McCotter's Real Mistake

When Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter made his famous E5 (that's an error by the third baseman, for those of you who don't know how to score baseball) he did something more than simply putting a solid Republican House seat in play. He opened the door wide for all sorts of trouble, and not the least of which was making the seat plausibly winible for a Democrat. He opened it up for the likes of Kerry Bentivolio, a Republican in name only, to have the convenience of becoming the only Republican on that actual ballot.

To be sure, the local GOP is attempting a write in campaign to see whether the party can keep Bentivolio off the November ballot. That's because he is in fact a libertarian, and stands against what the mainstream GOP supports.

This why we need to return to the smoke filled rooms of the past. Republicans as a political organization would not give him the time of day. But the parties aren't actually private entities anymore. Anyone who can collect the required number of signatures can have their name put on the primary ballot of either of the big two political parties. That's unfair to both of them. It can lead to situations such as this, where someone who doesn't truly stand for the party ends up a standard bearer. It's a large part of the reason that we have, according to the words of the pundits, demopublicans and republicrats rather than philosophically distinct parties.

To be sure, Bentivolio, being libertarian, plays against this type. Yet generally, the system as we have it has caused a movement towards the mushy center rather than the extremes of either party. Instead of building political organizations with a core of distinct beliefs which anyone can understand, we have entities which appear to merely coalesce around the most common denominator. We end up with no real choice come November.

Or we end up with a Bentivolio, which forces Republicans to vote against their grain or, worse, to vote for the Democrat as the lesser of two evils. Either way, opening up the two major parties to the whim of the public in the end offers less rather than greater choice. It gives the voter not distinct options, but pale gray choices.

This is not pick on Bentivolio, who we are sure is sincere and well meaning. We certainly would vote for a libertarian ahead of a liberal, even though we are not sure the distinction is particularly substantial. And we recognize that the ultimate fault here is with McCotter's stupidity. Yet even that is merely an under the circumstances error. Had the GOP been left to itself, McCotter as an established Republican would have surely gotten the nod without all the hullabaloo about petition signatures.

Close the parties. Allow them to pick their candidates based on their standards, selected by true and active party members. The voting public would still have their free will choice to make in the general elections. Indeed, they would likely have a clearer choice than they do as it is.

Should McCotter Run?

Thaddeus McCotter, a five term Congressman from here in Michigan, is considering a run for President. He's waiting to see what might happen in the next couple of weeks, but feels that there isn't very much excitement among Republican voters within the current batch of GOP hopefuls.

He's certainly right about that. No one in the Republican field is generating any decent press, and this when the sitting Democratic President is weak. The last time we were in a similar situation, Ronald Reagan came out and decimated Jimmy Carter, a fate Barack Obama surely merits. No Reagan is on the horizon to this point, though.

Does this mean that a fellow like McCotter, a great conservative to be sure, has any reasonable chance to grab the nomination? The easy and obvious answer is no. If nothing else, history is against him: no one has leapt from the House of Representatives to the Oval Office since James Garfield in 1880, and he's actually the only one who manged the jump. The Lower House simply doesn't serve as a particularly great base for such an effort. It isn't enough of a national platform. That doesn't mean he can't do it (Michelle Bachmann seems to at least be thinking about it herself) but only that it would be an uphill battle on a steep grade.

McCotter definitely is the type of guy who ought to be President. He's a staunch conservative, well read both intellectually and in terms of the current society (well, he likes Led Zeppelin, if that's not terribly passe), and unafraid to take what the liberal media would paint as controversial stands. But can he win a national race? Not that winning isn't everything on a case by case basis; he could well serve merely to insure that conservative values are at least given cursory treatment in 2012, or plants seeds for later, whether for himself of the broader, truer, right wing movement.

It would probably be better for him to stay in the House, though, building seniority within what will hopefully develop into a long term Republican dominance of that body. Still, the idea of a McCotter candidacy is intriguing. A little window shopping by the GOP electorate might not hurt.