BETWEEN THE LINES
Jonathan Alter
Time to Channel Cousin Frank
McCain's answer to the charge he's impulsive: so was Teddy Roosevelt, and look how he turned out.
John McCain wants us to think he's a man of character when he's actually just acharacter. There's a big difference between the two. "Character" connotes moral courage and fortitude, which McCain once possessed but now seems to have misplaced. By contrast, "a character" is merely a person with an instinct for eccentric self-drama that can be amusing or disturbing depending on the circumstances.
Neither the moral preening nor the impulsive zigzagging turned up in McCain's debate performance, which was solid. But the 2008 credit crisis has nonetheless shown his unpresidential side. This McCain commits alarming gaffes (insisting that he hadn't read Henry Paulson's bailout plan when it was only three pages long); engages in rash scapegoating (calling for the chairman of the SEC to be fired); launches almost comically hypocritical attack ads and wraps himself in "Country First" while playing every political angle, like idly threatening to skip the Mississippi debate.
Then, within hours, each of these gambits was suddenly, as Richard Nixon's press secretary once put it, "inoperative." Except for Sarah Palin. We'll be living with his "cynical" selection—the word used by his former communications chief Mike Murphy, and not usually denoting character—every time President McCain sneezes.
Given all that, I wasn't shocked to learn from a friend of Paulson's, who didn't want to risk his friendship by being identified, that Paulson thinks Obama is much more impressive than McCain in their private talks. (Not that Paulson is as much of an authority on all things financial as he thinks he is.) And it's hardly surprising that the country's last remaining financial grown-ups, Paul Volcker and Warren Buffett, are strongly pro-Obama. In fact, Obama could do worse than adopt a "we'll have what Warren's having" approach to the fine print of what the taxpayers get in return for their proposed investment. If it's good enough for Buffett and Goldman Sachs, it should be good enough for the rest of us.
Of course, McCain doesn't much care about the respectable opinions of fuddy-duddys (unless they're Henry Kissinger). "I'm Luke Skywalker getting out of the Death Star!" he said in 2000. His longtime hero is Theodore Roosevelt, who charged off in different directions shouting "Bully!" Rough times, he argues, call for a "Rough Rider."
The TR analogy has some problems. Roosevelt, at 42, was the nation's youngest president; McCain, at 72, would be its oldest elected to a first term. TR was a "trust buster" and the erudite author of more than 40 books; McCain, despite a few lame efforts to portray himself as a crusader against corporate greed, has been a free-market Calvin Coolidge Republican who (to his credit) admits having his books ghostwritten. Roosevelt's exploits in the Spanish-American War were mostly exaggerated; McCain's suffering during the Vietnam War was all too real.
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Member Comments
Posted By: billtill @ 10/14/2008 9:59:26 AM
Comment: About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.'
'A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.'
'From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.'
'The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years'
'During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy;
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage'
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29
Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: 'In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare...' Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the 'complacency and apathy' phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the 'governmental dependency' phase.
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.
If you are in favor of this, then by all means, delete this message. If you are not, then pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.
WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE,
ONLY BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/09/2008 7:34:21 PM
Comment: They harassed her until she registered to vote six times!:
http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3145562&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/09/2008 7:33:39 PM
Comment: They harassed her until she registered to vote six times!:
http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3145562&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/