McCain in a nutshell

By Ron Beasley

Is Barack Obama fit  to be president?  That is a question we hear all the time.  But Rex Nutting of Dow Jones MarketWatch wonders why few are asking the same question about St John McSame.  He takes a look on John McCain's resume and doesn't see much that would qualify him to lead the nation.  What he does find is:

Lack of accomplishments

Like the current occupant of the White House, McCain got his first career breaks from the connections and money of his family, not from hard work.

The son and grandson of Navy admirals, he attended Annapolis where he did poorly. Nevertheless, he was commissioned as a pilot, where he performed poorly, crashing three planes before he failed to evade a North Vietnamese missile that destroyed his plane. McCain spent more than five years in a prison camp.

After his release, McCain knew his weak military record meant he'd never make admiral, so he turned his sights to a career in politics. With the help of his new wife's wealth, his new father-in-law's business connections and some powerful friends had made as a lobbyist for the Navy, he was elected in 1982 to a Congress in a district that he didn't reside in until the day the seat opened up. A few years later, he succeeded Barry Goldwater as a senator.

McCain hasn't accomplished much in the Senate. Even his own campaign doesn't trumpet his successes, probably because the few victories he's had still rankle Republicans.

His campaign finance law failed to significantly reduce the role of money in politics. He failed to get a big tobacco bill through the Senate. He's failed to change the way Congress spends money; his bill to give the president a line-item veto was declared unconstitutional, and the system of pork and earmarks continues unabated. He failed to reform the immigration system.

Every senator who runs for president misses votes back in Washington, so it's no surprise that McCain and all the others who ran in the primaries have missed a lot of votes in the past year. But between the beginning of 2005 and mid-2007, no senator missed more roll-call votes than McCain did, except Tim Johnson, who was recovering from a near-fatal brain aneurysm.

In addition he finds this:

• McCain is "shallow"
• He has shown little leadership
• He is without principles

And this perhaps is the most damning:

Living in the Sixties

McCain is still fighting the Vietnam War. But he's not fighting the real historic war, which taught us the folly of injecting ourselves into a civil war that was none of our business. We learned that, in a world where even peasants have guns, explosives and radios, a determined and popular guerrilla force can defeat a modern army equipped with the mightiest technology if that army has no vital national interest to protect.

Instead, McCain is fighting an imaginary Vietnam War, where a sure victory could have been achieved with just a little more bombing, just a little more "pacification," just a little more will to win at home. This fantasy clouds McCain's judgment on foreign policy.

Most of the other high-profile politicians who fought in Vietnam -- Colin Powell, Chuck Hegel, John Kerry, and Jim Webb -- aren't stuck in the past, and they don't view the Iraq War as a chance to get Vietnam right.

Nutting concludes with this:

The bottom line

Successful presidents come from two molds: visionaries, or mechanics. The visionaries -- think Reagan or FDR -- see what others can't and say 'Why not?" to inspire the country. The mechanics -- think LBJ or Eisenhower -- know the ins and outs of government and are able to harness the power of millions of humans to accomplish great things, or at least keep the wheels from coming off.

McCain fits neither style. He's neither a dreamer, nor a detail guy. His major accomplishment, in Vietnam and in the Senate, has been merely to survive.

Just surviving doesn't make you're a hero, or a decent president. America needs to do more than survive the next four years.

Remind me again - who isn't fit to lead?  A reporter working for Rupert Murdoch has come up with a better campaign ad than anyone in the Democratic Party.

Comments

[zenpundit]

"Successful presidents come from two molds: visionaries, or mechanics."

Which one is Obama supposed to be? Visionaries usually come with a couple of really big, direction changing, ideas - the New Deal, the Great Society, Supply Side economics. Mechanics with a list of accomplishments (LBJ as Senate Majority leader, for example, Bush sr. with his resume).

What Obama has is an uplifting biography but not a vision. His legislative accomplishments are far fewer than that of even McCain. Why then would his campaign want to go brass knuckles as in the Nutting piece ?

[Xenophon]

The GOP will lose across the board nationally, not because Obama is the greatest of all possible candidates, but because like Clinton, he is the most extreme un-Bush, the most extreme un-Cheney, the most un-Rumsfeld, the most un-Rice, the most un-Gonzales.

The voting American public is heartily sick of the neo-con double standards, the un-necessary imperialism, the sexism, the fear mongering, and violence as an answer to every foreign policy problem.

Americans want peace and prosperity, and the GOP isn't giving it to them.