The older, wiser McCain is more careful and less combative. On election day here, as I sat with other reporters in the rear of McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” bus, I asked for the senator’s comment on DeLay’s statement on Fox the night before. DeLay said he could not vote for McCain even against Hillary Clinton because of grave damage he had done the Republican Party.
Graham, seated nearby, snorted in disbelief. But McCain limited himself to the polite comment that he and Tom DeLay had disagreements. Indeed, the 2000 McCain’s emphasis on campaign finance reform and opposition to tax cuts were missing from his 2008 campaigning here. He has adjusted his support for immigration reform to negate the issue.
But McCain has not entirely abandoned “straight talk” in seeking Republican anointment. I asked him Saturday whether he knew of any instance of an economic stimulus such as President Bush’s proposed $800-per-taxpayer handout actually averting a recession. He said he did not, and the proposal bothered him.
That kind of answer by McCain has annoyed Republican grandees for years, but it also is what sets him apart from other politicians. It brought to South Carolina last week such endorsers as Sen. Tom Coburn, who maddens his Republican colleagues with his campaign against pork, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, who defied his Democratic Party’s orthodoxy on Iraq. Even the GOP elders seem ready to grit their teeth and go along with McCain.
“DeLay said he could not vote for McCain…because of grave damage he had done the Republican Party”
A subject in which DeLay has well-recognized expertise.
McCain is NOT the front-runner, that distinction belongs to Mitt Romney, with 72 delegates to date.
McCain has 38, Huckabee 29, according to [url=http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/scorecard/#val=R]CNN Online[/url].
hmmm, CNN seems to have counted in undecided in with the totals, skewing the results (surprise, surprise). The [url=http://youdecide08.foxnews.com/2008/01/19/national-delegate-count-tally/]AP as reported on FoxNews[/url] has different numbers with Romney 59, Huckabee 40, and McCain (running THIRD, not the front-runner by a long-shot yet!) at 36.
A McCain/Lieberman ticket – now that is what I (and I expect a lot of other independents!) would like to vote for!
Re: #4
Not me. Lieberman on a ticket in any capacity would forfeit my vote immensely. To choose a man who abandoned a mildly anti-abortion stance in favor of a totally “pro-choice” position to gain credibility as a Democratic would show that McCain is as cynical in his “pro-life” stance as his opponents have always feared; and I hope all social conservatives would shun such a ticket as they would a plague.
To choose Lieberman would strike me as a nice reenactment of the lines attributed to St. Thomas More to his former client Sir Richard Rich, whose probable perjury enabled More’s conviction for treason, “Our Lord asked ‘what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul, but for Wales, Richard, for Wales?’.”
Or, as Karl Marx once wrote, “a philosopher once observed that the great of history repeat themselves. He forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
I’ll grit my teeth and vote for McCain if he’s the nominee, since my alternative will be a Democratic pro-abortion soft socialist, no matter whom they choose. At this point, I think Romney is the best Republican choice. I would also vote for Guiliani, since his pledge to appoint strict constructionist judges is believable both because of lawyers and judges who are supporting him but also because strict constructionist judges would favor strong law enforcement and reasonable national security efforts, things Guiliani cares about.
If John McCain choses Robert Novak as his running-mate, this will be the [i] Novacain [/i] ticket.