A Case For McCain

A reader writes:

While you have denounced John McCain's campaign tactics as "shitty," you've generally ignored some of the more vicious misrepresentations on the part of the Obama camp, the most egregious of which has to be their campaign to tar McCain with oil industry corruption allegations--the epitome of which has to be their "pocket" advertisement.  Given that McCain has never shown "big oil" a whit of favoritism, Obama's attempted smear on McCain's indisputable integrity is at least as base a move, if not more so, than anything McCain has done.

And while the "celebrity" ad was more than a bit silly, their "The One" web ad really was quite funny--I showed it to my largely apolitical 17 year-old sister, and she found it to be hilarious.  More to the point, it actually serves a legitimate purpose: trying to drive a wedge between the notions of Obama, the phenomenon, and Obama, the candidate.  Just about everybody, unless you're somehow pathological, loves the Obama phenomenon. The McCain camp, however, needs to remind people that however fun this whole phenomenon may be, Obama is just a man who wants to be president, who has to be judged on his qualifications.  And their "The One" ad seems to me to be a perfectly balanced and clever way to do that.

I know that you want this campaign to somehow be an unprecedented paragon of integrity, but I imagine if you actually think about this race in historical context, you'd realize just how incredibly civil it is.

There's been no hint of swift-boating, or any similar such smears.  The McCain camp's fudged a couple of numbers and used humor to try to take away some of the shimmer of the rather ridiculous angelic-like aura that's surrounded their opponent.  Considering that this a political campaign, neither of these should be the least bit surprising.  This is not "Rovian politics," this is normal.  Indeed, the fact that you can get so worked up with moral outrage about the McCain campaign's bit of number fudging just shows how incredibly genteel this race actually is.  (I'd challenge you to name a close presidential race--or a close anything race--in U.S. history that's more polite than the one we're witnessing.)

On Iraq, I don't quite understand your outpouring of support for Obama.  The fact that Maliki has seemed to endorse Obama's policy does not mean that anyone who thinks U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq past 2010 is a delusional neoconservative maniac.  Maliki's own military believes that a coalition presence will be required until at least 2015, and astute, if perhaps quite biased, Iraq observers believe that Maliki's  endorsement was in response to his perception that Obama is going to win and in response to his own domestic political concerns.  I'd remind you that it's the Iraqis who'll have a firm control over the ceiling of the number of American troops in Iraq, while our president always has control over the floor.  Given how perilously close we were to defeat in Iraq (at which point Obama's essential position was that we ought to give up, I have to mention), and how hard-fought the gains have been, I don't think it's unreasonable to want the candidate most likely to keep troop numbers near the Iraqi-controlled ceiling instead of the candidate who's shown the greatest tendency to want to set an arbitrary American floor.

Lastly, you've suggested on more than one occasion that McCain is as bad or worse than Obama as it relates to fiscal issues.  Yes, McCain's proposals may cost more theoretically, but I have to point out that the vast majority of McCain's legislative agenda, particularly anything remotely related to tax cuts, will be utterly dead on arrival.  McCain doesn't need to come up with spending cuts to offset his initiatives since most of the initiatives stand no chance of passage.  Finding spending cuts would be a purely academic exercise that would do little but cost McCain votes.  With Obama, by contrast, will get whatever he wants through congress.  Just about every dime of his spending program will be enacted, and given his history in the Illinois State Legislature (though I really wish we could get a more even-handed account of that time in Obama's political career than the statistically-challenged Stanley Kurtz) that's likely to just be the tip of the iceberg.  McCain has shown a very, very consistent record of fiscal responsibility, while Obama has nothing but empty promises and a record that shows the opposite.  I say that we should trust a candidate's record as a proper indication of what they're likely to do when in office, not what they say in the year they're running for president.

Look, I understand how you find Obama tempting.  So do I.  If even one house of Congress were in Republican hands, I'd consider it.  But I really don't want the only check on the Democrats' agenda to be a 42-seat--if that--Republican minority in the Senate.  McCain, if elected, will ensure the continuation of divided government (which you, only two years ago, so heartily endorsed), and he will send the Republican Party in a new, and indisputably desirable, direction after the last eight years of damage.  McCain may not be perfect, but at the very least, he still merits a conservative's honest consideration.  And you really ought to give him that.