It’s official! Senator John McCain has officially wrapped up the GOP presidential nomination. Huckabee has pulled out, McCain has the delegates, and now it is time for the Republican Party to focus efforts and rally behind our man: but is he really our man?
Senator McCain has a long history of straying from the right and setting up camp with the left. The policies that came out of such relationships as: McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, McCain-Lieberman, etc. are far from the platforms which on which a strong conservative candidate must stand. Yet, we, as conservatives, are expected to rally up with the rest of the Republican Party and throw our support behind Senator McCain. Has he really earned our support?
Personally, I understand that he is the best candidate out there given the other two choices. I like his position on the Bush tax cuts, I like his position on the war in Iraq, I like the stoppage of pork barrel earmarks; however, I still do not fully trust his credibility based on his past positions.
Let's not forget that the next president will be responsible for the nomination of 3-4 Supreme Court justices. Now, McCain did in fact pledge to nominate conservative justices, but he did so at CPAC in front of 6000+ conservatives; what do you think he's going to say?
Conservatives must hold Senator McCain accountable for each individual issue, not simply support him because he is the Republican candidate or the "most" conservative.
To his credit, he has started to make steps to gain conservative support, but what will it take to regain conservative trust? A lot can happen between now and November: will we see a lot of empty conservative promises or a legitimate change in philosophy?
Thursday, March 6, 2008
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1 comments:
What exactly about his position on the Bush Tax Cuts do you enjoy?
Specifically, how have those tax cuts personally changed your life for the better?
Unless you're salary is well over 150k a year, I'm going to go out on a ridiculously long and bridgelike limb and say not very much. Perhaps you can prove me wrong, but unless you provide specific and detailed examples from your personal life then I think that's just rhetoric born out of blind conservitive facism.
This war he's staked his campaign on has also driven us into an economic recession and Bush's approach of "compassionate conservism", that Senator McCain has chosen to align himself with, have lead to policies that rob from our children's education and elderly's social security.
With that major criticism aside, McCain is, indeed, a decent canidate when he's at his best as a political maverick but he is also a ridiculously old candidate.
The question that I'd want answered, before I even dreamed of endorsing him, is who his running mate is going to be.
I, as a Democrat, could see myself living with a McCain presidency but not if the next in line is someone as ridiculously right-wing as Mike Huckabee or Charlie Crist.
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