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I’ve acknowledged that neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney are hardcore, nor even “Reagan-styled” Conservatives, although neither were Rudy and Huckabee. Well, I’ll also acknowledge here that neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney are “Liberal sell-outs” either.
In fact, McCain has always been what he is today, a strong Center-Right Republican.
Yes, McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform) and McCain-Kennedy (amnesty for illegal immigrants) were very bad Bills, but they weren’t bad Bills merely because of Feingold’s and Kennedy’s participation, but because McCain-Feingold has resulted in violations on freedom of speech (political speech) and McCain-Kennedy was designed to continue to allow the cheap (below minimum wage) labor that has put a persistent, downward pressure on ALL prevailing U.S. wage rates to continue to flow into this country. Supporters of that Bill even refused to allow an Amendment that would’ve barred illegal aliens with a criminal records and suspected terrorists from getting amnesty under that Bill.
Still, such bipartisan cooperation is not at all rare, nor even (in all cases) wrong. Those two Bills are now disasters and McCain pretty much acknowledges that, just as he’s acknowledged that he was wrong in voting against the Bush tax cuts, cuts he says he’d now make permanent.
To his credit, McCain claims to have opposed the Bush tax cuts because there weren’t any spending cuts that accompanied him, BUT he’s come around seeing that those tax cuts actually RAISED revenues across the board and cut the deficit in half within their first three years!
Others have claimed that McCain disparaged Sam Alito as “too Conservative.” If that’s so, then why did McCain’s “gang of fourteen” give Sam Alito the up or down vote that resulted in Alito’s being confirmed 58 to 42, a vote that would NOT have stood up to a Democratic filibuster? McCain claims he never said that about Sam Alito and his actions seem to back that up.
McCain’s certainly no Reaganite, but neither is Romney, nor anyone else in this race, but he’s also not all that bad. I know supporters of Fred Thompson will be hugely disappointed, but Thompson never got on track and his message hardly galvanized the electorate. Isn't it better to take half a loaf rather than none?
I'll admit that I don’t put all that much faith in the polls that show McCain beating both Hillary and Obama head-to-head “if the election were to be held today.”
For one thing, the election isn’t going to be held today, nor even tomorrow. I believe that current Polls give both McCain and Hillary that edge because far more of the vast apolitical middle recognizes their names. By comparison, Obama and Romney are relative unknowns.
A lot can and almost certainly will happen between now and November, 2008, so there’s no way of knowing which side will benefit from those yet unforeseen events.
Frankly, I take great pleasure in the fact that the most Left-of-center candidates on both side (Edwards and Giuliani) are out of the race. I’d take either Romney or McCain over either Democrat at this point. I'm certainly not going to disparage McCain or distort his image, as some have done, because he "hasn't been Conservative enough." Hell, Ronald Reagan was a Democrat until he converted AFTER Goldwater's 1964 Republican Convention speech!
Before that he'd been a "JFK Democrat!" I think it's importat to keep such things in perspective.
As a side note, increasingly, it's looking like the U.S. may have something that it hasn't had in nearly half a century - a President who was not either a VP or a State Governor! The last Senator to be elected President was JFK in 1960. LBJ (JFK's VP) won his own full term in 1964. After Johnson, it's been Nixon (Eisenhauer's VP, twice), Carter (Gov of GA., once), Reagan (Gov of CA., twice), Bush Sr. (Reagan's VP, once), Clinton (Gov of Ark., twice) and G W Bush (Gov of TX.,twice).
In fact, going back to Teddy Roosevelt (former Governor of NY), elected in November 1900, only four Presidents since that 1900 election have been elected who weren't either former Governors or Vice Presidents. They were Warren G. Harding and John F Kennedy (both Senators before being elected President), William H. Taft (who'd been Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of War from 1904 to 1908) and perhaps strangest of all, Herbert Hoover, who'd served as Secretary of Commerce from 1921 to 1928 and had been considered as a possible DEMOCRATIC Presidential candidate in 1920 by many Party leaders, including future President Franklin D. Roosevelt, before being elected President, as a Republican, in 1928!
So long as Mitt Romney doesn't win the 2008 election, we will have only the fifth President, since 1900 to be elected without having been a Governor or VP! In fact, a McCain, a Clinton or an Obama would be only the third President to ascend from the ranks of the Senate during that period.
