Joe Lieberman! * Joe Lieberman!!!* Slowly, I turned…
Besides immigration, taxes, and campaign finance, he also led the fight to enact gun control in 1999, fought to give the FDA power to impose onerous regulations on tobacco in 1998, partnered with Lieberman on climate change legislation, wanted to put even more federal regulation on health care via the “patients’ bill of rights,” opposed a federal gay marriage amendment, and publicly battled with the religious right.
Those are all significant departures from the conservative mainstream.
-FrL-
Well to be perfectly fair, he brought that on himself by attacking his own party, supporting the war, sucking up to Bush and being a general, all around douchebag. He always was a conservative Democrat (religionist, pro-corporate, anti-affirmative action, sided with Republicans during that whole Terri Schiavo fiasco and don’t forget his crusades against rap music and video games), but the party didn’t turn on him until he betrayed them by not just supporting the Iraq War long after it had clearly become a debacle and a failure, but became a vocal collaborator in spreading the administration’s lies about it.
Ah.
Sounds funny. 
-FrL-
Vaudeville (and three stooges) thing. Slowly I Turned - Wikipedia
jinx!
Psssst. Limbaugh and Hannity are the Republican establishment. If ever there were an “establishment candidate,” Romney is it.
Cite? (W/ definition of terms, please; “the media” do not vote – journalists do but that term may be defined to include or exclude editors and the suits to whom the editors answer.)
“The elites” are those GWB, in white tie, addressed as “the have-mores” and his “base.” Why would they require such service?
They should take a lesson from that. Bush does not serve the Republican establishment, he serves the corporate establishment, and ideology be damned if it affects the bottom line. Corporations need cheap immigrant labor.
I wonder if McCain’s “maverick” persona extends to perhaps occasionally doing things the business interests don’t like?
http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/biasbasics3.asp
Nope, I meant the media elite, the Washington cocktail circuit, and what Scalia (I think) calls the “law professoriat” – the ones who praised Sandra Day O’Conner’s ridiculous Michigan affirmative-action baby-splitting as a brilliant triumph of judicial reasoning.
This only purports to be a survey of journalists who are decidely not the “media elite” (that would be the corporations who own and control it). Reporters might vote Democratic, but they don’t control the media.
Anyway, reporters tend to be far more informed than the average person. My mother was a political reporter and she was like an encyclopedia of candidates’ policy stances, the details of legislation and the actual, measurable outcomes of specific policies. She’s the only person I knew who actually read Hillary’s health care plan cover to cover and was able to explain, in detail, with cites, exactly how the right was lying and distorting about it (she sometimes did radio interviews on a local political show and she totally wrecked the right wing host one time when she went on to talk about Hillary Care. The guy admitted he hadn’t read a word of it and she left him in shambles). In my experience it was pretty normal for reporters to be better informed than even a lot of the politicians they were covering (many of whom never bother to read the legislation they’re voting on).
What does it tell you that the most informed people out there tend to vote against Republicans?
I’m kind of curious how you “evil, liberal, MSM” types conceptualize that profession. Do you thin there’s a political test to become a reporter? Why do you think it is that reporters tend to vote Democratic? Think about it.
Three additional McCain issues I imagine stick in the craw of the establishment…
- McCain’s ≈$800 Billion Tobacco Legislation
- General opposition to tort reform
- Modern-day legislators make lousy executives (on the rare instances they do win Presidential elections)
BrainGlutton raises an important point.
There are a couple of “establishments” here, and while they overlap they are not identical.
There’s the business establishment. The guys that want to make money, and want the government to help limit competition, lower taxes on them and raise taxes on their competitors, hand out fat contracts, and so forth. While people often imagine these are free market ideologues, that’s totally false. They might support capitalism in the abstract, but the free market isn’t a core value for them, money and power are.
Then there’s the religious right, which consists of both leaders and followers.
Then there are movement conservatives, which are a mixed bag. This could include National Review types, libertarians, and all sorts of op-ed writers, bloggers, think tankers, PNAC types, free marketeers and so on. This overlaps a bit with the RR, but
Then the Republican party types and careerists. Guys like Rush Limbaugh might like to think of themselves as movement conservatives, but they’re able to turn on a dime when the talking points of the day change. Anybody who still rabidly supports George Bush isn’t a conservative ideologue, but a partisan. These guys support Republican candidates because they belong to the correct tribe.
And these various groups shade into one another.
It seems it’s mostly the partisan types that hate McCain. Not because he’s got the wrong ideology, but because he doesn’t care much about the Republican party as a party. And because he thinks he’s better than they are.
So, did Reagan hate and distrust Gerald Ford in 1976? Sometimes people run against incumbents due to policy disagreements.
Really? Let’s look at the record.
President: FDR
Background/highest previous office held: Governor of New York
Legacy: Godlike.
President: Truman
Background/highest previous office held: Senator/VPOTUS
Legacy: Give 'em Hell!
President: Eisenhower
Background/highest previous office held: General
Legacy: Meh.
President: JFK
Background/highest previous office held: Senator
Legacy: Our loins ache for him yet!
President: LBJ
Background/highest previous office held: Senator
Legacy: Tragically flawed; got us the civil rights legislation, Great Society, War on Poverty; would be accounted the greatest POTUS since FDR if not for Vietnam.
President: Nixon
Background/highest previous office held: Senator/VPOTUS
Legacy: We may never again feel clean.
President: Carter
Background/highest previous office held: Governor of Georgia
Legacy: Successful in underappreciated ways, but on balance a well-meaning failure.
President: Reagan
Background/highest previous office held: Governor of California
Legacy: Homer (n.) : To succeed despite idiocy.
President: Bush I
Background/highest previous office held: VPOTUS
Legacy: Less said the better.
President: Clinton
Background/highest previous office held: Governor of Arkansas
Legacy: An embarrassment at the time, but damn do we want him back!
President: Bush II
Background/highest previous office held: Governor of Texas
Legacy: Worst. President. Ever.
I’m not discerning any clear pattern here.
Primary challenge is kind of an understatement. He lost the primary and left the party. It wasn’t only that he was a vocal supporter of the war, he was also noted for saying things like criticizing Bush undermines him at our own peril, and doing other things to frag Democrats.
McCain votes with the Republicans something like 88% of the time. I don’t recall him ever being out there actively working against them either.
Damn, forgot
President: Ford
Background/highest previous office held: House Minority Leader/VPOTUS
Legacy: Caretaker.
That’s not the way they see it in the conservative movement, though. They see people like Limbaugh and Hannity as their spokemen, and see conservativism as under constant assault from the left, who have dominated American society since the '60s. And they say that too often, the Republican party, led by so called “moderates”, is willing to give in to the left, because they take the conservatives for granted.
Was that Joe Lieberman standing behind McCain last night when McCain gave his speech? Looked like him, but the camera zoomed in on McCain too quickly for me to be sure.