Is John McCain Too Reckless To Lead?

Ron Paul supporters welcome the Hate Fest to St Paul

The theme of the St Paul HateFest seems to have shaped up into a two-tiered outreach:
1- Obama is not ready to lead
2- Obama is _______ (fill in anything a reactionary or bigot hates most)

The giveaway? The spate of vicious, false, negative, fear-mongering campaign ads, all approved by Karl Rove and his boy McCain. As McCain backers Lieberman and Miss Lindsey point out in today's Wall Street Journal, Obama's goal of world cooperation and peace are virtually the opposite of McCain's vision of global anxiety and war.

Yesterday I went to see the doctor for my annual physical. I'm deathly afraid of needles but the nurse who always draws my blood, Svetlana, I trust so thoroughly that I am never afraid. Remembering that Stalin's daughter is named Svetlana and that Stalin was from Georgia, I asked the nurse for her thoughts on the tense situation there. The normally mild-mannered, good-humored and witty intellectual let loose with a stream of invective that shocked me... and all directed at McCain and his Neocon lobbyist/advisor Randy Scheunemann. Svetlana doesn't read blogs but she was well aware that the Neocons goaded Saakashvili into taking rash action against South Ossetia to instill fear in Americans, who, they hoped would then turn to what the Republicans seem to think is a "proven" foreign policy expert. (Somehow being held captive in a North Vietnamese prison makes McCain, a bumbling idiot who has never gotten anything right regarding foreign policy, an "expert" in their minds.)

I didn't ask Svetlana if she's a citizen or not, so I don't know if her rage at McCain's cynical, self-serving and extremely dangerous interference in her old country would turn into another vote against him. But I did notice her frustration that the U.S. media-- particularly the cable Infotainment industry-- has completely distorted what is going on in the Caucasuses.

Ilan Goldenberg at Democracy Arsenal has come up with a good response for the Obama campaign to this Republican line:

John McCain. He was a cheerleader for George Bush and Dick Cheney's war in Iraq. He has said we should bomb Iran. He's willing to get into major escalations with China and Russia. He thought war with North Korea was inevitable. He even called Germany and France our "adversaries." Is that who we want leading our country? John McCain too reckless to lead.

Mississippi conservative Republican Senator Thad Cochran explained why he wouldn't vote for McCain during the GOP primaries. He said that "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me." Cochran has known McCain and worked with him for decades. Like many of his less outspoken colleagues, he knows how reckless McCain is and how unfit he is for the presidency.

And, although Cochran is far from alone among Republicans who fear that McCain has the wrong temperament to be president, and is a danger to America because of his rashness, more Republicans oppose him because of what they see as his shaky moorings on lifestyle issues. Today Robert Novak dragged himself from his deathbed to warn McCain about picking another irrational warmonger, Joe Lieberman, as his running mate. He says Lieberman is McCain's first choice. The only thing stopping him is the veto power the religious right has over GOP politics, especially over anything the thoroughly distrusted McCain wants to do.

Reports of strong support within John McCain's presidential campaign for Independent Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman as the Republican candidate for vice president are not a fairy tale. Influential McCain backers, plus McCain himself, would pick the pro-choice liberal from Connecticut if they thought they could get away with it.

...McCain's top strategists argue that the Bush coalition that won the last two presidential elections is dead and must be replaced by a new one that extends to the left, as Lieberman would. Bush strategists disagree, asserting that McCain is getting around 90 percent of the old Bush vote and can win the election with a few moderates added in.

They claim 90% support from the Bush coalition but that is very optimistic, pie-in-the-sky thinking. Unless he picks Mike Huckabee or another figure the evangelicals are enthusiastic about-- Mitt not being The One-- he'll be lucky to be claiming 80% of the Bush coalition in two weeks.

A group of Michigan social conservatives who support former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee threatened Thursday to abandon Republican nominee John McCain, upset that McCain's vice presidential choice may not reflect their anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage positions.

The uproar came after a pair of meetings Wednesday-- while McCain was campaigning here-- in which his campaign hoped to strengthen its support with religious conservatives. Huckabee supporters said they were especially upset at word that, at a meeting in Birmingham between McCain and a small group of conservative activists, a top McCain ally had floated the possibility he'd pick a running mate who is for abortion rights.

"We are totally done with McCain at this point," said Debra Mantey, one of the organizers of the other meeting, in Saginaw. She said she and many others in the group will refuse to help McCain's campaign unless Huckabee is on the ballot, or given the keynote address at the GOP convention.

One has to wonder if Debra Mantey (or even Phyllis Schafly) will be all over the media next week the way that flaming asshole Sacha Millstone, the irrational Clinton delegate from Boulder, was this week. Somehow, I doubt it. And even if McCain, who seems hell bent on picking almost anyone but Huckabee as his running mate, manages to set things straight with the Huckabee folks, what about the Ron Paul contingent? Who do you think Ron Paul, who is pointedly not being invited to speak at the Republican Hate Fest, is aiming this ad at? It will run on a hundred televisions every 8 minutes throughout the Mall of America during the Republican Convention down the road. And that's not a few dozen post-menopausal, spoiled and self-entitled old yentas whining about not getting their way.