And why they love him probably won’t surprise you.
Two Florida newspapers endorsed John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination Sunday, citing his extensive experience in politics and willingness to take unpopular stances…
The Gainesville paper’s endorsement praised McCain’s advocacy of campaign finance reform, refusal to condone torture, opposition to the Bush administration’s tax and support of a carbon cap-and-trade system. The Sun was most laudatory of McCain’s immigration stance. Although the Post disagreed with McCain’s backing the war in Iraq, it gave him credit that “early and often, he criticized the war’s mismanagement.”
None of those are conservative positions, and the papers do the usual hatchet job regarding torture — it’s not that McCain “refused to condone” torture (implying that other Republicans do condone torture), it’s that he sought to make it illegal in ways that leave field officers in legal jeopardy while shielding politicians from any consequences for using enhanced interrogation. Apparently that’s too much nuance for any MSMers to handle, though. The bottom line is, the newspapers lauded McCain’s liberal stances and disagreed with him on the one conspicuous conservative stance he’s taken in recent years — winning the war in Iraq. Tell me again why any conservative is considering voting for McCain. The whole reason the MSM is building him up is because as the nominee he would tear the Republican party apart. Giuliani and even Huckabee have dissed the base less often than McCain has.
The horserace part of the race thankfully isn’t favoring McCain at the moment. He has the MSM mo but the latest Rasumssen has Romney leading in Florida and McCain in second but just a point ahead of Giuliani. If, as now seems evident, the economy is going to become the dominant issue in the election, trumping the war and trumping “change” whatever that means today, McCain has no answers. If I had my druthers, which I seldom do, none of the candidates would be talking about economic stimulus or dealing with the “excesses of the economy.” They would all let nature take its course and the economy would correct itself over time. Our system is robust enough to deal with mild cyclical corrections. Imperfect intervention is more likely to lead to problems than just letting things shake out imho. But everyone running now remembers the last president who presided over a souring economy in an election year and didn’t do much to get out of the way other than break a pledge not to raise taxes the year prior: He lost to Bill Clinton. That experience has turned all of the candidates in both parties into big government advocates when it comes to dealing with even the mildest of recessions. Well, all but two, and Duncan Hunter is now out and Fred is on the ropes.
Not to be a Hugh Hewitt about all this, but if the economy sours after tomorrow’s expected bloodbath I only see one candidate who can realistically claim to know anything about, and that’s Romney. McCain and Huckabee don’t have a clue, Rudy arguably did well managing New York but it was the beneficiary of the larger US economy during his tenure, and Fred has the right principles but can’t seem to manage his campaign all that well. Neither Hillary nor Obama have the first clue. Last man standing is the ex Mass gov.
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