THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The fact that McCain lost the nomination is not the end of his usefulness to the media and other liberals.

McCain defied almost the entire Republican Party in his desperation to enforce the multiethnic policy on Kosovo with American blood.

The media did not even mention that issue in their coverage of the campaign. Bush naturally did not mention it either.

Bush could have gained considerably in the campaign by pressing this issue to a Republican primary electorate which is not enamored of fighting liberal wars. But the liberal media made it clear that this would not be respectable. So Bush and his crew went along. It is distinctly possible that the Kosovo situation is going to blow up between now and November. If Bush issued warnings on this, such a blowup will put Gore in a bad position. No respectable conservative is going to press an issue that could be that embarrassing for a liberal.

So clearly Bush has to somehow adopt the liberal foreign policy position.

But there is a limit to how openly even a moderate Republican like Bush can sell out. He would do anything to court liberal favor, but openly advocating their foreign policy right now would be too much. But it can be done under a Bush Administration. When it comes to moderate Republicans, liberals find nothing impossible if they really want it.

And they really want a Clinton-McCain foreign policy.

So it turns out that the media are just worried to death about the split between Bush and McCain. They look forward to a "deal" between them. All for the good of the Republican Party, of course. I must have heard liberals mention McCain for Secretary of State at least five times recently. If not Secretary of State, one liberal opined, then McCain might accept Secretary of Defense.

Now I wonder why they happened to pick those two positions? Secretary of State and Defense are the positions which determine where American force will be used. After such a deal, does anybody think McCain would quietly accept the present Republican policy on ethnic mixing and the like?

As the British would say, "Not bloody likely." With all the media and his own Defense or State Secretary demanding American blood for liberal policies, how long would a weak-kneed middle of the road Republican hold out?

Liberals know that all they need to do is get some Americans killed for liberal foreign policy. As soon as that happens, liberal foreign goals will become a holy cause to American conservatives. This is what happened in Vietnam. Conservatives started by demanding that America either fight to win or get out, but liberals did not want to fight Communists the way they would a right-wing enemy, and they did not want to be the ones to lose America's first war. So they chose the gradual escalation of the war in Vietnam.

As soon as Americans began dying over there, conservatives declared American blood expendable. Here was a chance for a vast increase in military expenditures, the one thing for which conservatives salivate. You may expect the same reaction when Bush adopts a McCain war policy.