Quote:
Originally Posted by chumdawg
The topic we are on right now is how conservative McCain is. You offered this up. Someone pointed out that McCain's views appear to match the standard conservative boilerplate. It's up to you to support your claim in the face of a challenge.
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that is not the topic that came up. That's the topic mavdog (and now you) are trying to shift to. Matching a boilerplate is your idea. And I did not offer this up. Mavdog said that the election is a referendum on conservative politics. I said that McCain does not represent conservative policies.
To turn it into a policy list (which anyone could google if they cared to do more than try to win debate points) and then argue some goofball argument about how many policies it takes to be conservative is not the point. I will concede gladly that McCain is more conservative than Obama, and more conservative than both chumdawg and mavdog. And if that's your definition of conservative, then go ahead and apply it to McCain, and you'll get no argument from me, except for saying that it's stupid to treat the concept as relative and the label as categorical.
But whether or not he is a conservative (or even "is conservative") is not the issue mavdog brought up. The issue is whether he represents conservative policies in such a way that the election can be defined as a judgment on conservative policies.
Even without talking about immigration and campaign finance and the role of the government in buying peoples mortgages, or any of the other issues that people on the right quibble over, it's obvious that McCain is not the standard bearer for conservative politics. If he were, then his running mate wouldn't have given him a boost among conservatives.