A suggestion to the McCain campaign, fresh from today's podcast
Today Siggy and I had the pleasure of talking to Kevin McCullough, who has a brilliant suggestion for the McCain campaign
Question: What does McCain need to do to win, Kevin?This is an excellent suggestion. Not only social conservatives but the Hispanic vote could be persuaded by this issue.
Kevin: A couple of things... he does not have a solidified base within hie party yet, so he's banking that he's going to be the more attractive vote to the independent and moderate and that he can garner enough of them to make up for whatever deficit he's lagging in his own base with.
But I'll tell you two things he can do that would be very simple. If he would, while being as moderate as he wants to be on climate change and other things, if he would go to California and say, not as a matter of faith but as a matter of Constitutional justice, "Voters in Prop. 22 were summarily overridden by four arrogant black robes in the California constitutional marriage ammendment process." If he would say, "these were judges snatching power from the people and we can not allow this to happen. This is a federalist issue, this is a local state issue, this is an issue of the voter's rights in this case", and if he would champion the right of the voters' right to the marriage ammendment in California, he could not only, possibly, garner a lot of respect from conservatives - social conservatives in particular, which which he is not on the best of terms in particular, but also they would see this as an act of leadership which would be very high in their priority level, but in the state of California it might drive enough voters to the poll to perhaps sway that state's electoral college count.
Listen to the rest of the podcast here.
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Labels: Election2008, John McCain, politics, Republicans
posted by Fausta @ 2:58 PM
3 Comments:
Definitely a good idea. While I support allowing gay marriage, I'm also a strong federalist and an advocate of judicial restraint. The usurpation of legislative power by my state's supreme court irked the heck out of me. McCain should do as Kevin suggested: it would not only be a winner with social cons (which I'm not) but also judicial conservatives (which I am).
With regard to climate, he could pledge to follow a flexible rational approach that weighs economic and energy needs as well. He could promise not to follow feel-good policies that do little or impede us in our search for long-term solutions. He could say that he will listen to any opinions backed up by facts ather than emotion.
expat
Well, actually the California Supreme Court, though I disagreed with their ruling, were acting well within their constitutionally defined powers. Proposition 22 was an intiative that by statute defined marriage in California and could only be overturned in three ways. The most obvious in the citizens voting against it sometime in the future. While the second is the state legislature, see below and the supreme court, also see below.
The state legislature punted twice, once over a veto threat and the second when it became obvious that they were going to have to put it to a state-wide referendum. Which, like the fate of court ordered same-sex marraiages in Hawaii did and probably will cause an amendment to pass taking that power of review away from both the legislature and the court.
This referendum the legislature wanted to avoid at all costs by having the gay rights groups do the heavy lifting through the courts and then get all the blame. In California a public intiative cannot be reversed by the legislature except by referendum. And an amendment can only be created or overturned through the ballot box.
I am quite sympathetic to those gays that want the imprimatur of an official marriage document however I do plan on voting for the amendment because my sympathy only goes so far. But I do suspect all sorts of chicanery and the first will probably a case to void the signatures for some reason.
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