McCain! (?)
Posted 30 January 2008 at 9:41 am
Homis posted an entry today talking about McCain and the presidency. (For those who haven’t heard, McCain beat Romney in the Florida GOP primary by five percentage points.) I was thinking about just posting a response there, but I figure I might as well make an entry here about it instead.
I’ve generally been a fan of McCain, at least to some degree, primarily because of his somewhat moderate stance and his willingness to work with people across the political spectrum. I know a lot of people in the Republican Party don’t like that sort of stance (especially Rush Limbaugh, who is apparently a staunch Romney supporter who feels it’s his daily duty to trash McCain regardless of the impact on the general election), especially because of his work on campaign finance and immigration. I actually liked those measures for the most part, at least in their intent, though it’s pretty clear that McCain-Feingold didn’t really have the impact I was hoping for (politics are as dirty and money-driven as ever).
I’m enough of a fan of his willingness to work across the aisle that I’ve advocated for several years a McCain-Lieberman ticket, perhaps in conjunction with Unity08. Sadly, Lieberman has already indicated that he’s not interested in running for VP again, despite that he and McCain are best pals.
However, I do have to say that I’m not inspired by McCain, nor am I inspired by anybody else running for President. I like several of them for various reasons - McCain for his semi-moderate stance, Huckabee for his support of replacing federal taxes with a national consumption tax, and even Obama just for his tremendous presence and oratory style.
But each of them carries problems as well.
McCain’s economic policies are difficult to divine. Yes, he’s for reduced taxes and reduced government spending, and that’s a good thing, but that’s also a fairly wide brush with which to paint a picture of his economic policies. I don’t think he’s going to be as much of a foreign policy axe as some have worried about. Had he been elected in 2000, I don’t think he would have invaded Iraq, for example. But it does bother me that nearly his entire campaign has been based on his Iraq policy (much as Giuliani’s campaign is more or less a Lois Griffin-esque recitation of “9/11″ over and over again).
Huckabee’s foreign policy shows inexperience and a question of whether he takes a keen enough interest in foreign policy matters. I also suspect that he’ll be more traditionally pro-Israel than I feel is necessary or healthy for that region, in part due to his religious convictions. Speaking of his religious convictions, I do also have concerns about the undue influence that he might have on education, in particular evolution versus creation/intelligent design/whatever they’re calling it these days. Even though he’s easily the most likeable guy on the campaign trail right now, that honestly won’t cut it (the same could be said of Bush in 2000, after all).
And Obama, well, I just disagree with the vast majority of his policies. I think he’s profoundly naive on Iraq, and I firmly believe that he will pull troops out of there faster than the commanders would advise, just because it would be a popular move for his base. (In contrast, I think Clinton has the good sense not to push things too fast, to the point where I think she’ll renege on her promises to pull out troops because she understands that the reality of the situation doesn’t match the Democratic party ideal.) I also have problems with any health care plan that taxes the healthy to pay for the unhealthy (I refer to the hidden tax of forcing everyone to buy health insurance whether they want to or not). As I said somewhere else, if I were a casting director, I’d cast Barack Obama as the President in every movie I made, because he just looks that presidential. But I wouldn’t vote for him.
I’m not going to vote a partisan ballot in March for two reasons: one, I want to maintain my political independence; and two, both major party nominations are probably going to be decided by then anyway. (I’ll be voting because of the Cleveland Heights income tax increase ballot issue, but that’s a topic for another post.) I’m also still holding out hope that Unity08 will come up with a better moderate choice.
No matter how you slice it, though, our choices this year really suck. People are talking about Michael Bloomberg swooping in and fixing all that by running as an independent, but I’m not holding my breath.
