McCain right despite flaws

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: October 25, 2008

Ears ache and heads throb over election clichés, which pulse as voting day finally draws near. The most frequent heard echoing in both ideological realms is that this is “a crucial election,” one on which America’s course as a people and country hinges. That description has become the annoying housefly of American politics, perpetually buzzing in the faces of the electorate. For once, it is also true.

Cable network news has spent most of the past 18 months enthralled with the idea of Barack Obama as president. The Democratic senator has climbed to the place of angels, not walking on water but somewhere far above it. His personality – composed partly of keen intellect and soaring rhetoric and partly of myth – has inspired devotion normally reserved for cult figures. Women espy him striding to a podium and swoon. Leftist commentators watch him and feel thrills rippling through their limbs.

Associations hover, but fail to cling. Bill Ayers, himself something of a cliché, walks freely and defiantly after escaping the law’s short reach in the wake of terrorist bombings. The man who once urged children to rise up and kill their parents handed millions of dollars to Obama, who then doled the money to radical education programs. Also lurking in the senator’s misty past is Saul Alinsky, a sociologist and self-proclaimed radical whom Obama regarded as a mentor. To lesser politicians, these relationships would have proved fatal; to Obama, only his appeal sticks.

Pounding fists against this ostensibly impenetrable veneer is Republican John McCain, an opponent who is certain of his self-image, as that of – we have grown to dread the word – maverick, but seems disturbingly unsure at age 72 of precisely who he is beneath the label. The Arizona senator cherishes the conservative vote but has made a lifelong habit of snapping at those hands from which he must feed. McCain smashes free-speech through campaign finance reform, swallows without contemplation climate change dross and accepts socialism and massive spending through the bailout of Wall Street while railing against the same.

Still, that which separates McCain and Obama runs deeper than the superficial and exterior differences between the two. Obama’s associations matched with his policy prescriptions hint at an intention to produce not a mere philosophical shift in politics, which we have seen before, but a fundamental shift in government and the American way of life.

Wade through mirages over his plan to provide tax breaks to 95 percent of Americans – 40 percent of whom pay no income tax — while striking in the fashion of Madame Defarge at the pocketbooks of aristocrats and businesses, increasing capital gains taxes and leaving level the corporate income tax rate, which at 35 percent is the second highest in the industrialized world. McCain would cut the capital gains rate in half and the corporate tax by 10 percent. That might not be enough to stir the economy, but Obama’s plan surely would send it into deeper decline.

While increasing government’s reach through higher taxes on the top income bracket – which either would be passed on to lower-income taxpayers or affect them by halting development – Obama has vowed to support radical legislation that McCain opposes: the Employee Freedom of Choice Act, which would end secret union balloting and make workers prey to open pressure from union bosses; the Freedom of Choice Act, which would halt parental consent laws for abortion; and the revival of the Fairness Doctrine, targeting free speech in conservative talk radio.

It would be better if we could choose a candidate more so based on our faith in him as a statesman and our support of his positions. McCain lacks the strength of conviction we prefer. Obama is stronger in this sense, which given his positions, disturbs us. Because of this in combination with reasons described here and others we have outlined through the course of the election season, McCain is our choice for president of the United States.