Why Does the GOP Base Need Convincing About McCain?

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard writes a piece entitled "Let's Grow Up, Conservatives" which attempts to make the case that we should all fall in line behind McCain should he become the nominee. I thought these first two paragraphs pretty accurately describe McCain's problem:

The story from California last week was bound to alarm conservatives. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed John McCain for president at a solar technology plant. Rudy Giuliani, who's also backing McCain, joined the lovefest as an uninvited but very welcome guest. And McCain talked about the Republican party as a "big tent," a phrase often used as code for appealing to moderates and ignoring conservatives.

It's not that bad, though. McCain, now the likely Republican nominee, seems to understand that his first order of business is not merely mollifying conservatives but winning them over and unifying the party. "The important thing is to convince our Republican base, one, I'm a conservative," he told Jay Leno. "Two, I'm the best qualified in taking on their major concern."

Why does the base need convincing? Is that not proof enough that McCain past antics have been anything but conservative?

There's a Bible verse that comes to mind - Matthew 7:20 (KJV): Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. And by "fruits", we're not talking gays here. If you pick a piece of fruit off of a tree and that fruit is an apple, you can pretty safely say that the tree is an apple tree. The product of the tree tells you a lot about the tree itself.

If we examine McCain's "fruits", such as McCain-Feingold (restrictions on free political speech), McCain-Kennedy (anmesty for illegal aliens), McCain-Lieberman (signing onto global warming baloney), plus his votes against the Bush tax cuts, the Gang of 14, his opposition to drilling for our own oil in ANWR, his denigration of Christian conservatives during the 2000 campaign, and his apparent interest in switching parties in 2001, I'd have to say that that's one confused tree if it insists on calling itself conservative.

If McCain stood in his garage and called himself a Buick, would all the pro-Buick forces rally around and support him? No, they would assume he's either lying or crazy.

John McCain is calling himself a conservative. You make the call.