Don't Be Afraid of President McCain

From AJS.COM

Note: see Sarah Palin must not be elected, which I wrote quite a while later, when McCain and Obama had selected their running mates, a decision that reversed my stance from this article.

Be Afraid of President McCain is an article from Reason Magazine, available on their Website.[1] It's a great piece for Republicans to read, and IMHO is one of the most powerful reasons to vote for McCain. I'm a moderate Democrat who wants to love my party. Really, I do. But, on reading this article I'm ashamed and moved to vote for a Republican.

The article essentially paints the left as exactly what Republicans want America to think they are: rabidly opposed to any form of patriotism, and hostile toward any form of government reforms. The article primarily aims to paint McCain as an early adopter of the Iraq War and as the primary architect of The Surge. This may or may not be true. He's certainly in favor of a military solution in Iraq, but I'll give the man credit for having a plan, which Bush lacked for years. I may not agree with his plan, but it's hardly the fear-inspiring fascist dogma that this article paints a picture of.

As for the rest of the article. Let me quote:

• "Like almost every past McCain crusade, from fining Big Tobacco to drug-testing athletes to restricting political speech in the name of campaign finance reform, the surge involved an increase in the power of the federal government, particularly in the executive branch."

They don't actually explore how any of these other "crusades" expanded executive power, but they certainly do make an excellent list of McCain's resume high-points.

• "Like many of his reform measures—identifying weapons pork, eliminating congressional airport perks, even banning torture—the escalation had as much to do with appearances ... as it did with reality."

Again an excellent tour of the reasons to vote for McCain, but the assertion is weak at best. Opposing rendition cost McCain dearly with the administration, and had the 2006 elections gone differently, he would have been in the dog house over that move. Appearance was clearly not the goal.

• "McCain’s dazzling résumé—war hero, campaign finance Quixote, chauffeur of the Straight Talk Express, reassuring National Uncle—tends to distract people from his philosophy of government."

This bit had me hoping. I thought that at last, we'd get some insight into his seedy plan for executive power. Instead the article takes a left turn (no pun intended):

• "McCain regards Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as political idols; like them, he never hesitates in asserting that government power should be used to rekindle American (and Republican) pride in government. Unlike most neoconservative intellectuals, however, McCain is intimately familiar with the bluntest edge of state-sponsored force. [he] comes from a military family [...] the Navy captain son of a four-star admiral who was the son of another four-star admiral, all named John Sidney McCain. And that just scratches the surface."

No really. The article just tried to assert that because he comes from a long line of military men, he's some kind of fascist-in-waiting. Really. It just asserted that trying to rekindle patriotism was wrong, and tried to tie it to some perceived plan to use military force ... perhaps against Americans.

If you are a Republican, and you were not planning on voting for McCain, please read this article. Read it, and read it again. It's a laundry-list of the reasons that you should vote for him. It's also a sad comment on how badly the Democrats are mis-reading the American public. There's a reason that, even after a disastrous term in the executive branch, Republicans might retain the office. As a Democrat, this makes me sad, frustrated and just plain tired. I want my party back, dammit!

Followup: So, we're many months down the line and Obama is now the frontrunner for the office. Obama has, in almost all ways, lived up to the ideals that I've held my party to and McCain is still grasping for cheap political points like the "you just don't understand" mantra of the debate and his inexplicable nomination of Sarah Palin. I was ready to vote for John McCain just one year ago, but he's a different man than he was in 2007 and that man was a different man than he was in 2006. I'm just no longer sure if I'd be voting for the staunch opponent of the Iraq War and torture that I wanted to see in office or the back-peddling, but still respectable candidate that I saw last year or the cheap politician that is running now. I'm sure that more than a little of this is not McCain, but his campaign strategists. They're probably the ones pushing him to behave so strangely, but I can't take the risk that a) he's not the one calling the shots or b) he'll be calling them in January. Sad, really.