If Dan Ardell is any sign, McCain has a big problem

Dan Ardell is a retired 67-year-old Republican who’s living the good life in Corona del Mar. He’s also John McCain’s worst nightmare.

Oh, the two have never met and probably would hit it off swimmingly if they did. From what I can tell, both are thoughtful, intelligent men of a conservative bent who care deeply about the country.

Ardell’s first presidential vote was for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Since then, he’s voted for Ford, Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes.

But here in late July, with the presidential election about 100 days away, he’s leaning strongly toward Barack Obama. Ardell hasn’t taken a blood oath yet to vote for Obama, but basically says his vote is there for the taking unless the presumed Democratic nominee blows it down the stretch.

Months ago, I wrote about a conservative Republican who couldn’t bring himself to vote for McCain because he wasn’t conservative enough. Voters like him also pose problems for McCain, but the conventional thinking is that they’ll come around on election day, if only to keep Obama from winning.

Ardell is a different kind of animal. He’s grown increasingly weary, he says, of the Republican Party’s tilt to the right under George Bush. And, even worse yet for the national GOP ticket, Ardell says Obama “inspires” him.

And even worse than that, Ardell doesn’t dispute the characterization that Obama is too liberal. “He’s far too liberal,” he says. “Now it comes down to choices. I look at McCain. I’m 67, he’s 72. I need to take naps occasionally. I might bring education, some gray hair and hopefully some wisdom that a younger person wouldn’t bring, but I also bring old baggage with me. I’m not very innovative, I don’t have a lot of new interesting and challenging ideas, and I may not be as open to other people as my son, who’s 38, is.”

And you wonder why the Republican Party is worried. If poor John McCain can’t count on the vote of a lifelong Republican who thinks Obama is too liberal. . . .

Ardell thinks he’s got Obama sized up pretty well, and the only thing that could dissuade him is if he senses Obama isn’t who he says he is. In other words, if he turns out to be a phony who really is harboring a special-interest agenda.

At the moment, Ardell thinks otherwise. He thinks Obama genuinely wants to -- and can -- break down political barriers that have polarized the country. And he likes that Obama apparently is “not going to be the lone cowboy -- and I use that term intentionally -- on the international scene.”

Ardell describes himself as fiscally conservative and “fairly liberal” socially. That is a voter demographic that describes millions of people and is the philosophy, he says, that led him to vote for George W. Bush in 2000. However, by 2004, he thought the president had drifted away from the “compassionate conservative” mantra that Ardell found appealing.

As a result, Ardell, not satisfied with John Kerry, didn’t cast a presidential vote in 2004. The last time he took a powder in a major race, he says, was the 1976 California U.S. Senate race.

This time around, he wasn’t thrilled with the GOP field. And after eliminating Hillary Clinton and John Edwards from his score card, he paid increasing attention to Obama.

Ardell is hardly a radical. He cut his teeth in the banking business and ended up with an asset management company that handled pension funds. His Republican bona fides seem unchallengeable.

The tantalizing question is whether Ardell portends a movement of local Republicans away from the McCain ticket. In 2004, the Bush-Cheney ticket got 60% of the vote in Orange County, a few percentage points higher than it got in 2000.

I ask Ardell how representative he thinks he is. After joking that he’s surprised that his “conservative friends don’t absolutely throw up” when he breaks the news to them, he says he’s surprised that an unexpected number of them “seem to be flexible on where they might be.”

Perhaps, though, hope about abiding local GOP passion lies in this anecdote:

Ardell turned onto Coast Highway a while back and a driver pulled alongside him, honking angrily and shaking his fist.

Replaying in his mind whether he’d provoked the man by cutting him off in traffic, Ardell realized he hadn’t.

Then he had a thought.

Nah, couldn’t be.

Yeah, maybe so.

Ardell was driving his wife’s car, which was adorned with a sticker: “Republicans for Obama.”

“The only thing I could think of,” Ardell says, laughing, “was the bumper sticker.”

--

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.