February 22, 2000

Quite by accident, Michigan held two primaries on February 22. One -- call it the Real Republican primary -- GW Bush won quite handily, thank you very much. More than handily, in fact: by a crushing two-to-one margin.

The other party that held a primary in Michigan has no name, but might be called the Virtual Reform Party. John McCain won that primary by just about the same margin that Bush won the Real Republican primary. Since the Virtual Reform turnout was larger than the Real Republican turnout, McCain got more total votes.

That's where the accident comes in. The Virtual Reform primary was held inside the official (but not quite Real) Republican primary. So by outpolling Bush, McCain not only won bragging points, he won a passel of GOP delegates. Real Republicans can argue -- with some justice -- that McCain has no more moral right to those delegates than Al Gore would. But that is the breaks of the game. It was presumably the clever idea of the Michigan GOP to hold an open, free-for-all primary. They doubtless hoped to draw in some conservative indies, and even conservative Dems, who would then be transformed into Real Republicans.

Instead, McCain and the Virtual Reform party stole their election from them. No wonder Real Republicans are annoyed. If, instead of sinking out of sight, Bill Bradley were winning Democratic primaries in which more indies and Republicans voted than Democrats, I would be annoyed too.

Let's consider the Virtual Reform party for a moment. It obviously isn't the same as the official Reform party, which has been busily spinning off into bizarro-land. What it is, is what the Reform Party wanted to be. The McCain vote, in Michigan as in New Hampshire and South Carolina, was drawn heavily from independents, and from "weak," swing-voter Republicans and some Democrats. (In Michigan a few hard-core Dems also voted for McCain, in order to poke Gov. John Engler in the eye.) An impressive proportion of McCain votes come from first-time voters.

The McCain voters, in short, looks very much like the Perot voters in '92 and the Jesse Ventura voters in Minnesota. By and large they are people who, as Adlai Stevenson once said of independents, want to take the politics out of politics. John McCain himself could be Perot's dream candidate -- except that Perot's dream candidate is himself. McCain is a war hero, an impressive figure with a fine military bearing, running as an anti-politician. He doesn't really stand for much of anything in particular, but that too makes him the perfect Virtual Reform candidate.

The Virtual Reform Party isn't virtual just because it has no official existence; it also calls for virtual reforms instead of real ones. Oh, yes, McCain did co-author the McCain-Feingold bill, a worthy measure that would only tinker at the edges of our wretched campaign finance system. But probably not one McCain voter in ten could even name the bill, much less say what it is supposed to do.

Virtual Reform voters aren't so much concerned with particular reforms in the real world -- much less with actual policy questions like how to deal with education or poverty. They are in love with the idea of reform, the vaguer the better. They are also in love with straight talk ... so long as they don't have to hear any that might be uncomfortable. In this, too, McCain is the perfect Virtual Reform candidate. He took a pass on the Iowa caucuses, because he new his opposition to the ethanol subsidy wouldn't play well in Iowa. He may be right, but he wasn't willing to tell Iowa voters this particular item of straight talk to their faces.

The Virtual Reform party may not stand for much (or even anything), but it is very entertaining. (Even the official Reform party is amusing in its death throes.) The media loves McCain, as it loved (briefly) Perot and Ventura before him. The media, after all, is in the business of entertaining us, the better to sell dog food and online brokerage services. Dreading the Gore-Bush race in the fall, the media will squeeze all the excitement they can out of John McCain, before tossing him aside.

And, indeed, McCain has been exciting. Face it, the Republican primaries have been a humdinger, far more exciting than the steady disintegration of Bill Bradley. (Only the Apollo Theater could briefly lend some excitement to the Dem race.)

But tossed aside McCain will be, once the circus ends. The Michigan vote was a great tightrope spectacular, but it only underlined McCain's fundamental problem: Real Republican voters won't vote for him -- at least not many of them. In the weeks since New Hampshire, they have been moving away from McCain, not toward him.

For a would-be Republican nominee, this is something of a problem.

Maybe McCain will solve it, and somehow snatch the nomination from Boy George. And then again, maybe an asteroid will hit the Earth, permanently suspending the GOP race.

Meanwhile, gimme some more peanuts.

-- Rick Robinson

Return to Observatory

Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

Back to Top