Posted by
Matt Purple on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 3:28:54 PM
And believe it or not, that honor doesn't go to Bush, who can only claim the honor of being our second worst Republican president. Or perhaps our third if you consider Rutherford B. Hayes. His muttonchops still summon a stark fear into the hearts of conservatives everywhere.
John McCain, in seeking an identity for his amorphous and somewhat unprincipled "maverick"-ness, has long been comparing himself to President Teddy Roosevelt, a politician for whom his admiration is no secret. Roosevelt, who served as president from 1901 to 1909, is one of history's most famous GOP statesmen and also a guiding light for self-styled "progressives". As a personality, he's hard to hate. A rugged frontiersman and energetic polymath whose hobbies included boxing, reading, and conservation, Roosevelt seemed to embody the best of the American spirit. But his overreaching policy prescriptions were far removed from the American Founding. Roosevelt was less a maverick than someone at total odds with his own party, an unapologetic statist renowned for his anti-business regulations and hurling America's military weight around the world.
McCain's most puzzling TR tribute is a web
video that features a lengthy quote from the twenty-sixth president. The lefty blog Think Progress correctly noted that the excerpt was from Roosevelt's speech at the Progressive Party convention in 1912, after TR fled the Republican Party because it had nominated the more conservative William Howard Taft. At the time, Roosevelt's platform included a living wage, a public insurance program similar to Social Security, and a death tax. This followed a presidency during which he cracked down on business, instituted countless economic regulations (including instituting price ceilings on railroads), and passed the unconstitutional Antiquities Act which allowed for the creation of national monuments and public parks without Congress' consent. Roosevelt even had a slice of contemporary environmentalist killjoy in him, refusing to allow a Christmas tree in the White House.
This troubling record of government interventionism at home coupled with Roosevelt's equally overreaching record of government interventionism abroad (as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he was such a firebrand advocate for the Spanish-American War that he was later appointed William McKinley's vice president to keep him away from the military) suggests a record that is anything but traditionally conservative. McCain's TR fetish could be chalked up to his love of anti-establishment Republicans, but the similarities between the two mavericks runs deeper. Recently, McCain has stated loudly that he believes climate change is a threat to mankind and drastic action needs to be taken -- an emulation of Roosevelt's government-enforced conservation. McCain's so-called "national greatness conservatism" and belief in peace through strength resembles TR's famous "speak softly and carry a big stick" doctrine and his penchant for foreign interventionism. And the Arizona senator's insistence on meddling in the affairs from industry in the name of the people -- from his tobacco regulation bill to his Patient's Bill of Rights -- smacks of TR's famous trust-busting.
It's the transitive property: if McCain says he's like Roosevelt, and Roosevelt was a proclaimed progressive, then... And while bloating the government beyond its constitutional parameters is always wrong, at least TR had an excuse. The excesses of the Gilded Age are legendary and the trusts that Roosevelt targeted were legitimately corrupt. McCain lives in a world where the balance of power has shifted wildly from the corporations to the state, culminating in a federal government that can regulate the amount of water used in a flush-toilet. America doesn't need another Republican progressive itching to use the government to fight the "powerful special interests" in the name of the people. It needs an authentic conservative who understands the severe constraints that the Constitution imposes on the government and that freedom is defined by the lack of state power in the lives of individuals.