A Record Breaking Experience

There are a number of reasons trusting John McCain with our highest office is difficult for me despite his very honorable record up until he decided to make a serious play at the presidency (roughly 2004-2006). To be fair, I am somewhat concerned that Obama has had only 2 years of government experience on the national level. I think Obama supporters who are honest can admit that experience does matter. We can argue, as many democrats have, that no new president enters the oval office with presidential experience. However, I think in our heart of hearts we all know that experience in the field prior to entering the oval office will certainly have an effect on how a candidate acts as president, in the same way that our professional experiences usually add to our ability to work at higher levels within a field of work. But here’s the catch: the value of a person’s experience depends on what he has learned from that experience and his application of that knowledge in the present. Experience is not in and of itself a good thing, but a neutral thing. It has great potential to reinforce a person’s capacity for being effective in any line of work, but does not automatically equate to that effectiveness. In my field of education, for example, there are many teachers who have decades of experience that add little or no value to the quality of their instruction. In many cases their effectiveness actually diminishes with experience. So how do we judge what a person has learned from his experience? By examining how his experience influences his present judgment. In short, John McCain’s present judgment reveals to me that he is tired of being a true maverick and being punished politically for it by his opponents as well as his own party and has in turn made startling compromises to align himself with his party. As a result, he has become a low-rent parody of himself. Despite his long and noble record in the senate, he has strayed so far from it in this election that many of us are not asking “Who is Barack Obama?” but “Who is John McCain?” In my opinion, we are watching the unraveling of a great patriot, made even more tragic by the fact that he is likely near the end of his career. I want Obama to win, but at the same time, I do not want McCain to lose and have this misguided chapter of his career be the one that Americans remember.

A Republican friend of mine says that McCain will be a better president than his campaign suggests as his record is what should be considered, not his rhetoric (he also says this same standard should be applied to Obama). David Brooks supports this idea in a McCain-supporting article:

“It’s not that [McCain] has changed his political personality that bothers me. I’ve come to accept that in this media-circus environment, you simply cannot run for president as a candid, normal person.”

And yet Obama has run for president as a candid, normal person, and he has faired well so far with that approach. The tragedy for McCain is that Americans might have taken well to an uncompromised version of him. His base would not have been as excited, but would they have instead flocked to Barack Obama, an African-American liberal with a funny name? I think not.

Another Republican friend of mine recently said to me that McCain was the best man for the job and if Republicans have to play a little dirty (including tactics of fear and pandering to ignorance and bigotry) to get the best man in office, than so be it. I must assume, to give McCain the benefit of the doubt as a decent man, that this is the rationale behind his recent campaign choices. (If I do not, than I would have to assume much worse things about him which I do not believe to be true.) However, I view this line of thinking as fundamentally opposed to the ideals of democracy. Furthermore, a campaign that elicits the kind of terrifying responses we have seen at McCain/Palin rallies cannot possibly be justified by a win for his campaign. As an idealist living in the real world, I am open to the idea that sometimes the ends justifies the means, but in this case, the cost to the character of our country is simply too high. Even if he wins, America loses too much in the process. For me, no amount of experience can justify the judgment behind having his VP say to supporters that Obama “palled around with terrorists” and run an ad focused on the same theme. McCain is not an ignorant man. He must have understood the dangers of what he was about to do. He must have understood that there are some in his base that fear Obama simply because of his skin color and his name (as seen in this video). And if for some reason he was shocked by people’s reactions, than perhaps he truly is out of touch.

And now I must address his greatest error of judgment which cannot be separated from his record as it could potentially have a greater impact on America than all of his work in the senate combined: picking Sarah Palin as his VP. A Republican friend of mine makes the argument that he would rather have the inexperienced candidate at the bottom of the ticket than at the top. But I say that Obama and Palin cannot honestly be compared as equals in any area of competence. In addition, the problem I have with Sarah Palin is not with her, but with John McCain. As Matthew Dowd, a chief strategist from George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, states in this article: “[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that." This is an error in moral judgment that cannot possibly be swept under the rug as part of a campaign the educated are supposed to ignore in favor of McCain’s experience.

I came into this election season as a left-leaning independent voter, but even staunchly conservative Republicans who are generally regarded as “thinking/intellectual conservatives” have criticized John McCain’s judgment:

• Kathleen Parker writing for the National Review, a conservative publication founded by William F. Buckley Jr., the figurehead of American conservatism: “Palin Problem: She’s Out Of Her League”

• Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley Jr., and now a former writer for the National Review (he was let go after writing this article) on TheDailyBeast: “Sorry, Dad, I’m voting for Obama”

• Charles Krauthammer for the Washington Post: Palin’s Problem

• David Frum for the National Post: Palin the irresponsible choice?

• George F. Will for the Washington Post: McCain Loses His Head

• Peggy Noonan from the Washington Post: The Trial

• Wick Allison for D Magazine: A Conservative For Obama

And just today, Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican, endorsed Obama as reported here in the NY Times: Powell Backs Obama and Criticizes McCain's Tactics