Friday, Jul 4, 2008
The Arizona moderate knocked out the Tennessee right-winger in the filibuster showdown. Does his victory foreshadow the 2008 primary?
May 25, 2005 | When Sen. John McCain stood before the microphone Monday night and announced the moderates' deal that averted the nuclear option, Majority Leader Bill Frist was nowhere to be found. He wasn't at the press conference. He wasn't a party to the deal. Despite orchestrating the showdown over the filibuster, Frist was left out of the compromise, looking like a fringe player in McCain's show.
If the confrontation over judicial nominees was an early battle among Republicans with an eye on the next presidential election, McCain, a leading centrist candidate, faced off against Frist, who is positioning himself as the conservative's conservative. And by any measure, McCain clearly won. But the filibuster drama may have exposed a larger truth about GOP efforts to succeed George W. Bush in 2008 -- neither McCain nor Frist is well-positioned to win the Republican nomination.
Indeed, the moderates' compromise may serve to undermine both politicians' White House ambitions. It all comes down to the right-wing constituency of the Republican Party. "No one had surfaced as the clear social conservative candidate even before this, and this serves to muddy it up that much more," Republican strategist Ed Goeas said. What's missing from the 2008 candidates, Goeas said, is "a Ronald Reagan conservative."
In failing to kill the filibuster and thus assure the approval of an endless raft of conservative judicial nominees, Frist didn't hand over the goods to the Christian right and may have paved the way for the rise of an even more conservative competitor. "There was only one way for Frist to win in the Republican Party, and that was for him to fully deliver," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "I was stunned to see the powerlessness projected by Frist and Reid, the majority and minority leaders on the floor [on Monday night]. Neither leader had many followers. They weren't running the show. Now look, you expect that of the minority leader. But you don't expect that of the majority leader. I thought he looked pale and worn and defeated. That is not the profile of a presidential nominee," Sabato said.
As the 2008 race heats up, McCain will undoubtedly reference Monday's compromise as proof that he is the beau ideal of comity, rising above the vitriolic Washington partisanship. But to many in the Republican base, he has never been a greater liability. In stopping Frist, McCain upset the very base he needs to win the Republican nomination. "When you are looking at a primary vote, what Republican primary voters wanted was to get those judges through, and what ultimately occurred is that Frist was pushing for that and McCain stopped that," said Republican strategist David Winston. "He didn't allow that to happen. When you go into the primary process, that's something that people are going to remember. And when you are looking at the Republican nomination, you are going to be looking at a lot more people who wanted all those judges to be accepted."
However Frist went down, he went down fighting for the religious right -- and that could help come primary time. The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are won by wooing the more active and more partisan members of each political party. "Of the folks who will attend [the Iowa caucuses] on the Republican side in 2008, you are probably looking at a good third that are active social conservatives," said Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Iowa.
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