Taleena Takes Me to Task

Taleena over at Sun Comprehending Glass takes me to task because in this post I speculate aloud about the chances of a couple of social moderates capturing the social conservative's vote:

Wither "Social Conservatives?" What will 2006 and 2008 bring? I think that rank-and-file social conservatives will vote for a McCain or a Guliani, if they feel that they have a conservative Supreme Court to guard the legacy of their gains of the last 20 years.

I found Taleena's response puzzling:

I think he over estimate's McCain appeal and I stand by my earlier comment:

"Social conservatives" will be split down big vs. small government lines in '06, but will ultimately back a tough Hawk in '08 as Western Europe slides deeper into dhimmitude.

...and so I commented:

Do we have a bigger hawk on the national Republican scene that McCain? Do not the centrists voter swoon at his name? Has he not traction among the moderate Democrats as the anti-Bush?

Taleena replied:

Centrist swoon over Guiliani too, and the first amendment travesty McCAIN-Feingold will not be forgotten. Neither will his flirtation with running as a third party candidate. Guiliani also has traction among moderate Democrats.

Since when has Howard Dean hesitated to use Christian in demonizing the R's? Neither has he or other leaders in the D's concealed thier disdain for Israel either. Sure libertarians are a small to smaller group of people (depending on where you live) but I wonder how long even socially liberal libertarians (like Glenn Reynolds) will put up with the creeping and not so disguised socialism on the left?

This has gotten too long for comments, so I'll post my reply here:

Again, two points I'll contend:

Centrists may have swooned over Guliani, but unless he's got a great new campaign line, he is rapidly approaching his "sell by" date. 2001 was a presidential term ago and there have been no new terrorist attacks on U.S. soil (thank God!) In the meantime Guliani has not held a national post or pulpit. I would have nominated him first head of Homeland Security, but that did not happen. What has he been doing? What compelling narrative can he relate?

I think that the outrage over the McCain-Fiengold campaign finance debacle is kept alive only in the hearts of hard-line anti-McCainers and First Amendment zealots. (I consider myself in the latter category.) But I really think that that kind of outrage gets very little traction in the general public who still think the problem with the political system is too much "special interest" money. Ironically, MacCain is going into 2008 with a guaranteed pipeline to mainline Republican donors. He is going to appeal very strongly to the anti-Hillary crowd.

Howard Dean presents the Democrats incoherent political voice about Christians. (He is joined in this by John Kerry.) He wants Christians to vote for the Democrats, but expresses contempt for their gullibility in voting for Republicans. He claims to be a Christian himself (which he may be, that judgment is reserved for Another), yet he has only hazy ideas about where the books of the Bible are located.

Glenn and many other libertarian thinkers identified with the Republicans during the Reagan years, due to the Gipper's stance that, "Government isn't the solution, government is the problem."

Many libertarians jumped the Republican ship when GWB announced "compassionate conservatism." The only thing that kept people like Glenn around was the cold-eye realization that post-911, the Democrats had zero foreign policy credibility. Whatever you thought about the Republican's domestic agenda (not much) we could argue about later, after the people that want to kill us are dealt with.

UPDATE: After posting the last couple of paragraphs, I realized I may have oversimplified to the level of untruth. There are many Democrats with loads of foreign policy smarts. The problem for the Democrats as a viable opposition party is that those grown up voices are being shouted down by the (increasingly misnamed) MoveOn.org and the Kos Kids.