John McCain went to war for the United States. Since that time he has used his experience being tortured in Viet Nam. He’s served in the Senate for a lot of years. And he’s run for president a couple of time. Well, he is the current Richard Nixon. Running again and again in the hopes he will beat his own Kennedy.
So, the other day I was sitting around at MSNBC.com which links, pretty directly, to Newsweek.com and one of the pundits, the virtual talking heads, on Newsweek.com was talking about how not wanting John McCain as president was a bad sign for this nation. The reason, McCain is a Vet and had served in active military service and his fall from grace (potentially because he’s actively supported G.W. in Iraq) is a bad sign for politics and the voting public in this country.
The main issue I have with this assertion is that McCain has only ever achieved popularity as a centrist-reformist candidate who aggressively (allegedly, hard pressed to prove it to me) pushes election reform. This, however, does not denote a candidate that is a presidential contender. The Unfortunate Mr. McCain has never been a presidential contender no matter how frequently he’s chosen to run for the position. He doesn’t have the chutzpa necessary to hold the office, nor does he have the presence of someone who is meant to lead the free world OR make the important, necessary, decisions.
McCain, more often than not, is someone who is not consistent on the little decisions. After his previous attempt at running for president and G.W. winning, word on the street (and internet) was that he was considering moving to the Democrat side of the isle. He’d renounce his political religion (republicanism) and move over to a new belief structure (democratism). The outcome, at the time, would’ve been an immediate shift in power in the Senate. For some reason, he chose not to do it. My theory, at the time, was that Dick Cheney was ready to leave office and the party had promised him the vice-presidency. I was wrong; but I do believe that the party promised or threatened him with something – so he stayed.
McCain has actually acted, in public, more like the party opposition than like a party leader. He has dissented in a lot of areas. And only when it’s come to a war (that is not a declared war) that he and most of the Democratic and Republican leadership supported, has he found his voice as the chief supporter of the Iraq conflict. In short, he isn’t a party man; and he supports the Iraq conflict and troops there.
The voting public is not a bunch of idiots. They don’t look at the president and the party leadership and think, “I don’t care what he was like in the past, I like what he is showing us now,” and then vote for a man because he has a record for serving in war. A record for having been a soldier does not qualify a person to be president. We were told this, repeatedly, by the same press outlets that would suggest we are, somehow, less American or that the United States is somehow less because we refuse to vote for a man who, in many public decisions, can’t seem to make up his mind one way or the other, when Bill Clinton was running for president and his record of service (or significantly distinct lack of one) came in to question.
John McCain is a bad choice for president. The public knows, and understands, this. They know that if they vote for this man he is as likely to support the war effort as he is to pull the troops out. Under John McCain, I think the odds of our being pulled in to a much larger scale conflict increase dramatically. The American people don’t want this. They are tired of veiled information about possible threats and abrupt and uncomfortable changes to their travel schedules. They are tired of presidents who claim we need to support them, and then call the people unpatriotic for not supporting an effort that is, inherently, wrong.
Not voting for John McCain, not supporting his presidential bid, is a good thing. It is a way for the American people to strike back at the war machine that currently exists. This is the parties way of telling McCain he was last years news, and only then news when he is talking about reform. McCain’s war record should be lauded; however, that same war record should not be construed as a trump card or a prerequisite for being president. McCain, through his own actions, has proven himself a bad choice.