I watched McCain’s speech to the Republican National Convention tonight.
There will always be some policies that he’ll promote with which I’ll disagree. I don’t expect to approve of his approach to illegal aliens, campaign finance “reform”, “global warming” or “climate change”, “bipartisanship”, etc. He is starting to make the right noises about drilling… now if he’ll add Anwar to his offshore drilling commitment, and nuclear energy as well. We’ll see on that. He occasionally makes populist sounding noises, and seemed to be suggesting a new entitlement program for people who have “lost jobs due to globalization”. That’s worrisome, but maybe he only means to suggest a different way of allocating current unemployment compensation funds.
Nevertheless, with all the likely policy disagreements I’ll have with him, I have nothing but respect for McCain the man, and I think he’ll do the right things on foreign policy, taxes, spending, judges, education, etc.
I don’t think he’s holding anything back. I don’t think he has plans he doesn’t want to share in detail just because he’s afraid they would result in him not being elected. His continued attempts to get Obama to debate in “town hall” settings are evidence of that (invitations still refused by Obama).
I can’t predict the direction a McCain presidency would take, largely because it is likely to be driven by unforseen events… Consider the Bush presidency, and 9/11, Katrina, the housing bubble/crash, the price of oil, etc. In retrospect, all of those things seem like they should have been predicted, but who can claim that they did?
These kinds of unpredicatable events will affect either a McCain or Obama administration, though their responses are likely to be considerably different.
What I don’t think can be debated is that an Obama presidency will produce a strong leftward motion of the nation, the creation of new entitlements, etc. A McCain presidency, at a minimum, probably won’t do that, and with luck, might make it possible to “fix Social Security”, rein in federal spending, and make more effective policy with regard to the world’s threats, including islamofascism, Russia and China.
McCain has a record that makes me believe he’ll be his own man, like it or not, while Obama will be permanently beholden to the special interests that help him get elected.
Bluntly, McCain has shown complete willingness to do what he thinks is right, regardless of personal, politcal costs, while Obama, for all his talk of change, is wholly a creature of the Chicago political machine, surely the cradle of cronyism and corruption.
There are no figures like Rev. Wright, Tony Resko, William Ayers, et. al., in McCain’s past.
I think McCain is a genuinely humble guy who is really in touch with his own humanity, while Obama seems to believe the ads his handlers have cooked up.
In any case, McCain just comes off as a grownup, and not because of his age, but because of his perspective, while Obama gives off the vibes of a candidate for president of the student body in a university. Come to think of it, he WAS editor of the law review at Harvard… while McCain at the same age was learning just how much he loved America, in his Hanoi cell.
In true McCain style, he did not shy away from making the RNC uncomfortable with references to past corruption and big spending. As always, he is painfully straight, even with his supporters.
Can anyone think of anything Obama said that was anywhere near as challenging to the Democrats?
I didn’t think you could.
