He could have been president

...but, alas.

I especially like the 'ranch.'

"It's the Economy, Stupid" after all

If there is one thing I know absolutely nothing about, it's economics. I seem to share that ignorance with John McCain by his own admission. And lo and behold, the economy has turned around and bitten us on the ass. As I watch my TIAA/CREF account sink slowly in the West I ponder what to do next. Don't know.

Apparently neither does McCain, at least according to this editorial in today's Wall Street Journal. They seem livid over McCain's talk of the economy. It's as bad as Obama's!

I suppose we could ask Phil Graham or Carly Fiorina to explain, but they both seem to have been "disappeared"* from the campaign.

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge is also not amused. Though, like the WSJ, he thinks Obama would be worse. That's getting to be a fine distinction.

*a tactic sometimes used in Latin American dictatorships. unfriendly to the US. Like Spain.

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Lowry on McCain

Rich Lowry, NRO's designated adult, starts to get an inkling about something that a lot of Repubs are overlooking about Palin/McCain. It's an anti-Repub ticket. That is, it leans toward the populist forces of the party that have been taken for granted and used as shock troops by the Repub leaders for so long without a payoff. After Katrina there is an anti-establishment mood out there among the volk. It has a 'liberal' expression and that is what the Demos have been banking on. But it also has a distinct and large 'conservative' expression. If McCain can actually carry out his stated agenda, the Repub party apparat is in for considerable heartburn. If the steele cupcake has anything to do with it they might get a dose of genuine right wing Christian populism. Rather than Dan Quayle think Evita.

For what it's worth, here's part of Lowry's analysis:

Then again, McCain's message wasn't always congenial to these delegates. You never would've known that he's a Republican running when Republicans have held the White House for the last eight years. There was a nod to President Bush for keeping us safe at the top; after that, McCain made the case for getting "this country moving again" - typically an out-party message.

The reaction in the hall was tepid to his diagnosis of how the GOP has lost the trust of the public, and to his pledges to work cooperatively with all well-intentioned comers in a nonpartisan manner. But his real audience was out in the country, where traditional GOP politics is a tough sell this year.

He HAS to run against the Repub establishment. I think that doing so actually appeals to him. He may even mean it. But can he pull it off once in office?

About that McCain Camp Health Care Plan

... the one I linked to in the last post, where a McCain adviser claims we all have health care because we can just go to the emergency room and the gov will pay for it. Well, the McCainites say he is NOT an adviser. Or, maybe he is, but they just don't agree with him. Or something.

Lame.

But we're a nation of whiners so what can I say?

McCain, Obama, and Patriotism

Someone asked about the allegation that McCain has questioned Obama's partiotism. Well, in my view, yes.

And it is not just me. Here is a quote from Bob Herbert writing in the New York Times. You should read the whole thing since it gets the views of both me and Carmen letter perfect on several aspects of the campaign. Here is the part about patriotism.

“For four days, Senator John McCain and his allies have accused Senator Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.”

Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.

But it could just be us I suppose. And yes, I do view the latter accusation as tantamount to calling Obama a traitor.

Here's another take on the same subject from pretty much the same source: The New York Times.

Though I suppose we could take it as simply politics as usual, the other side is just as bad, they all do it, it works, etc.

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Another Consverative's view of McCain

Well, after reading that wonderful little column by the Prince of Darkness himself praising an American hero that I linked to in the last post, here is another conservative's take on John McCain.

I wonder how many other conservatives feel that way about McCain?

ok - back to grading. I just needed a little break. Honest.


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Karl Rove and an American hero

Even when I am at my cheeriest and most forgiving, willing to love all my fellow creatures, even on such a day I still despise Karl Rove and think that he ought to serve at least a few days in Hades. But today he has a column in the Wall Street Journal about John McCain and his stay in a North Vietnamese prison that I think everyone should be aware of. If I vote Democratic in the fall it won't be because I do not admire McCain as an authentic hero.

[A fellow prisoner] still vividly recalls Mr. McCain's sermons [as he was designated the 'priest' by the other POWs]. "He remembered the Episcopal liturgy," Mr. Day says, "and sounded like a bona fide preacher*." One of Mr. McCain's first sermons took as its text Luke 20:25 and Matthew 22:21, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." Mr. McCain said he and his fellow prisoners shouldn't ask God to free them, but to help them become the best people they could be while serving as POWs. It was Caesar who put them in prison and Caesar who would get them out. Their task was to act with honor.

I was raised on a farm by very old fashioned people and the idea of honor was not alien to us (I think it actually is alien to most modern Americans - and that is not a criticism). This passage has some resonance with me.

This one too:

One night, a Vietnamese guard loosened his bonds, returning at the end of his watch to tighten them again so no one would notice. Shortly after, on Christmas Day, the same guard stood beside Mr. McCain in the prison yard and drew a cross in the sand before erasing it. Mr. McCain later said that when he returned to Vietnam for the first time after the war, the only person he really wanted to meet was that guard. [He doesn't say if McCain ever did meet that guy]

Unfortunately, this one did too, in a negative way. Read it and I'll explain.

... in 1991 Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands. The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life, so Mrs. McCain brought the child home to America with her. She was met at the airport by her husband, who asked what all this was about.

Mrs. McCain replied that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation. "I hope she can stay with us," she told her husband. Mr. McCain agreed. Today that child is their teenage daughter Bridget.**

In the 2000 Republican primary campaign push polling in some parts of the south claimed that this child was McCain's illegitimate daughter by an African American woman. Nasty, anonymous, and effective. It was done on behalf of George W. Bush, though exactly by who, at whose suggestion, has never been reported.

But the heavy betting was always on Karl Rove.

* well if he remembered the Episcopal Book of Common prayer of course he sounded like a preacher.
** wonder how a President McCain would feel about the shenanigins with adoptions at the US embassy in Hanoi? One can only hope his famous temper would kick in.

The Primaries and Immigration

Several Republican candidates made a strict anti-illegal immigration policy the hallmark of their bid for the nomination. They are all gone now. Instead John McCain, who has been bitterly criticized by self-appointed spokesmen for the party for being too moderate on immigration, is now the presumed winner of the nomination.

The Wall Street Journal, which has always supported immigration reform that allows for a clear-cut path to permanent residency and citizenship points out this fact. Read the whole column, but their summation is:

The GOP primaries have been about as clear a market test as one could imagine for the restrictionist position. Mr. Romney adopted it in full-throated fashion, as Fred Thompson did earlier, and as Mike Huckabee does now. If hostility to illegal immigration were as decisive a voting issue as the TV and radio talkers claim, Senator McCain would not be the presumptive Republican nominee. And this is all without taking account of Democrats and Independents, who tend to be even less restrictionist.

The primaries suggest that even GOP voters appreciate that immigration is more complicated than conservative media elites pretend. Mr. McCain has adapted his immigration position over the last year and now talks about securing the border before other reforms go ahead. But he also talks about a guest-worker program to deal with economic realities, as well as the folly of deportation.

This must be right, even wise, since it agrees with Clemens' position. Once again the voters, even in primaries which usually bring out the committed and doctrinaire, seem to have more sense than most of the politicos.

The Republican Dilemma

I am hoping for a great implosion of the Republican coalition this year - not really because I think that the Demos will have all that much to offer us, but because I now believe that the Republicans have become toxic. I hope to explain that in more detail over the coming weeks, and what I hope a real drubbing at the polls will do for the Repubs, but for the moment let's just look at the Republican pundits and their reaction to political reality. In this case in the person of John McCain as the likely nominee and a possible victor over Clinton or Obama.

Mona Charon is a conservative pundit who appears occasionally on TV and on National Review's web site. After writing at NRO about the blistering e-mails she got from readers for suggesting that McCain was trying to meet conservatives more than half-way, which they clearly thought was not enough, she writes ...

The problem with John McCain is not just that he strays. George Bush has strayed from conservatism too. So has Fred Thompson, and certainly, Mitt Romney has as well. But Senator McCain has a knack for saying things in just the tones and accents that liberals prefer.

In 2000, he condemned the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance.*” In 2004, when Sen. John Kerry was getting his comeuppance from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, vets whom he had known during the war and who couldn’t remain silent as the Democratic nominee distorted his war record**, John McCain weighed in by calling them “dishonorable and dishonest.***” When the Bush Administration was being vilified as a nest of Torquemadas for using waterboarding on three occasions, McCain came forward to condemn waterboarding as torture****.

Interesting, if true, as someone once said. She then makes what I think is an accurate point about McCain and the conservatives:

his return from the political grave can probably be traced to the moment (October 22) when he joshingly referred to having missed the Woodstock music festival in 1969 because “I was tied up at the time.” In that instant he came to personify (for many) the conservative side of the great 1960s chasm that (Obama’s irenic rhetoric notwithstanding) continues to divide our society. Not only was he not smoking pot and lolling in the mud with his girlfriend, you could almost hear Republicans telling themselves that he was standing up to torture at the hands of America’s enemies.

And that may explain the otherwise inexplicable animus out there - some are refighting the 60s era. Now mind you, very few of those who are so het up about 'liberals at Woodstock' served in uniform, though they are willing to trash the reputation of those who did if it suits them (e.g. John Kerry, Al Gore, and even ... John McCain). It's no deeper than a lifestyle thing. Perhaps as Henry Kissinger said about academic battles, such struggles are so vicious because they are about so little.

But what does M. Charon think of McCain herself?

There is a strutting self-righteousness about McCain that goes hand-in-hand with a nitroglycerin temper. He flatters himself that his colleagues in the Senate dislike him because he stands up for principle, while they sell their souls for pork. Not exactly. He is disliked because on many, many occasions he has been disrespectful, belligerent, and vulgar to those who differ with him.

So there you have it. God, I hope thousands and thousands of conservatives think like she does. Otherwise, the Demos may be in more trouble than they may think at the moment.

* they are
** he didn't
*** they were
**** it is


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VDH on McCain's chances

Victor Davis Hanson, or VDH as he is know on National Review's Corner, has some intelligent things to say about McCain and his chances among conservative Republican voters in a little essay called 'McCain Agonistes' (the guy is a scholar of the classics after all). Basically he thinks that McCain is the best hope for defeating the Clintons. He doesn't even mention Obama.

I especially like his conclusion if conservatives don't make their peace with McCain and support him:

Otherwise, we are about 1/3 the way through a Greek tragedy, in which the fated catastrophic denouement is known, but can't be prevented.