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It's been odd watching the McCain campaign warn darkly against redistribution. Redistribution -- which McCain says "means taking your money and giving it to someone else” -- is what the government does. It collects taxes and uses them to buy things, or give people money. Put even more simply, it collects revenues and then distributes them. As such, I rather like Jon Chait's summary of the McCain campaign's recent message: "McCain: Obama Wants to Have a GOVERNMENT in WASHINGTON!" But conservatives may end up ruing this descent into ideological war. Two months ago, it wasn't exactly clear what an Obama win would "mean." But as McCain has worked to transform this election into a referendum on liberalism, it's increasingly becoming...a referendum on liberalism. Ambers comments:
It might be dangerous for the Republican Party to elevate the stakes for this election to a death match between competing ideologies. If Barack Obama's victory is as decisive as it is shaping up to be, the Democrats can justifiably claim that conservatism itself has been rejected as a political and governing philosophy. In the closing weeks of the campaign, as the Republican ticket continues to run against the very idea of progressive politics, they are sowing the seeds of the post-election realignment narrative....Obama has been talking about the larger GOP governing philosophy for a while now, but until recently, the race hasn't seemed like as much of a referendum on Republicanism; it's been more of a referendum on the Bush years. What changed? The GOP went all in on an ideological war.If Obama wins, it's going to be very easy for folks to claim that the old conservative pressure points of taxes and government have dulled, and we're entering an era in which economic instability and widening inequality necessitate a more assertive role for progressively-conceived governance. Indeed, one of my long-running criticisms of the Obama campaign was that they weren't campaigning so as to build an ideological mandate. John McCain, helpfully, has solved that problem. My hunch is conservatives will not end up thanking him.
