When I saw that McCain was running for the Republican Nomination in ‘07, I thought to myself, “Hey, this could make the election interesting; McCain is an entirely different sort of animal from the rest of his party.” I thought, “If he shows signs of returning to actual fiscal conservatism, I might vote Republican this time.”
Now, in ‘08, I can’t say that I feel the same way about the man. I’m voting Obama now, incidentally.
The reason for my vote.
In 2000, 2004, and even as near as 2006, McCain had fundamental disagreements with the Bush Administration; he was respectful of his colleagues in the Senate, was incensed by the Republican’s “attack machine” method of political debate, and he generally had an excellent sense of humor. Strangely, though, the second he donned his “game face”
he aligned with the existing Administration, and adopted their attack machine as his own personal election winner.
His primary election success was based on his stance on the issues; a stance that, while it did alienate some of the conservative vote, appealed to centrists and even some liberals. That this stance was abandoned in favor of, essentially, the Bush Doctrine - this screams intellectual dishonesty. This screams, “I want the election, and I’m willing to swap my position to whatever it takes to get it”.
I understand the motivation: the Democrats have an inspirational candidate; it’s going to be hard to get any Democrat to defect, we’ll concentrate on solidifying the existing conservative base instead. Add to that, the republicans have a Nader-esque spoiler in the form of Bob Barr this year, when they rarely have to deal with spoilers of the Nader variety - at a time when a significant number of their base has been leaning towards the pre-McCarthy conservatism that the Libertarians have been appealing to. (The Ron Paul vote, around 2-3% nationally, IS significant when you’re considering the presidential race, which has been remarkably tight in the last couple of cycles). This is particularly damaging this year; much of the Green democrats have been both severely disillusioned by Nader and strongly attracted to Obama; Nader isn’t going to spoil the Dems nearly as badly as Barr is going to spoil the Republicans.
The problem with this campaign method - solidification of your base in light of internal attrition and the difficulty of oppositional attrition - is that it ignores the centrists that more or less make or break a campaign. The centrists, at the outset, agreed more with the even-handed McCain of ‘06 than the hamfisted McCain of ‘08. By attempting to pander to the moderate right, and by utilizing the Rovian political tactics against a candidate who’s platform rests partially on the idea that Washington’s politics are broken, he essentially lost the center and moderate left in one stroke.
At that note, McCain essentially helped Obama prove his point: every attack, every smear, was an opportunity for Obama to say, “Hey, see what I mean? This isn’t appropriate behavior for a politician. What happened here? We need to fix this. Help me fix it. Prove to the other politicians that this sort of appeal to fear and outright lying won’t win them an election.”
So, some of the smears that are kind of laughable. The “Empty suit” rhetoric, for example. Given that Obama appears to know what he’s doing, and McCain appears not to, this just looks like another typical example of Rovian transference tactic: get the public to scrutinize the other party on your faults, so that when it comes out that you have them, the effect is mitigated by the portion of the public that was convinced by your initial accusation.
It’s a brilliant - but entirely dishonest - tactic. I can’t think why the Dems don’t use it often, but the “moral” majority does. It couldn’t be because those with strong absolutist morals are relatively easy to emotionally exploit in that respect, now, could it?
The “Socialist” charge is equally ridiculous. It essentially goes this way: Obama has been exposed to socialism, and has socialists’ support so he’s a socialist. Now, the easiest failure of this argument is that exposure doesn’t equal agreement, nor has it resulted as such in Obama’s case - at least, not to any visible degree.
The implication is that an individual’s supporters dictate his politics. If you’re going to take this logical fallacy to its conclusion: Obama may have socialists / communists who agree on more points with him than with McCain, and thus support him - but McCain has Neo Nazi’s and other forms of fascists who agree with him on more points than they agree with Obama, thus supporting him.
Socialists are generally well thinking people with an idealistic flaw (that is, that people are selfless enough at the national scale to allow pure socialism to work - they just aren’t; pure socialism generally can’t work with anything but small populations for this reason - but in balanced hybrid with capitalism, it works rather well). Neo-nazi’s, on the other hand, are disgusting examples of the ideological danger involved in a eugenic mindset (that is, one race is superior, but in a way that nature apparently hasn’t caused to overtake the species).
In short, by invoking a sort of “guilt by association”, McCain’s campaign is playing a losing game, even if we play by his intellectually dishonest rules.
Below the fold are some points on the economy, and not really related to the election. Read on if you’re interested.
