Neo-Cons and Bolton Flock to McCain Standard

As I noted in my last post, the withdrawal of both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson would spur neo-conservatives and their closest aggressive nationalist friends, like John Bolton, to rally behind John McCain as their preferred candidate. Of course, now that Romney himself has withdrawn, there hasn’t really much of an alternative, notwithstanding Mike Huckabee’s ardent Christian Zionism. In any event, Jennifer Rubin, a political correspondent at Commentary’s Contentions blog (which has become much more active, if predictable, under John Podhoretz’s editorship), has a good rundown with useful links of the latest endorsements and commentary:

“On Friday at CPAC, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton sung McCain’s praises and then heartily endorsed him on Saturday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Fred Thompson got on the McCain bandwagon too. The Wall Street Journal’s editors disparaged the notion that social conservatives should sit home or vote for Hillary Clinton ( “What they can’t do with any credibility is claim that helping to elect a liberal President will further the causes that these conservatives claim to believe most deeply in”) while President Reagan’s National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane doesn’t think much of the talk show critics’ suggestion that we hand management of the war over to one of the Democrats. Newt Gingrich recognizes the obvious ( “He’s had a lifetime voting record that’s dramatically more conservative than Clinton and Obama”) and Larry Kudlow voices support as well.

Bill Kristol thinks the anti-McCain sentiment among conservatives is exaggerated, and a simple account from the campaign trail reveals a obvious truth: lots of conservatives have supported McCain all along.”

Of course, McCain’s main foreign-policy spokesman (and NRA lobbyist who, I had a heard a few years ago, got in trouble with the Capitol Police for carrying some kind of firearm where he shouldn’t have), Randy Scheunemann, tends more to the Bolton camp. A former member of the board of directors of the Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and a main founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), Scheunemann worked for McCain in 2000. (When at one point just before the Iraq war, I clicked on the CLI website and got the website of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress [INC] instead, it was Scheunemann who told me that the two organizations used the same web server, thus tending to confirm the notion that the CLI — whose honorary co-chairs were John McCain and Joe Lieberman — was a Chalabi front organization.) And, as pointed out in a previous post and in a Friday article by McClatchy’s excellent Warren Strobel, former CIA director James Woolsey has signed on to the campaign as an adviser, too. Scheunemann set up the CLI with Bruce Jackson, a long-time friend and protege of Richard Perle’s.

Does this mean John McCain is a neo-con or would necessarily pursue neo-conservative/aggressive nationalist positions if he became president? No. Unlike Bush, he has his own strong views on U.S. foreign policy, not to mention far more foreign-policy experience — and hence confidence — in those views. He also has advisers who tend to the realist category. But it does mean that, like Bush, there would almost certainly be a major power struggle between the two tendencies if he got to the White House. The best relatively recent article on McCain’s foreign-policy evolution, however, suggests that the hawks would definitely enjoy the upper hand. Read John Judis’ October 2006 article in The New Republic entitled “Neo-McCain.”

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