COMMENTARY: McCain Should Use Steve King Road Show to Rally Base

Western Iowa’s firebrand conservative congressman Steve King is pitch-perfect with his party’s base. With his selection of language and issues, the Kiron Republican has something of a political Midas touch with the rural right.

And now he’s in John McCain’s corner. Which is no small thing for the presidential candidate.With a growing national reputation for making provocative comments that many conservatives regard as fearless, King, in the right settings around the nation, could give a big boost to McCain with reluctant Republicans.

Of course, McCain and King would have to set a few boundaries so King doesn’t force the Arizona senator to go off-message with a YouTube moment. If King sticks to basics, he’s an asset, because of his unassailable conservative bona fides.

Speaking to a crowd of nearly 600 Republicans this past weekend in Carroll, King made a passionate case for the campaign of presumptive GOP presidential nominee McCain.

The next president, King said, may very well appoint two or even four members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Stay home, disgruntled Republicans, at the risk of spending the rest of your lives watching your causes and issues, legislative initiatives at the state and local levels, even school board votes, overturned by liberal courts, goes King’s potent line of reasoning.

Many conservatives were not with McCain to begin with and remain wary of his maverick ways. But it’s high time for Republicans to fall in line, primarily because of the Supreme Court appointments, King said.

“Here’s the most important thing,” he said. “If you look across these presidential candidates, we don’t know if it’s going to be Obama, we don’t know if it’s going to be Hillary. But here’s what I do know. I know that Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. She is the model, the epitome, of a liberal activist judge. She’s the person that the text of this Constitution that I carry with me every day means nothing unless she can use it as a shield to protect her judicial activism.

“She has a liberal attitude about how society would be shaped and how life should be treated with contempt unless it happens to be a death penalty for a multiple murderer, and also with disrespect toward marriage and our Christian values.

“We are sitting here on the precipice of the risk of going into the darkest of judicial appointment ages if either Hillary or Obama is the next president of the United States. You will see appointments to the Supreme Court, of which there will likely be at least two, perhaps four. If that happens you will see the clones of Ruth Bader Ginsburg appointed to the Supreme Court. Think about a whole series of Ruth Bader Ginsburgs appointed to our federal courts, all the way down through the ranks, the entire farm team.”

King — who supported former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson for the Oval Office and campaigned for him in Iowa — said Republicans must honor the decision made by the party on the presidential candidate.

“It’s not that hard when you think about it,” King said. “Smile, hustle and act like you like it. This time we will be officially nominating an authentic American hero. This is a man who has served his country every day of his adult life, and he’s done so sometimes from the cockpit of a jet plane, and he’s done so sometimes from a bunk in the Hanoi Hilton.”