Posted on 11/01/2008 6:37:48 AM PDT by fiodora
Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign-policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.
But it’s all about economics and kitchen-table issues, we are told. OK. Start with economics.
Neither candidate has particularly deep economic knowledge or finely honed economic instincts. Neither has any clear idea exactly what to do in the current financial meltdown. Hell, neither does anyone else, including the best economic minds in the world, from Henry Paulson to the head of the European Central Bank. Yet they have muddled through with some success. Both McCain and Barack Obama have assembled fine economic teams that may differ on the details of their plans but have reasonable approaches to managing the crisis. So forget the hype. Neither candidate has an advantage on this issue.
On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved — the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.
Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment — a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.
An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.
Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike 1992, Obama is no Clinton centrist.
What will you get?
Card check — meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.
The so-called Fairness Doctrine — a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators — which is a Hugo Chavez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.
Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama’s publicly declared criterion: “empathy” for the “poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old” — in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one’s station in life.
An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry, and nine of the largest U.S. banks. This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited — $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending — as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.
This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-distributing growth-killing marginal tax rates.
The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamanian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.
Moderate conservative? What the heck is that?
Is this a new term for "country clubber"?
McCain is a lot of things, but "conservative" ain't one of them.....let us never, ever forget that.
Good, Charles. How about further left than EVERYONE? Except maybe Ayers and Dohrn. And Putin.
More like a Huey Long, where every man’s a king... as long as you meet Affirmative Action guidelines.
Good, Charles. But I wish you had figured this out before you dumped continually on Palin and the McCain campaign.
I don’t mean withhold your criticism. Say what you want about either Palin, McCain or the campaign. BUT PUT IT IN CONTEXT.
You have often failed to do that while pundit-ing this cycle. Every analysis made by you guys should be put in the real-world terms of the CHOICE to be made.
It’s not just the “media” that we want to be fair and balanced. A good analyst’s remarks will be internally fair and balanced as well.
Can someone tell me ANY area where Obama possesses particularly deep knowledge? He has no experience in private business or economics. He has absolutely zero foreign policy experience or knowledge. He never served in the military or even the reserves or national guard. He doesn't know jack about energy issues. He knows nothing about agriculture.
His supposed area of "scholarship" is law, yet he's said and written almost nothing about it. He was handed the editorship of the Harvard Law Review via affirmative action and proceeded to become the first (and only) editor never to publish a single article on law. He hasn't published anything on the subject in the years since leaving Harvard. His few interview snippets indicate that he just sees the courtrooms as places to dispense "social justice", with judges ignoring the plain wording of the law in favor of Obama's subjective idea of "fairness". And, I might add, that his supposed record as a "law professor" was a part-time job teaching survey classes in which he failed to even rise to the position of assistant professor. And this was in a Politically Correct academic environment where any well-talking, leftist black guy with a degree from a good school can rise to a full professorhip and a departmental chairmanship with ease.
So what is Obama's area of expertise? Community activism? Perhaps, but he's pretty mum about what he actually did as an organizer, for obvious reasons.
Okay, so maybe it's running for office, I'll grant that he's succeeded there to an extent that he could be described as one of the great overachievers of all time. The problem is that he doesn't do a damn thing once elected but vote the far left line and start campaigning for another office. In the presidency, he won't have that luxury.
His only real area of expertise appears to be in promoting himself. He's written a couple of small books about himself (well, maybe he wrote them) and can ramble on and on about himself for hours on end.
So if this clown wins on Tuesday, we can look forward to four years of a walking ego boasting about himself, campaigning for re-election from day one of his administration, giving a blank check to Reid & Pelosi to pass whatever leftist crap they can come up with, while moaning that foreign policy decisions, military issues, energy issues, and economics are above his pay grade.
America will truly deserve what it gets if our nation elects this guy.
The very concept of an outside community organizer is inherently flawed; a form of counter-productive but arrogant meddling in the lives of others. It is implicitly insulting; historically disastrous to those afflicted by the attention, to the extent that they are influenced by the attention. (See Obama: Community Organizer.)
FNC this morning showed a clip of Obama yesterday denouncing McCain for supposedly taking the low road in his campaign this year. As if his own words when he said that wasn't negative campaigning--but of course the media won't point that out.
With the media acting as an arm of the Obama campaign, nothing negative would be heard at all if not from McCain...while the media is constantly dumping on McCain and Palin, so Obama doesn't really need to.
I must say that there are some extraordinarily intelligent posts here on this thread. Thanks to the posters for sharing their insights.
Very interesting read on a Saturday morning.
“McCain is a lot of things, but “conservative” ain’t one of them.....let us never, ever forget that.”
The most important question is not whether McCain is “conservative.” Unfortunately the primaries did not produce a true conservative.
Right now we must ask if John McCain is conservative compared to Obama. I truly fear for our country if Obama is elected, especially if the Democrats end up with 60 or more seats in the Senate. The result will be a runaway train to disaster.
I have? Sometimes I don't have time to go into depth and try to make my short comments fit the situation. I am sorry I have failed to do so and will try to be clearer in the future.
I was not trying to do an analysis but rather a quit hit on obama. I thought the title itself was context enough. I was just telling Charles that, yes, obama is to the left of LBJ but I think he is much, much farther to the left than LBJ and gave a few examples.
I was addressing my comments to Charles Krauthammer, the author!
:)
I never said it was. I merely pointed out the term "moderate Conservative" that the author used and asked a rhetorical question as to the meaning of the term. There are Conservatives and there are Moderates, but I see no such animal as a "moderate conservative". I also pointed out that McCain is a lot of things, but Conservative of any sort isn't one of them and I can cite dozens of examples.
We must get the fire lit under the Conservative movement again or we are in serious danger of losing our republic forever to Socialism. Those of us who pay attention have a good idea where McCain will take this nation and it isn't down a Conservative road. We should not let folks like this author identify McCain as ANY type of a Conservative, because he is not, never has been and never will be. George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative", but he has governed like a countryclubber. Yet, we allowed the media to define him as a Conservative. You see where that got us, right?
If you review my posts over the past 8 years or so, and specifically in the last 10 months of this election cycle, you will see comment after comment where I point out that it is far, far more important that we have a majority of Congress that are true Conservatives. As such, your comments are preaching to the choir.
The Presidential election is up to the Electoral College now. Our time to chose a Conservative nominee has long since passed. I have serious concern that if we allow McCain to be branded a Conservative by the media it will kill the Conservative movement for at least a generation in the eyes of the casual observer. We simply cannot allow that to happen.
We do indeed still have a voice in who our Congresscritters will be, though. I respectfully suggest you go out and vote accordingly. I already have.....
Oops.
No problem, my FRiend!
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