A Little Beyond A Normal Endorsement
Conservative firebrand Oliver North has a message for his peers in the movement -- don't to do John McCain what moderates did to me. In a column up this afternoon at Real Clear Politics, North doesn't just endorse McCain, he defends him from the same impulse at division that doomed his own Senatorial campaign:
After I won the 1994 Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia, I naively assumed that all in the GOP would pull together behind my conservative candidacy. I clearly don't know much about politics. If I did, I'd be writing this from my U.S. Senate office instead of my home in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. But at the trade school John McCain and I attended in Annapolis, Md., they did teach me how to count. I lost by a narrow margin in a three-way race. Some of those who were with me then are among those who now say they won't support John McCain.Worse still, since this election cycle began last year, the Democrats have raised more money than the GOP, and in the primary balloting that began last month, Democrats have turned out more voters. These numbers matter because they reflect the energy and commitment of the opposing parties in this year's presidential contest.
Neither John McCain nor anyone in his campaign asked me to write this column. But I cannot sit silently while my fellow conservatives do to John McCain what GOP "moderates" did to me. Today the stakes for our country are far higher, and the implications for the future are far greater than who sits in one of 100 U.S. Senate seats. Now our nation is at war against a vicious foe. We need a president who has proved how to win it.
During the course of the past six years, I have made a dozen protracted trips to cover U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines defending us against a jihad hostile to all that we hold dear. In the dark days when Iraq's Anbar province was the bloodiest place on the planet, John McCain was one of the few in Congress brave enough to venture into that cauldron. I know because I saw him there.
During those trips, he listened to bright, brave young Americans wearing flak jackets and flight suits and became a steadfast supporter of a winning strategy for ending this long and costly conflict. But the senator's commitment goes far beyond political rhetoric. One of his sons is a student at our alma mater; the other is a Marine Corps lance corporal serving in harm's way. Thanks to John McCain's vision and resolve, a few weeks ago, my cameraman and I walked in shirt sleeves down streets in Ramadi and Fallujah, where we used to dodge bullets, IEDs and RPGs.
As with the endorsement of Ambassador John Bolton, it will be difficult to discount North's conservative credentials. He remains a widely admired figure among the very people who have not widely admired McCain. Like Bolton, North has had no problem openly criticizing members of his party who failed to measure up to his standards.
So why doesn't he join the small chorus predicting doom for the GOP if McCain gets the nomination? North believes that the war trumps all, and that only McCain will have the credibility and the expertise to win it. That's enough for North. Will it be enough for the rest of the conservatives in the GOP?
Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 12, 2008 4:57 PM | Comments () | TrackBacks (0)
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