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Andrew Sullivan digs up an old letter to the New York Times on Teddy Roosevelt's radicalism:
Moreover, most of the Rooseveltian policies - the arid land reclamation schemes, the National forests, the leasing of coal and mineral rights, the renting of grazing lands, the construction of the Panama Canal by direct employment, the development of water powers under public ownership and control - are in strict harmony with Socialist principles....The faith of our forefathers in the sacred principle of competition as the self-acting force which yielded ideal justice and rendered to every man according to his deserts, has departed as surely as the belief in witchcraft. [Socialists] can't threaten me worse than Theodore Roosevelt does with his inheritance and income tax schemes and the social workers of New York with their ever-increasing demands on the city budget.Teddy, of course, is McCain's most favoritest president. Which means McCain hearts socialism. But of course McCain hearts socialism, at least as McCain is defining it. This is a guy who has been complicit in the functioning of the redistributionist -- which is to say, socialistic -- American government for 25 years now. In 2001, on Hardball, a questioner asked him if the top tax brackets didn't smack of "socialism and stuff." McCain replied, “Here's what I really believe, that when you are -- reach a certain level of comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.” It's a wonder Joseph McCarthy didn't rise from the dead to dispatch McCain himself.You have to understand McCain's current contortions as a reaction to Barack Obama's platform. McCain got outflanked. Early in the campaign, Obama and his advisers clearly decided they would run on tax cuts. More than that, they would emphasize tax cuts. And they have. The difference between Obama's tax cuts and McCain's tax cuts is simply distributional: McCain's cuts are weighted towards the rich, Obama's towards the poor. But making an argument that Obama's tax policy gives too much to the middle class would not win McCain any votes. So he has to argue the symbolic end of the policy. He has to argue that it's a radical policy. But for better or worse, Obama doesn't have a radical, or even particularly interesting, tax plan (save insofar as cutting taxes amidst sharp deficits is radical), and so McCain is left saying that the basic functions of government -- things he's supported -- are some sort of Soviet plot. And that just comes off as a bit anachronistic. It's symbolic politics, but what it's symbolizing has stopped scaring people. It's like watching McCain give a policy address outlining how he'll ensure no monsters nest beneath your bed. When I was five, I would've totally voted for that. But I'm not five anymore.There was a time when socialism -- and more to the point, communism -- was a legitimate thing to fear. It was a living, breathing ideology. It had appeal. What we're seeing now is that argument divorced from its substantive content. The best McCain can manage is to darkly warn that Obama will "spread the wealth." To which a struggling electorate says: "Dude! Spread some wealth over here!" McCain has identified a thing to fear, but the failure of his message is that he can't explain why you should be afraid.
