the tindog coffeehouse

John McCain has made the statement that while he considers himself a conservative Republican, he compares himself more closely to Theodore Roosevelt.

As The Washington Post has pointed out, Roosevelt was anything but a conservative.

This year McCain has courted the conservative Republican base, casting himself as a “small-government, low-tax” Reagan Republican. But he acknowledges, when asked, he is really a Theodore Roosevelt Republican, and TR was hardly a conservative. He favored aggressive government regulation of the economy and a stiff inheritance tax — both part of the Square Deal he pushed as his domestic agenda.

I’ve quoted from An Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon before, but I thought this passage was particularly relevant:

When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 on the assassination of William McKinley, he moved sharply in the direction of the progressive wing of his party. In 1906 he even advocated a tax on inheritances with the avowedly social-engineering purpose of preventing the “transmission in their entirety of those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits.” Mainstream Republicans were, to put it mildly, aghast at the idea….

If McCain is trying to present himself as a conservative (though his Senate voting record often says otherwise), then he needs to stay as far away from Teddy Roosevelt as possible.