power brokers are economically
right, while the broader rank and file varies in degree, some in both parties being relatively
left. The leadership of the Liberal party in particular will go as far left on economic issues as is necessary to retain power in a society that swings different ways at different times, but is generally relatively
left; the Conservatives haven't learned this lesson as well.
Many prominent Liberals are socially "liberal", which I would of course characterize as socially
left-wing, while the leadership/power brokers are essentially indifferent to the issues (e.g. same-sex marriage); the money's the thing, for them. Again, they'll stress such issues, and their adherence to "liberal" positions on them, to the extent necessary to retain power.
Our modern Conservative party has more problems in that respect, and is more similar to the US Republican party than it used to be. One of its core constituencies is the socially "conservative" group, which is more accurately characterized as socially
right-wing. The economic
right doesn't run the show as much as it did before, and the leaders/power brokers increasingly come from the socially
right-wing constituency, which is also economically right-wing of course.
But this does not mean that all
conservatives are either economically or socially
right-wing.
In our recent election, Joe Clark, briefly a Prime Minister in the 70s and the former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party (our historic "conservative" party, which has now disappeared in a merger with the
right-wing Alliance party) in fact
endorsed the NDP candidate in an Ottawa electoral district: Ed Broadbent, the former leader of the NDP. So did Flora MacDonald, another prominent Progressive Conservative, and a Trudeau-era Liberal cabinet minister.
While those individuals did not come out and endorse the NDP against their own parties overall, they plainly recognized that *both* of their parties -- the new Conservative party, and the Liberal party under Paul Martin -- were under the sway of their overtly right-wing elements (economically, in the case of the Liberals, and socially, in the case of the Conservatives), and implicitly rejected this.
(Conversely, three prominent Western NDP politicians defected to the Liberals in that election, allegedly out of a fear of the "left/liberal" vote being split and the Conservative party coming up the middle, but in fact rather plainly out of naked personal ambition.)
Anyhow, from what I've seen of McCain, I'd say he's rather Joe Clark-like: a principled conservative, which is simply not the same thing as a right-winger.
Zell Miller, on the other hand, is plainly a right-winger, and not a "conservative" Democrat, if there is such a thing.
What McCain's motives for remaining with the Republican party are, one can only guess. And certainly the very decision to do so can be regarded as reprehensible in itself, in that it lends that party his personal credibility as a principled person. But it's just possible that his decision to remain could have better effects than a decision to defect from the party: defecting might have little impact on the outcome of the election, but remaining might allow him to have influence.
It isn't necessary to approve of any party or person 100% in order to recognize that something it/s/he does is worthwhile.
And certainly, conversely, criticizing any party or person on some aspect of what it/s/he says or does is not equivalent to condemning it/him/her.
In the US, with its virtual absence of party discipline, it seems like just about anybody, including prominent politicians, can call themselves Democrats and yet say and do little that is consistent with what might be understood to be the party's core values and agenda. Schwarzenneger seems to be another example on the Republican side, where the mavericks are perhaps a little scarcer: socially "liberal" and yet perceived as a right-winger, which he certainly is on other issues.
What I notice is that Democrats who oppose firearms control measures seldom line up behind other things that I would think of as the core values and agenda of the Democratic party, as expressed, say, in Al Gore's nomination speech for the 2000 election.
The problem, to me, seems to be precisely the absence of a firm consensus on what the core values and agenda of the Democratic party, in particular, are ... reflecting the absence of such a consensus in the society itself. And that latter lack of consensus is, to me, the real problem, of course.
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