More Mainstream Republicans Deserting McCain: Michigan

topher

Gov William Milliken won't be campaign for McCain any longer

Two weeks ago DWT published a guest post by former Republican Congressman John Buchanan of Alabama explaining why he had changed his mind, after voting for McCain in the primary, and is now supporting Barack Obama. Congressman Buchanan mourned the loss of the "real" John McCain he liked and admired and wrote that he's "proving himself to be a very unfunny caricature" and "is using the same oft repeated big lie strategy of bearing  false witness against Obama that was used against him in 2000. The real John McCain was above such nefarious tactics. He would instead be running an honest and honorable campaign on the real and important issues our country faces in this election."

It was a big deal when former Michigan Governor William Milliken endorsed McCain in the Republican primary instead of Mitt Romney. This morning's Grand Rapids Press is reporting that Milliken, like mainstream Republicans all over America, is having buyer's remorse.

"He is not the McCain I endorsed," said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. "He keeps saying, 'Who is Barack Obama?' I would ask the question, 'Who is John McCain?' because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.

"I'm disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues."

...During a stop in Grand Rapids on Thursday, Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican U.S. senator from Rhode Island, said he's voting for Obama and urging others to do likewise.

McCain campaigned for Chafee's unsuccessful re-election bid in 2006, but Chafee said he is concerned McCain has swung to the right, a divisive strategy that could make it difficult for him to govern.

"That's not my kind of Republicanism," said Chafee, who now calls himself an independent. "I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what's happened now. In eight short years they've taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they've torn it into tatters."

As for McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for his running mate, "there's no question she's totally unqualified," Chafee said.

And it isn't just Buchanan, Milliken and Chafee who are horrified at the transformation of John McCain into the disreputable troll we see on TV everyday. Michigan, in fact, is filled with them. Former state Senator Phil Arthurhultz, a Republican of Whitehall, is backing Obama and ex-Republican County Chair (Kent) Bob Eleveld, once the head of McCain's campaign in western Michigan, refuses to back McCain at all this year. "I'm not supporting either of them at this point," he said. "Suffice it to say there are a number of people who have been strong Republicans in the past, including party chairs, who feel as I do... I think the straight talk is gone. I think he's pandering to the Christian right. That's some straight talk from me."

Discord in the ranks couldn't come at a worse time for Bush congressional rubber stamps like Tim Walberg and Joe Knollenberg, two Michigan congressmen on the road to losing their seats. Both are down in the polls and are likely to be defeated by Mark Schauer and Gary Peters, both Democrats committed to supporting working families instead of narrow partisan agendas and the special interests of big campaign contributors.

One thing almost all Republicans abandoning McCain, or thinking of abandoning McCain, have in common is their utter disdain, if not outright contempt, for Sarah Palin. One McCain loyalist, Rep Ray LaHood (R-IL) told Chicago's biggest radio station, WBBM, that her 24/7 smear campaign could backfire on the GOP, "doesn't reflect the character of" Obama, and "doesn’t befit the office that she’s running for.  And frankly, people don’t like it.” (Funny how reluctant they are to question McCain's judgment and even his patriotism for this abysmal selection that so jeopardizes the country's well-being.) Actually what's left of the hatered-obsessed Republican does like it. It's what they are. LaHood is retiring but dozens of Republican politicians running for re-election are freaking out about McCain and Palin and the negative coattails that are likely to sink their own races. One of the most endangered Republicans in the Senate, Bush rubber stamp Gordon Smith of Oregon, resigned as chairman of McCain's Oregon campaign and actually uses Obama's photos in his campaign spots! He even tried insinuating that he and popular Oregon Senator Ron Wyden are "a team." Wyden responded to that yesterday:




UPDATE: WILLIAM F BUCKLEY'S SON CHRIS DUMPS McCAIN

In a bid to follow his father's advise of separating the Right from the kooks-- tough gig!-- Chris Buckley announced that he's voting for Obama.

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times... a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t-- still-- doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam-- his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

...He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain-- who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.