Quote of the Day
It is customary these days to ignore what should be done in favour of what pleases us.
Plautus
Brief Blog Note
This is the end of my third year after creating this blog in 2008.
The McCain/O'Donnell/Angle Kerfuffle: Advantage McCain: Thumbs UP!
In 2000, I supported Bush over McCain. The issues themselves were not key to my support. First, I am a Texas native and an Air Force brat. I left Texas early in life, returning for high school, college and work through the doctorate and for a limited period after I left academia. I always retained an interest in Texas politics. Other than Senator Tower and separate terms for recently deceased Governor Bill Clements, spanning the 80's, Texas had been a fairly predictable Democratic state with the exception of some Presidential elections. Bush's 1994 election and 1998 reelection were a turning point in Texas politics when Texas became known as a solid GOP state. Bush, however, had to learn to compromise. His executive experience plus bipartisan record were key elements for my support in 2000. I really didn't look at the nuances of tax and other policies. I had been fed up with the constant drama, e.g., Bork, Thomas, the Clinton impeachment. But to be honest, Gore and Kerry were so bad as candidates that Bush won elections he probably shouldn't have.
When I was on a pop conservative website in early 2008 defending McCain, the ideologues were going after McCain on taxes, campaign reform, and immigration. I was particularly annoyed on the tax issue because McCain in nearly 3 decades of service had voted consistent with lower tax philosophy. There had been some discussion of his 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cut votes as being political payback over the 2000 election, but when I went back over the 2000 campaign, McCain had run on a mix of fiscal conservatism and a populist tax cut, more oriented to the middle class. I really can't defend his unfortunate class warfare spin in one or 2 Senate speeches that I saw during the period.
McCain justifiably noted that Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell lost two gimme Senate seats last year. The point is that the activists sniped nominations that were penny-wise, pound-foolish. Mike Castle had repeatedly won statewide elections in Delaware and was consistently beating Coons, whom ended up blowing O'Donnell out of the water, in double digits. O'Donnell was a failed candidate, sort of the Harold Stassen of Delaware politics. I'm sick and tired of hearing Angle and O'Donnell come up with one pathetic excuse after another to explain how, in the biggest Congressional turnover election in decades, they couldn't get the job done. Angle couldn't beat Harry Reid with 14% unemployment in the state and the worst approval rating of any national politician except Pelosi.
Almost any US Senate Democrat votes the conservative way maybe 1 out of 10 times. The most widely known so-called RINO's (including Castle) 5 out of 10 times. McCain, one of the top bipartisan senators, 8 out of 10 times.
So when I hear obnoxious judgmental media conservatives like Michelle Malkin, whom seems to issue a putdown every other sentence, attack McCain for losing his only election in 2008 against Obama--let's recall that McCain was leading in some polls before the disastrous selection of Palin. Any other GOP candidate would have been wiped out in landslide proportions. I've criticized the campaign strategy, but to be honest, in a change election year with the incumbent with nearly 30% approval ratings, and the biggest asset bust in decades, the fact that Obama was outspending McCain in every battleground state, winning over 100 electoral votes and holding Obama to 53% are amazing.
I am more conservative, from a fiscal standpoint, that any of these ideological candidates or media conservatives, like Limbaugh, Hannity or Malkin. The difference is--I'm not stupid enough to overplay the hand I've got. I bide my time and I make the necessary compromises, like Reagan did, needed to get the highest returns. A gadfly like Sharron Angle, Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul has no shot at influencing national policy. It's not a question of business as usual as these ideologues imply; just like an any of the times I've saved IT projects, the real power battles are below the surface. These other people, like Barack Obama, are more interested in the pretty boxes and wrapping versus what's inside the box.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Eagles, "Peaceful Easy Feeling"
