Like Reagan, Like McCain

The other day on NBC's "Meet the Press" — where he appears with the routine frequency of Topo Gigio popping up on the old Ed Sullivan show — John McCain contemplated this month's Republican defeat and made sure to bring up the name Ronald Reagan.

"I am a conservative Republican," Mr. McCain said, "in the school of Ronald Reagan — who, by the way, brought our party back after a defeat in 1976 and gave us hope and optimism."

These days Republicans repeat Reagan's name the way a parched castaway gasps out the word "Water!" But Mr. McCain's drop of the name had a special resonance.

He is by every measure the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, as Reagan was immediately after the 1976 Republican debacle that brought down incumbent Gerald Ford. Then out of office, Reagan moved quickly to solidify his position.

He did it, in large part, with words. Reagan gave a series of speeches in 1977 that were notable for their criticism, gentle but unmistakable, of his party's establishment — particularly on the way Republicans had betrayed their commitments to low taxes and smaller government.

With Reagan on his mind, Mr. McCain did something similar last week. In a pair of speeches to conservative audiences, he asked, in effect: "What went wrong for Republicans in 2006, and how do they make it right?"

Only for pundits and other numinous beings are these easy questions to answer. Ordinary mortals will find the job frustrating. The results of November 7 were a jumble, yielding no clear, definable course of action for a party groping to regain its majority.

Moderates as well as right-wingers lost their seats two weeks ago. Foes of immigration went down and so did immigration boosters, sometimes in the same state. Voters — in Michigan and Arizona, for example — who re-elected liberal Democrats simultaneously approved ballot initiatives that were so conservative the state Republican Party was reluctant to endorse them.

The only thing the losers had in common was that they were Republicans. No incumbent Democrats lost their seats in Congress on election night. The repudiation of the Republican majority was comprehensive — but why?

Reagan claimed in 1977 that America was essentially a conservative country, and Mr. McCain worked from the same premise last week.

"I am convinced that a majority of Americans still consider themselves conservative or right of center," he told a meeting of the Republican group GOPAC. Americans want fiscal restraint and a balanced budget from their government; they want room for individual initiative and freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

It was to further or guarantee these objectives that voters made Republicans a majority, Mr. McCain said, and Republicans let them down.

"We were elected to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free enterprise and private initiative," Mr. McCain said, "and then we lavished money, in a time of war, on thousands of projects of dubious, if any, public value."

Congress's increase in domestic discretionary spending was a crude attempt, according to Mr. McCain, "to bribe the people into keeping us in office." The bribery went beyond the petty projects — the "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska — that made the term "earmarks" a common coinage.

Much worse, Mr. McCain said, was the vast expansion of the Medicare entitlement with the prescription-drug benefit. The program, which President Bush proudly considers a landmark, addressed a relatively limited problem facing some older Americans by lavishing all older Americans with an entitlement that will cost a trillion dollars a decade.

In foreign policy too, the government of the Republican majority failed to meet its principles by miscalculating what it would take to win the war in Iraq, and the voters repudiated the Republicans for this as well.

Conceding that "Americans are tired of Iraq," Mr. McCain nevertheless repeated a point he's been making since the summer of 2003: "Without additional combat forces, we will not win this war."

In plotting a Republican comeback, some of what Mr. McCain recommends will sound programmatically popular: enacting a line-item veto, banning earmarks, regulating lobbyists more closely, and making the budget less susceptible to accounting tricks.

Voters, according to polls, approve each of these — at least in the abstract.

Whether they will approve the drying up of federal money that would result is a more difficult question. Indeed, Mr. McCain seems to be staking out positions that, taken together, might make him one of the most unpopular politicians in America.

Exit polls on Election Day showed that only one in five voters favored sending more American troops to Iraq. That percentage would fall more if the higher troop levels brought a higher number of American casualties.

It is also unlikely that older Americans, rich or poor, would feel friendly toward a politician who took away their new subsidy to buy otherwise expensive medicine.

Mr. McCain has built his career on being a "conviction politician," and now he wants his party to follow his lead by standing by its principles. "Do the right thing," he said last week, "and the politics will take care of itself."

It's a brave and admirable strategy for Republicans and Democrats alike, and it seemed to work for Reagan a quarter of a century ago. But what happens if your principles aren't what the public wants?

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.