PrintOctober 15, 2008
John McCain: the hero or the goat?
John McCain still has a real chance to be elected POTUS. Even with the CBS/NYT latest poll preposterously proclaiming a 13% lead for Obama, John McCain can still end up the hero of this prolonged passion play.
It really does depend on his debate performance tonight. Let us not underestimate the power of the Presidential debates in American history. JFK certainly clinched the 1960 election with a combination of a smooth debate performance and some extra-curricular assistance from the Daley machine's delivery of Acorn-like voters from Chicago cemeteries. Gerald Ford definitely lost the election with a stumbling response about Poland in his debate with Peanut-head Carter. And Dukakis fumbled it away to GHW Bush with a wimpy performance in both his debates. So what can John McCain do to seize the momentum?
The increasingly inspired Republican base continues to all but beg McCain to fight for them. And fight he must. Talk show host Michael Savage has suggested that perhaps the regimen of torture McCain suffered during his prolonged stay at the Hanoi Hilton broke his willingness to fight. Savage suggests that McCain's propensity to seek accommodation and compromise stems from the horrors he endured for his country, that he is no longer willing to fight. I beg to differ. Rather, John McCain seems to hold an almost Victorian sense of chivalry and honor. He clearly lives with a somewhat rigid adherence to a code of conduct. Thus, his unwillingness thus far, to attack Obama on his impossibly compromising relationship with the race-baiting Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And his unwillingness to expose Obama as the frighteningly socialist, reparation-seeking, infanticide supporting, America-hating, crooked, Chicago-machine style hack that he is.
Obama continues to pound McCain with the ill-gotten fruit of his foreign campaign contributions. The airwaves are inundated with Obamanite smears of every conceivable McCain position. The Democrats are flush with cash and are spending on advertising, as usual, even beyond their means to support it.
Even left-wing academics are thumbing their noses at McCain now and coming out in support of not only Obama, but even is support of the unrepentant Weatherbomber, Bill Ayres. Move-on.org, the Daily Kos and Code Pink are helping Obama measure the drapes while Katie Couric and Keith Olbermann throw their coats over the puddles that Obama not soil his precious Ferragamos on his way up the steps on Pennsylvania Avenue.
John McCain boxed quite competently as a lightweight at the Naval Academy. John McCain also served bravely as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, often reprimanded for pushing the envelope and engaging in risky maneuvers in order to gain the edge needed to secure victory. Well, he needs to wade in there tonight against another lightweight, Barack Hussein Obama, and push that envelope as though America's life depends upon it. Nothing short of a full, frontal assault, with every question and every answer turned into an attack on one of the wide array of soft spots in the Obama platform, will do. With a withering and relentless assault, Senator McCain will find that the inexperienced Social-Democrat he faces does indeed have a glass jaw. McCain can start the whole Ayres/Wright/Farrakhan/Pfleger/Acorn/Infanticide/Reparations/
Tax hiking/Military-slashing/Inexperienced house of cards tumbling down.
What's it gonna be, hero or the goat, John McCain?
Tax hiking/Military-slashing/Inexperienced house of cards tumbling down.
What's it gonna be, hero or the goat, John McCain?
Ralph Alter blogs at Right on Target.
