Everyone seems to agree: the conservatives are running as the party of no ideas. But not if Bill Kristol has anything to say about it. He's recommending that John McCain apply the surge idea (i.e. the one GOP policy in the last decade or so that hasn't become a colossal boondoggle of a failure) to everything else in the public policy arena. God knows it ought to be successful, because if there's anything we could use to improve our healthcare, for example, it's a temporary increase in soldiers at hospitals nationwide. But wait, I thought conservatives wanted people to use less healthcare?
It's actually pretty easy to explain why John McCain doesn't have a domestic policy agenda: because he's holding a crumbling Republican party together, and he can't afford to piss off even a single party faction. If McCain's history in the past two decades were different, if he were more charismatic, if he actually had a base within the GOP--well, if those circumstances were true, he might have enough leverage to get some GOP grumblers to hold their tongues while he trotted out an ambitious agenda. But none of that stuff is true--Republican elites just don't trust McCain (aside from, perhaps, the neocon wing). So, best to try to paper over those differences (as well as the GOP's unpopularity) and focus on scaring the hell out of people on the national security stuff.
