We readily acknowledge that McCain has run a distressingly ineffective presidential campaign. He has failed to find his voice on the campaign trail, rarely revealing the appealing personal characteristics and refreshing political views that caused us to endorse him in Michigan’s Republican primary in January.
His selection of Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as his running-mate also gives us pause. Palin is a promising governor and has excited the Republican base, but she is clearly not prepared for the role she was chosen to play and is costing McCain support he might have expected from undecided voters who harbor doubts about the seasoning of Democrat Barack Obama.
But America’s knowledge of John McCain goes well beyond the presidential candidate. We’ve known the Arizona senator for 26 years of stellar service in Congress, and before that as a war hero who endured with courage the unspeakable horrors of a North Vietnamese prison camp.
Nevermind that the point of a presidential campaign is essentially a months-long sales pitch — don’t judge McCain by the way he’s run his campaign. Don’t judge him for picking someone who is “clearly not prepared.” Judge him for “26 years of stellar service” and the fact that he was a POW.
And re: Obama, they wrote:
But if he wins this election, he will enter the White House as the most inexperienced president since Herbert Hoover in 1928. His proposals reflect the Democratic Party’s big-spending orthodoxy. Conservative estimates place the price tag for his new programs at nearly $350 billion a year, and yet he vows even more middle class tax cuts.
Obama would raise taxes on investors and costs for job creators at a time when America needs more investment and jobs.
Vague and very Republican talking-point-y. It seems that in order to endorse McCain, editorial boards have to buy into everything McCain has said about himself versus Obama, even if those things are provably false.
My favorite part is this:
Although he now supports making them permanent, he opposed the Bush tax cuts in 2001 because they were not matched by off-setting spending cuts. Again, had McCain prevailed, the nation would have had the economic growth the tax cuts helped produce without the appalling deficits the spending generated. If elected, we hope he hews to his original stance that tax cuts and spending cuts should go hand-in-hand.
In other words: “we’re also endorsing him because we’re pretty sure he didn’t mean that flip-flop on tax cuts.”
Come on.
