Why I won't be upset if McCain wins

Essentially, the reaction against Bush and Bushism has set in. Nothing can turn it back. I would much prefer a Democratic victory because I think it will take that to bore down deep enough into the Federal Bureaucracy and ferret out the political hacks and incompetents who have infested it since Bush entered office. It was at its most obvious with Gonzo at the Justice Department and his string of third rate lawyers from a fourth ranked law school, but other departments have had their problems. And, there are always the clowns at the American Embassy in Hanoi who decided to split up 26 American families and make their lives hell so they could score an ideological point against the Vietnamese government.

So it is a pleasant surprise to find this in an old issue of the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson.

McCain's whole campaign is anti-Rovian. His core supporters are Republican moderates and Republican-inclined independents, and then he picks off enough conservatives to prevail. Even if he didn't have a history of rocky relations with various right-wing leaders, the very trajectory of his campaign would pose a threat to the conservative movement, notwithstanding that McCain is philosophically an heir to Barry Goldwater.

Bush has been his own nemesis and now he finds himself publicly embracing the Un-Bush, a man he repeatedly insulted and smeared in his own run for the presidency. I think that Meyerson is right in the major thrust of his argument:

With his preemptive war and seemingly permanent occupation in Iraq, and his attempt to privatize Social Security, George W. Bush pushed American conservatism past the point where the American people were willing to go -- pushed them, in fact, to the point where they recoiled at the conservative project. And with that, American conservatism shuddered to a halt. In the 2005-06 congressional session, Republicans still controlled both houses of Congress, yet they introduced no major legislation.

This exhaustion of conservatism has been apparent all along in the Republican presidential contest, where the chief point of agreement among the leading candidates has been to make permanent both the Bush tax cuts for the rich and our occupation of Iraq. The conservative agenda has been winnowed down to supporting what remains of Bushism. That's not only a losing formula for November, it also means that intellectually, conservatism is running on empty.

So - I suppose that William F. Buckley really is gone, and if it is McCain in November, I can live with that.

but I don't think it will be.