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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

A Prediction

By The Daily Dish
May 27 2008, 10:20 AM ET

A reader speculates:

I think your support for Obama is based entirely on your largely-justified contempt for the Clintons, and not at all on the reasons you state in the blog today; your laundry list is starting to seem forced, a little tinny...I don't accuse you of dishonesty, just enemy-of-my-enemy stuff and a bit of infatuation.  Your heart is already hedging, and your mind won't much longer be able to justify hoping that an unapologetic tax-and-spend liberal will win just to give what's for to a bunch of phony conservatives who also spend too much, but at least pretended, before during and after, that they were against such profligacy.



Obama not only won't pretend not to put spending on steroids, but will glory in it.  Even the gay issue will probably fare better under McCain; I don't believe he cares one way or the other, whatever he says during the campaign, and may be able to midwife the Republicans your way; Obama, counterintuitively, might actually be worse for gays for fear of being stereotyped as "gay friendly"; he'd be looking to pander a bit to the right, and gays are usually the first ones thrown over the side, especially with a black president, given the historically "conservative" views of blacks towards gays. 

Herewith, a prediction:  by Labor Day, you will have long since given up on Obama and will be advocating the election of McCain.  For all the reasons the various villains of the Republican Party hate him, and for the fact that he more closely matches your policy wishes than Obama does or ever will, he will be your man.

I have a feeling, once the prospect of Hillary being president is safely foreclosed, so will your support for Obama be.  At least I hope so.  The Republican Party may well deserve a strong comeuppance, but one-party Democratic rule would be far too damaging for the country to indulge such a catharsis.  McCain and a liberal Congress may well be as fruitful for the country as Clinton and a Republican Congress were. Undivided partisan rule is best avoided; better that none of these characters get a free hand, wouldn't you agree?

That's why I'm for McCain, anyway.

My arguments from last fall still stand.

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