The Z Spot

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Why every Republican should vote for John McCain

Yes. That may seem like a rather bold statement. Shouldn’t the election be about expressing your views on who the best candidate is? Yes. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works here.

Several newspapers reported on this over the last two days. But in case you haven’t heard, McCain is the only candidate even close to being able to beat Hillary or Obama in the general election. Yeah. Romney is especially dangerous. In fact, more people said they would not consider voting for him if he gets the nomination than would vote or consider voting for him.

Electability is usually a crock. The numbers don’t really back the dramatic claims usually made by candidates. This cycle is an exception.

What this country needs to regain its legitimacy, both domestically and abroad, is to distance itself from anybody, particularly neocons and evangelicals, with whom Bush can be associated. If Republicans want to see a Republican in office in 2009, they need to vote for candidates who can successfully distance themselves from the Republican Party of the Bush administration, and the bad taste it has left in swing (and other) voters’ mouths. McCain and Paul are the only candidates that can do that. They are the only candidates who appeal to moderate or Democratic voters. And Ross Perot has a better chance of winding up on the ballot in the general election than Ron Paul. And he’s not even running.

So, if you don’t want to see the White House go to the Dems, or, for that matter, if you don’t want it to go to Hillary or Obama, vote McCain.

Eli Blake said…

To be honest, McCain does scare me as a candidate though. The other day in his N.H. victory speech, McCain sounded like the honest cowboy who isn’t afraid to walk into a bar and order a milkshake (straight out of 1950’s westerns). If you closed your eyes and listened to the voice, it reminded me of Reagan.

Which really does scare me. Because if listening to him reminded me of Reagan (and I totally disagreed with 99% of what Reagan stood for) then I’m sure I’m not the only one who heard the Gipper in that speech. And some of the others who did are probably Republicans.

But let’s be honest about something: McCain (who the other day said he’d be fine with keeping U.S. troops in Iraq ‘for a hundred years,’) is a continuation of Bush. He is every bit as stubborn as Bush, and he is well connected to a lot of Bush cronies (by which I mean Bush I cronies like Brent Scowcroft and Frank Fahrenkopf, both of whom are on the board of directors for the International Republican Institute (IRI) a neo-con ‘foreign policy’ organization originally established to provide an ‘alternate reality’ to Jimmy Carter and the U.N. in terms of election monitoring, if necessary. McCain is an improvement on the specific matter of torture of prisoners, but I’m not willing to hand the GOP another four or eight years of running things the way they are just to get the U.S. back into compliance with the Geneva Conventions.

January 12, 2008 11:30 PM

Zach said…

Hey Eli,
Thanks for taking a minute to check my blog out. And actually comment.

I guess that in response, I would make two points. First of all, to you as a Democrat, McCain seems like an extension of Bush, and is scary. To Republicans, that’s not necessarily true. The other area (other than keeping troops in Iraq) in which he mirrors Bush’s policies are immigration. Which ironicall, both he and Bush have the most moderate, and (in my mind at least) sensible, views in the Republican party.

The second point is this: is McCain scarier than an evangelist like Huckabee, or than Romney? Appearantly, according to huge portions of the population, he’s not.

Although McCain’s policies (particularly in IR issues) tend to be pretty conservative, he is known for working in a bipartisan way.

Similar to my views on Feingold, I hope that at the very least, Democrats can recognize that although his policies may not be what they like to see, McCain is the type of guy that we should all hope to see in office. That is, he is honest, stands by his principals, and is willing to cross party lines to work for the people of this country.

January 12, 2008 11:37 PM

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