Flying Pink Unicorns

McCain is the strongest GOP candidate since Eisenhower. He really is. I know that sounds real strong, so let me back it up.

I'll begin with a few anecdotes. My late mother was a reliable democratic voter. She almost never voted for a Republican period (voted for Rooooooody both times if I recall, and voted for Pataki the first time). She never, not a once, voted for a Republican for President. Mom was also not political, and not at all politically knowledgeable. She told me in 2000 that if McCain was the GOP nominee, she would have voted for him.

Similarly, a few democrats have recently told me that they know die-hard democrats who say they will vote for McCain over Hillary at least. These people speak for an awful lot of others. I'll try and explain why.

John McCain is the son and grandson of Navy Admirals. He requested a combat assignment in Vietnam, and boy did he get one. As most or all of you know, he was flying a bombing mission when his plane was hit, he was forced to eject, and he was captured by the Vietnamese, spending more than 5 years as a POW, the first several under absolutely awful conditions. He was grieviously wounded in the initial shoot-down, and was often beaten senseless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_mccain#Naval_training.2C_early_assignments.2C_first_marriage_and_children

In the most famous incident of his POW-hood, he was offered early release when the Vietcong realized how powerful his father was. He refused, unless everyone taken prisoner before him was also released. His refusal is required by the Code of the US fighting force.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_U.S._Fighting_Force

Still, I imagine a lot of people, having been seriously injured, and having been repeatedly tortured, would have leapt at the chance to accept early release, damn the code. One assumes the Vietnamese could have simply ignored his wishes and thrown him out of prison and told him he'd be shot if he didn't make his way back to US lines, but still, the courage he showed is almost unimaginable.

While in the Senate, McCain bucked his party by taking on big tobacco by, among other things, calling for increased cigarette taxes to reduce smoking, co-sponsoring the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law (more on that later), working with Bush on the only sensible measure of the entire Bush presidency, the immigration reform/amnesty bill that died last year, opposing both rounds of Bush tax cuts, saying of the first round, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle class Americans who most need tax relief." He has also supported certain gun control measures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_mccain#Naval_training.2C_early_assignments.2C_first_marriage_and_children

Most significantly perhaps, although McCain was a strong and valuable supporter of Bush's reelection in 2004 (a fact which Hill or Obama SHOULD make great hay out of in 2008), he was, virtually alone among Republicans (Chuck Hegal a notable exception), critical of the Bush war effort in Iraq, at times FIERCELY critical. As far back as 2004 (right after the election, note), McCain said he had "no confidence," in Rumsfeld. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,141374,00.html That may not sound impressive now, in 2008, but it was a radical position for a Republican then, with the Presidential etc. talking points being that Iraq was tough but going reasonably well. At that time he called for an additional 110,000 additional troops. (I note parenthetically that I was calling for huge #s of additional troops at the time as well. Given that what I know about the nitty gritty of fighting a ground war would fit inside of a thimble leaving plenty of room for your thumb, I give McCain little credit here). So although he's been properly branded as a supporter of the war effort in Iraq, the reality is quite a bit more complicated.

McCain has made his brand as a straight talker-- he calls his campaign bus the "straight talk express," and is, in my view, significantly more honest/less dishonest than any Republican has been in my lifetime, and is in fact more of a straight shooter than nearly anyone in our political class. In Iowa, each of the other GOP candidates pandered to local farming interests by supporting an enormous Ethanol subsidy. McCain didn't, either in 2000 or in 2008, and he did very poorly in Iowa, in part as a direct result.


Not to say that the Straight Talk Express hasn't come off the rails a time or two.

Campaigning for Bush in 2004 calling him a great leader in the war on terror, knowing what he knew THEN, constitutes at least the lead car of the straight talk express heading off the rails. Some of his other Iraq comments are a few more cars careening off of the tracks and down the valley.

http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/01/bush-talk_not_s.php

Also, on the campaign trail this time around, McCain is claiming that he opposed the Bush tax cuts because there were no spending cuts along with them. This is directly at odds with what he said at the time, which was that the tax cuts were giveaways to the rich, and appears geared to winning over GOP primary voters' hearts. When you market yourself as the straight talk express, lies which in another candidate would be no big deal become somewhat glaring.

But to return to my original thesis-- Here's a Republican who is, imho, a genuine war hero, who is NOT wedded to tax cuts for the wealthy, took on tobacco, has a sensible position on immigration, and is significantly more honest than most politicians. Its no wonder he appeals so strongly to independents.