HATCHET : Down, but not out
Posted on Thursday, October 9, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/nwat/Editorial/69929/
Things aren’t very pretty for the GOP right now. Many conservatives, evangelicals and people who claim both titles weren’t exactly thrilled when Sen. John McCain won the Republican presidential nomination this spring. Fiscal conservatives would have preferred Gov. Mitt Romney and the social conservatives had lined up behind Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Only the brilliant choice of Gov. Sarah Palin to round out the ticket solidified the conservatives for McCain. But the postconvention honeymoon is over. By almost any count the presidency is Sen. Barack Obama’s to lose, and in a series of extremely lame debates, we are reminded why McCain was the choice of so few of us.
That being said, McCain is still the superior choice over Obama to lead the country. I don’t want to think of it as the lesser of two evils because neither McCain nor Obama is evil in the Saddam-Hussein / Kim-Jong-Il sense of the word. However, Obama would ultimately lead America in a more communal direction, while McCain would lead us toward personal responsibility.
So with McCain sinking in the polls and Obama taking leads in almost all the swing states, can McCain still win ? The cliché “ anything can happen” comes to mind, but more specifically, if I was advising the McCain campaign, here is what I would suggest.
1. Respectfully remind us why Obama has disqualified himself to lead through poor choices. Obama’s association with Bill Ayers is disgusting. No person who wants to be the president of the United States should ever associate themselves with an unrepentant terrorist. Period. Obama should have said long ago that the fact Ayers got off on a technicality for taking part in domestic bombings was a travesty of justice. How is Ayers any different than Timothy McVeigh ? If McVeigh hadn’t been put to death, would Obama be okay sitting on a board with McVeigh no matter how pro-education that board was ?
Obama’s reckless and inexcusable comments as a sitting U. S. Senator that our military was just “ air raiding and killing civilians” in Afghanistan is another statement that calls into serious question Obama’s character qualifications.
McCain himself has to publicly denounce Obama on both of these two items, and perhaps several others. That is the only way these items are going to get any media play. Surrogates and likeminded nonaffiliated political groups attacking Obama on these points won’t change the narrative.
2. Remind Americans they like split government. McCain needs to sound the alarm loudly though TV advertising and to the national media: An Obama victory means the Democrats will have a monopoly on government, most assuredly meaning the Obama administration, unchecked, will rule from the extreme left, in keeping with his voting record, which earned him National Journal’s most liberal senator label.
The undecided, independent and moderate votes that are still up for grabs are probably the demographic that most values split government. Both parties sharing the power of the White House and Congress to keep one side from running the country by itself is the preferred state of government for the middle-of-the-road voters. Right now, no one seems to be reminding them that an Obama election means extreme, unchecked partisan governance.
3. Appeal to the American sense of personal responsibility. Americans, myself included, can often be lured by the siren song of a freebie. Tax breaks for me, but not for those evil rich guys, sound pretty good since I don’t think of myself as a rich guy. What’s that ? A bigger child credit ? I’m glad I have two kids. Free health care ?!? Sign me up.
But we have a spilt personality. We also have bred into us the ethic of personal responsibility, which represents our best selves. We are not all selfish, only-care-about-our-pocketbook people. I believe that our sense of personal responsibility trumps our selfishness. McCain should appeal to personal responsibility — or rather, that his policies will encourage people to be responsible individuals as opposed to Obama’s, which encourage personal irresponsibility.
Granted, the personal responsibility message is hard to package. But fundamentally, this value of the individual is what sets the GOP apart from Democrats.
Lucas Roebuck is a former managing editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times and Siloam Springs Herald-Leader.