The Best Case Scenario for the Right, Part 1: Conor Friedersdorf

This is the first contribution in a two-day discussion between TheNextRight.com (Soren Dayton and Jon Henke) and Culture11.com (James Poulos and Conor Friedersdorf) about the Best Case and Worst Case scenario for the Right in 2008.  Conor Friedersdorf opens the discussion.

Election 2008 pits a schizophrenic Republican who revels in being a maverick against a temperamentally cautious Democrat keen on rallying the country behind center-left policies. A conservative isn't going to be elected this November, as there aren't any running.

On foreign policy, the best outcome for conservatives is an administration that avoids unnecessarily embroiling America in foreign wars, winds up Iraq and Afghanistan without endangering our security, reverses the proliferation of nuclear weapons, improves our alliances, increases our soft power, manages the rise of China and India, and pursues terrorists aggressively enough to avoid another major terrorist attack. Were there a metric that gave the proper weight to each of these tasks, I've no certain way of knowing whether a McCain Administration or an Obama Administration would come out ahead. After 8 years of George W. Bush using the War on Terror as a political bludgeon, however, only an Obama Administration would have a chance to depoliticize the effort to make America safer, so all else being equal he wins.

On domestic policy, the best case for conservatives is a solution to the financial crisis that doesn't take the country too far toward centralized economic planning, entitlement reform that increases our long term fiscal solvency, market oriented health care reform and immigration reform that predicates an amnesty for non-criminal illegal immigrants on the prior construction of a big border wall and demonstrated workplace enforcement. Neither candidate is going to do even half of these things. Perhaps John McCain would govern as a moderate conservative; but I find it more likely that Obama would unify rather than divide conservative opposition and set the stage for a GOP resurgence in Congress circa 2010. Call this one a tie.

On judges, conservatives are better off under a John McCain presidency by a long shot, so long as his appointees don't undermine civil liberties in service to the War on Terror, which they won't in the best case.

Overall I'd say the best case for conservatives is an Obama Presidency whose overambitious agenda provokes a GOP backlash in the 2010 midterms, causing a chastened Obama Administration to focus on bipartisan entitlement reforms that only a Democratic president could pass. As I think about it, what I'm saying is the best we can hope for is another Clinton Administration sans the affairs while the right regroups, casts aside the corrupt yes men who enabled the Bush Administration to do so many un-conservative things, and develops a coherent, appealing domestic agenda. My assumption is that such a process could not proceed with John McCain and Sarah Palin in the White House.

Conor Friedersdorf is the features editor of Culture11.