Andrew Sullivan's very smart case for McCain:
McCain offers the Republicans a way to support a still unpopular war and maintain a scintilla of credibility on national security. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson have all punted on the issue of Iraq to some degree or other in the campaign so far. None will directly attack President George Bush, since he is still a semi-religious figure among the Republican base. All support the surge for now, but none has detailed what they would do next year, let alone the first year of their own potential presidency. We know Giuliani wants to bomb Iran. But we know little else.Which leaves McCain. Yes, he’s still out there. His disappointing past six months have had one beneficial effect: he has stopped being too cautious, resumed his habit of talking nonstop to any hack within hearing range, and put his mother on television to have a go at Romney.
I loved his response to the somewhat staggering news that the Christian right’s Pat Robertson had now joined Giuliani’s campaign: “I’m speechless.” Well, when two oddballs gather together – one who blamed feminists and gays for causing 9/11, the other who hounded ferret owners as mayor of New York City – silence is often golden. McCain has even attacked Senator Hillary Clinton for securing federal funds for a Woodstock museum. It may be 2007, but you can still run against hippies.
McCain, however, looks better not just because he has stuck to his pro-war position while acknowledging painful reality, but because the others have increasingly looked so unnerving. Romney’s plastic demeanour and say-anything style have not caught on outside the first two states where he has poured millions of his own money into blanket television advertising. Thompson has yet to seem a viable president. Giuliani’s bizarre personal quirks and all-purpose, random hawkishness do not calm nerves in a very unstable world. Fellow Republican candidate Mike Huckabee is a jovial inheritor of Bush’s spend-like-Jesus conservatism, but has zero foreign policy experience. And so . . . we come back to McCain.
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Very smart, yes (although IMHO McCain has still carried WAY too much water, or Kool-Aid, for the Administration on Iraq).
But not one it is likely Republican voters will listen to. (Nor are they likely to listen to McCain's latest endorsement, Tom Kean, late of the 9/11 Commission and the way-too-moderate to GOP presidential primary voters ex-governor of "New Juh-sey.")
Dear Mr. Sullivan,
I know of no Christian that believes, or agrees with Mr. Robertson that feminists and gays are responsible for the Muslim Jihadists attacking the U.S. on 9/11. Though many believe that feminists and gays, as cause and effect (since the acceptance of feminism and homosexuality took root in our society through secular means), play a major role in the incredible rise of promiscuity and sexual perversion being ubiquitous in our youth culture.
Well, it seems like a remarkably smart bit of stand-alone exegesis. Unless you know that the latest polls show John McCain the presently strongest Republican against Hillary Clinton. All the other Republican campaigns are, in the view of insiders, in various kinds of trouble. Sullivan is vehemently anti-Hillary (which is hard to miss), that's the common thread to his various championing of the likes of Obama and McCain.
If you've seen the McCain ads going out to New Hampshire, as I have the misfortune to every time I watch the local news, they're not that compelling and even somewhat painful. His campaign can't quite disguise that he's getting brittle and uneven. In other coverage out of NH he's even looking physically frail. The ads even reflect a way of looking at things that belongs in the 1960s and 1970s, not 2008.
Well, I'm not sure anyone will vote for McCain on Sullivan's recommendation since Sullivan is both gay and conservative, neither of which has been appealing to the GOP base, but I happen to agree with him in this case.
Jillian, you may be right. about Sullivan's anti-Hillary motive. I keep imagining Giuliani, who looks like he still might get beat up on a fifth-grade playground making the case that we need him to protect us while standing next to Mother Superior. It seems, somehow, like a flawed strategy.
Donny: "I know of no Christian that believes, or agrees with Mr. Robertson that feminists and gays are responsible for the Muslim Jihadists attacking the U.S. on 9/11."
So what you are saying is that Jerry Falwell was not a Christian. I'm assuming that you knew of him, although I may be wrong in that.
It would be so much easier if the "phony Christians" could be identified BEFORE they blew off their mouths (or blew up something else, as in the case of Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph). It might also help if the "real Christians" helped police their own ranks, much as they have asked Muslims in this country to do with their own.
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