Making the Case for John McCain

Having just registered as a member at The Next Right, I feel as though the best way to get started is to post the letter that - as an Alum - I was asked to write on Sen. McCain's behalf in my law school's newspaper.

Slight editing - I named my former classmate in the actual letter.

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THE CASE FOR JOHN McCAIN

A former classmate recruited me to make the case for John McCain – presumably because there are few who he could find to make it.  So, I am writing this as a student of American political history – being fairly certain that Senator Barack Obama will be elected to be the 44th President of the United States. After the Republican Party fell into many of the same traps that parties fall into when they’re in power, the stage is set for Senator Obama.

The reason I am so easy to dupe into an exercise like this is probably because my former classmate knows how I feel about the federal government as a “miracle drug.”  Its capacity to fix problems is overshadowed by its proven ability to prohibit American innovation and to cause far more problems than it could ever manage to fix.  Such a broad based offering leads me to Sen. John McCain, for whom I will be voting this November.  Whether this is an acceptable option for most of you will depend on what ideologies you embrace, what commercials you found most interesting, or for some it will just be a matter of habit – pulling the (R) or (D) lever (being a conservative who has lived his life in the northeast – I don’t expect any amount of good pointery in this missive to change minds).

I approach an election wanting to know the underlying philosophy of each candidate.  Issues are important, but new issues come to the Presidency every day and understanding the underlying ideals of a candidate is far more important to me than however they’ve triangulated a particular issue.

This year, I am left with two candidates who I find exceptionally talented – albeit in different ways.  Sen. Obama is the most gifted orator since Reagan.  He is not nearly as gifted off the cuff, but he is clearly an extremely intelligent man who has laid the foundation for his successes in the halls of academia and the Illinois State Legislature.  Since he wasn’t elected to the Senate until 2004, he could make the claim that he was the only major Democratic candidate who had been opposed to the invasion of Iraq.  Part of his appeal is that he has not been a creature of Washington for decades.  Sen. McCain is a man of conviction who has made a career of staking his position and living by it.

My concern with Senator Obama is that his public record reveals him to be little more than a political opportunist – which is infuriating if you’re trying to determine what underlying philosophy he has.  He is likely to be a President for whom political calculation is a more precious commodity than principle.  The finest example of this was the FISA bill, which he changed his position on once he became the nominee of his party and had to consider the fact that not just Democrats and Daily Kos readers would be voting for him in November.  In February of this year, he stated, “I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty.”  By June, he had changed his position, trying to couch his support by saying that as President he would carefully monitor the program – but in the end, siding with President Bush.  His decision to forgo the public financing was another demonstration of his preference for opportunity over developing an underlying philosophy of governance.  This move has effectively destroyed the public financing system, since no candidate going forward is likely to commit to it.  It seems absurd to watch Sen. Obama rail against a “broken system” when he is the one who broke it.  He also has – curiously – not disclosed his entire donor list, as Sen. McCain has.  While Sen. McCain has left his campaign open to public scrutiny, Sen. Obama shies away from it.  I also question a public official who has made his career by perfecting the “present” vote on the people’s dime.  I have a fundamental problem with the career-mindedness of our politicians as it is – but I will save that for another day. 

With the economy being in the frightful condition it’s in, I am leery of voting for Senator Obama.  A root cause of the financial breakdown is the mortgage crisis and the cooked books at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Countrywide and others.  With a recession coming, the importance of economic issues – and the importance of government efficiency – becomes paramount.

Does Senator Obama have a plan to be the steward of our economic destiny? In February, Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal did the math on the Illinois Senator’s economic proposals.  Sen. Obama’s proposals amounted to a 39.6% personal income tax; a 52.2% combined income and payroll tax, a 28% capital-gains tax, a 39.6% dividends tax, and a 55% estate tax.  Such imposition from the federal government left Sen. Obama with questions to answer in June.  Now, with the economy heading south for winter and credit markets locking up, the federal government ringing the economic neck of Americans is a poor choice.  Sen. Obama has since elaborated his position (fundamental change seems to be negotiable) – insisting that the top echelon will pay more (it’s their patriotic duty, after all), while 95% of Americans will receive a tax cut.  Such a claim leaves many heads spinning, however, since it is estimated that less than 70% of Americans actually pay federal income taxes as it is.  How is this tax cut to be delivered to those who aren’t paying federal income taxes?  Will they be getting money back that they didn’t actually put in?  If ten million more people will not be paying taxes, then at what point do we have more people collecting from the government than we have contributing to it?   Call it pandering, opportunism, or redistribution of wealth, but something fails to ring true in Sen. Obama’s proposals.  It would appear that Sen. Obama prefers a move toward socialist-market initiatives – the kind that have bogged down economic growth in Western Europe (the kind that much of Western Europe is moving away from). 

Talk of regulation or de-regulation, in my mind, is overshadowed by the fact that it was Sen. Obama’s own party that prevented the regulation and oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  It doesn’t seem logical that a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President will perform the proper oversight and regulation when they have so grandly dropped the ball on this issue so far.  Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others were encouraged (via threat of financial penalty) to provide affordable housing and “subprime loans” to those who might not have otherwise had the opportunity to get a mortgage.  All of this was achieved under legislative devices like the Community Reinvestment Act.  Sen. Obama can give lip service to regulation and oversight until to his heart’s content, but when Armando Falcon, the Director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight brought the issue to Congress, Democrats accused Mr. Falcon of being overzealous, misguided, and even intimated that he was more interested in the political lynching of Franklin Raines than he was the structural integrity of Fannie and Freddie.  Was this what Sen. Obama has decried as “Bush’s deregulation” or was it a shell game that goes on all too often in Congress and in our politics?  This seems to be a problem that Sen. Obama is more likely to encourage than he is to remedy. 

Despite his skillful distancing and triangulating, Sen. Obama is the less desirable candidate in the face of such economic challenges.  While some invoke the Great Depression (as is the case whenever economic turmoil rolls around) this is the worst economic crisis we’ve seen since the Carter Administration.  The difference is that we can either change course, as we did in 1980, or we can revive policies that walk and talk like the New Deal and turn a potential recession into this century’s economic catastrophe.  In the 1980s, President Reagan worked with a Democratic Congress and managed to limit the economic damage.  In the 1930s, President Roosevelt and his New Dealers pushed through an agenda that managed to prolong the economic crisis aroused by the 1929 stock market crash.  They used the economic crisis as an excuse to advance their preferred policies. The idea that “capitalism broke” was misguided then and it is misguided now.  If its capitalism that is broken, what is it that is being offered in its place? 
 
John McCain – who may be running the most lackluster national campaign since Bob Dole in 1996 – has been a consistent advocate of government restraint, of reducing the deficit, and doing away with wasteful government spending.  These are adult answers to adult problems.  If Treasury Secretary Paulson’s plan is the right one, then America needs to be more responsible with every penny that comes to the federal government for easily the next decade.  Instead, the people who are causing the problem are allowed to spend at will, by dishonest means, in order to keep their careers moving forward. Sen. McCain’s promise that he’ll make earmark authors famous is a promise that I actually look forward to seeing realized.  In a time when we face novel challenges internationally, domestically, and economically, our Executive branch needs to serve a very simple purpose: hold Congress’ feet to the fire and insist they be adults.  Publicly shame them into being responsible if need be.  John McCain’s plain and simple leadership is what this country needs right now.  Every day I grow more convinced that we will go with style over substance, but I pray that in the closing days, Senator McCain will make the case that “Change We Can Believe In” is as useless a slogan as “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” was.  It’s a clever campaign gimmick – but a useless governing philosophy.  I am not convinced that Senator Obama knows the difference and cannot endorse his candidacy.  The over used phrase “fundamental change” does not seem to be rooted in any particular plan for governance.  Senator McCain is an accomplished public servant who seems uncomfortable campaigning – and that may be all the clue we need as to what kind of Commander in Chief he would be.

Both men have presented a compelling case.  In fact, I would argue that Sen. Obama has made a remarkable case that he’d be the better Head of State, while Sen. McCain has made the case he’d be the better Head of Government.  Both are the responsibility of our Executive.  While Sen. Obama’s God-given talent endlessly impresses me it is his opponent who has offered a governing philosophy for public scrutiny.  Sen. McCain knew what his response to the Russian invasion of Georgia was immediately.  It took Sen. Obama much longer to decide.  Sen. McCain took a position on the Bailout Plan immediately.  Sen. Obama avoided it for a few days.  I am not inclined to think that Sen. Obama has a particular stance on many issues – but I don’t believe that the “fundamental change” he espouses means a 180 degree turn on every particular issue, either.  I don’t think that Sen. Obama is going to turn away from President Bush’s position on citizenship for illegal alien workers, his expansion of the federal government (the largest since 1947), the surge strategy that worked beyond Sen. Obama’s wildest dreams, or the foreign aid and effort that he’s engaged the United States in.  One of the great untold stories of the Bush Administration is the work it has accomplished in the developing world.  Bob Geldof, known for his humanitarian work in Africa, has been frustrated that more people don’t know the extent of the policies that Bush has enacted to benefit Africa.  As recently as October 21, Geldof expanded his compliments, saying that the current President has set the bar extraordinarily high for either Sen. McCain or Sen. Obama.  Just because our national media is less interested in Bush’s accomplishments than his failings doesn’t mean that accomplishments haven’t occurred. I would refer anyone to Orson Scott Card’s (a lifelong Democrat) recent essay, “Will the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn on the Lights?”  When the record dictates that change for change’s sake would be detrimental in most areas of governance, one has to wonder whether Sen. Obama knows what going in the opposite direction really means. This is when you realize that what didn’t work earlier this decade – a Republican President rubber stamping a Republican Congress, is simply going to be repeated now.  That’s what Sen. Obama and the Democrats’ campaign is really about.  If Sen. Obama doesn’t have much of a governing philosophy of his own, then President Bush’s greatest failing – not being able to locate his Veto Pen – will simply be duplicated.   That is hardly a fundamental change.  In fact, it’s fundamentally the same, except it will have a (D) next to it instead of an (R). 

Sponsoring a bill that mandates foreign aid is not good judgment.  Saying you’re post-partisan fails to ring true when you’ve voted with your party almost 97% of the time.  Using the criminal justice system in an attempt to stifle free speech doesn’t demonstrate good judgment, as Obama’s campaign recently has in Missouri and in lobbying the Justice Department to investigate groups opposed to him.  One hopes that Sen. Obama sees that undermining 401(k) plans in favor of government run “guaranteed retirement accounts” would be misguided, but it would be his party proposing them. In the spring, during a Democratic Primary debate, Sen. Obama asserted that he’d meet with the leaders of rogue nations without pre-conditions.  During his first debate with Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama asserted that he would do no such thing.  If his position changes again, it will be hard to argue that Sen. Obama’s foreign policy comes from a place of deeply founded principle and judgment.  But currently, flourish aside; if Sen. Obama’s assertion in the debate with Sen. McCain is to be his position, then it is not all that different from President Bush’s.

Neither man is perfect, but I’ll take the candidate who has made tough choices and is willing to embrace those choices over the candidate who has seemed allergic to committing himself to a host of issues. 

It is important to note, though, that regardless of who wins, both men are on the ballot to be my President – not just the man who is closer to my side of the spectrum.  Most Americans believe that country comes before party and ideology – but every four years, that can be hard for some to remember.  I don’t believe hope lives or dies with either candidate, regardless of slogans or posters.  Perhaps it is a question of whether we believe that our future lies in the proposed divinity of our government or the proven majesty of our people.  Neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain holds the American people’s future in their hands.  They are to be good stewards of our government and country – nothing more.  Until the next “most important election of our lifetimes,” (it is amazing how we are all, apparently, reborn every four years) I wish you all continued success.