John McCain and the Jimmy Carter Model

There's been a fair amount of discussion about McCain's proposals on health insurance and social security as if they were serious proposals that could be enacted into law if McCain became president.

In fact, they're not.

The Bush administration could not get a social security privatization bill to the floor in Congress even when the Republicans had majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Why would anyone think McCain is going to get his proposals to tax health care benefits and privatize social security passed by large Democratic majorities?

Any bills like that would be long, long dead before they arrived.

That leads to the larger truth of any McCain presidency. McCain would be a Jimmy Carter-type of impotent, ineffective president.

Of course, McCain himself isn't stupid or incompetent any more than Carter was. But McCain is like Carter in that he has no political constituency. McCain inspires no loyalty among Republican members of the House and Senate who have hated his "maverick" ways for years. In fact, a lot of them think he's a phony and a jerk to boot. The Democrats don't respect him any more either. Whatever affection people on the left used to have for McCain the maverick dried up as soon as he started running his race-baiting "Celeb" ads.

If McCain was elected president, he would have no political capital, no reservoir of personal loyalty among political elites, and no base of popular support. That's right--no base of popular support. If anything has become clear over the last five weeks, it's that the Republican base strongly prefers Sarah Palin to McCain.

That was the formula for Jimmy Carter's failed presidency and John McCain would be no different.