Here’s the secret reason why cultural conservatives hate John McCain

January 31st, 2008 at 12:21pm Pat Cunningham

John McCain gets pretty high ratings from conservative groups — his lifetime score with the American Conservative Union, for example, is 82.3 percent — but lots of cultural conservatives still hate him.

Why? Well, I think it goes beyond the issues of immigration and campaign-finance reform (on both of which, by the way, President Bush took the same stance as McCain but without suffering as much animus from the far right).

The arch-conservatives will never admit this, because it sounds so ridiculous, but I think their great disdain for McCain  has something to do with some of the terms he uses in his public utterances, as when he said this the other night when he won the Florida primary:

“I am confident we will succeed in this contest and in the bigger one in November against anyone the Democratic Party nominates.”

Do you see the problem there?

He referred to the “Democratic Party.”  Real Republican conservatives call it the “Democrat Party.”

Rabid rightists seem to think that “Democrat” as an adjective somehow sounds less euphonious, less respectable and  more pejorative than “Democratic.” So, grammatical considerations notwithstanding, they misuse the one word and shun the other. And when they hear McCain use these words correctly, it grates on them.

The genesis of this Democrat-as-an-adjective silliness is not entirely clear. According to one theory, it all started with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the infamous red-baiter and witch-hunter of a half-century ago. Others say it can be traced to the late 1950s when a man named Meade Alcorn, chairman of the Republican National Committee, issued a directive to his minions to thereafter avoid use of the word “Democratic.”

McCarthy’s example or Alcorn’s admonition, whichever it was, has been heeded to this day among the party’s more zealous elements. And woe to he or she who dares stray from this orthodoxy.

Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of the conservative National Review Online, has written of the guff he gets from some readers for his refusal to misuse “Democrat.” John L. Perry of the even more rightist NewsMax.com also refuses to go along with those who “abuse consciously or misuse ignorantly” the D-word. 

The late Sen. Sam Ervin once said: “I have been trying to reform Republicans all my life and have had virtually no success, but I would like for them to adopt good grammar and quit using the noun ‘Democrat’ in lieu of the adjective ‘Democratic.’ If I can teach the Republicans that much grammar, I will feel that my effort to educate them has not been entirely in vain.”

Entry Filed under: Democratic Party, John McCain