Monday Night Endorsement Update

McCain is getting wiped out when it comes to newspaper endorsements-- and that includes at three dozen that endorsed Bush in 2004 and have come over to Obama this year.

Obama's lopsided margin, including most of the major papers that have decided so far, is in stark contrast to John Kerry barely edging George W. Bush in endorsements in 2004 by 213 to 205.

If you'd like a great laugh, you should take a look at the poll of far right-wing Republican bloggers. Are they trying to fool someone or are they really all this stupid and allergic to reality? There were exactly 76 trombones in this sad funeral cortege and most of them claim they believe McCain will win the election next week. 91% think Palin has been a plus for the campaign and 67% think the Republican Party got its ass kicked in 2006 and appears to be in for an even worse drubbing this week because... the GOP isn't conservative enough! And if you've ever wondered where all the crazy hatred comes from... well it's not all Limbaugh and Coulter and Hannity and O'Reilly. The right-wing bloggers are pretty off the cliff as well. 89% claim Obama is dishonest; 76% say he's not patriotic and 88% say he's not qualified to be president. Only 8% say they're not Sarah Palin fans.

In recent days we've been reading about many high profile Republicans endorsing Obama. Many are sickened by McCain's viciously divisive and negative campaign and by the extremism of his supporters. Others are disillusioned by his selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate. We've all read about Colin Powell, Lincoln Chafee, Jim Leach (R-IA), William Weld, former Alabama Congressman John Buchanan, Chris Buckley, former Michigan Governor William Milliken, Arne Carlson, former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, Wick Allison, Rep Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD), Larry Pressler (R-SD), and even freaks like arch-Neocon Ken Adelman and GOP child molester Mark Foley. But all over the country there are lesser known Republicans backing Obama against McCain.

The GOP candidate for Congress in Portland, Oregon, Joel Haugen has gone a step beyond Republican Senator Gordon Smith and actually endorsed Obama. "I am sure," he writes, "that we need to choose a President who exemplifies the 21st Century and is not just an echo of the Cold War mentality. I personally admire John McCain, but I simply cannot see him inspiring the nation and our world economic partners to work together and solve our very daunting problems. My Obama support-decision matrix includes the characteristics of Judgment, Temperament, Charisma, Intellect, Adaptability, Virtue, Vision, Traditional Republican Values, and dedication to 'Main Street.'  Barack Obama is without question the superior choice for me."

One Republican who still hasn't come out for Obama-- and probably won't-- is one of the most respected colleagues of John McCain's in the Senate-- and the real war hero that McCain alsways tried so hard to paint himself, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. Hagel's wife has donated to the Obama campaign and Hagel has pointedly refused to endorse his old pal McCain. This week's New Yorker published a Connie Bruck feature.

It isn't only Hagel's genuine heroism in battle that McCain has tried to claim as his own, it is also, even more overtly, the fact that it has been Hagel, never McCain, who was the Republican who opposed Bush's toxic Iraq agenda.

McCain no doubt understood how difficult it would be for Hagel to endorse him, yet their differences were what would make the endorsement so valuable. From 2004 on, McCain, in his desire to win the nomination, had embraced Bush’s policies ever more zealously, while Hagel had become the Administration’s most severe Republican critic. Although he has frequently voted with his party on domestic policy, his views on foreign policy represent a bold departure from those of the Administration, and his willingness to take Bush to task publicly has alienated many Republicans. In some ways, Hagel is far more of a maverick than McCain has ever been, and his endorsement would likely sway independents whose votes McCain probably needs in order to win.

...In mid-July, Hagel and his friend Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, accompanied Obama on a trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. Describing Baghdad to me after he returned, Hagel said, “You can’t walk around-- you’ve got flak jackets, helmets on all the time, no matter where you are. It’s always struck me it’s almost like a Fellini movie, kind of unreal. The American people are told things are stable and secure and violence is down. No American would walk outside there without a convoy!”

Hagel’s unwillingness to endorse McCain is generally perceived to be a result of their ongoing disagreements over the Iraq war. But he told me that the gulf between them is much deeper: “In good conscience, I could not enthusiastically-- honestly-- go out and endorse him and support him when we so fundamentally disagree on the future course of our foreign policy and our role in the world.”

...Hagel said, he’s been “very disappointed” by McCain’s campaign. “He gave one unifying speech and then has spent fifty million dollars to destroy his opponent.” Hagel may be the only senior Republican elected official who has publicly criticized McCain’s choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. “I don’t believe she’s qualified to be President of the United States,” Hagel told me. “The first judgment a potential President makes is who their running mate is—and I don’t think John made a very good selection.” He scoffed at McCain’s attempts to portray her as an experienced politician. “To try to make the excuse that she looks out her window and sees Russia—and that she’s commander of the Alaska National Guard.” He added, “There is no question that this candidate is arguably the thinnest-résumé candidate for Vice-President in the history of America.” Hagel’s criticisms have prompted protests from Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, who said in an e-mail statement to me, “Senator Hagel knows that decades of foreign-policy experience in the Senate did not stop countless Democrats and some Republicans from declaring the surge a failure before it started and recommending instead a disastrous policy of withdrawal and retreat in Iraq.”

For Hagel, almost as disturbing as Palin’s lack of experience is her willingness--in disparaging remarks about Joe Biden’s long Senate career, for example-- to belittle the notion that experience is important. “There’s no question, she knows her market,” Hagel said. “She knows her audience, and she’s going right after them. And I’ll tell you why that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because you don’t want to define down the standards in any institution, ever, in life. You want to always strive to define standards up. If you start defining standards down—‘Well, I don’t have a big education, I don’t have experience’—yes, there’s a point to be made that not all the smartest people come out of Yale or Harvard. But to intentionally define down in some kind of wild populism, that those things don’t count in a complicated, dangerous world—that’s dangerous in itself.

“There was a political party in this country called the Know-Nothings,” he continued. “And we’re getting on the fringe of that, with these one-issue voters—pro-choice or pro-life. Important issue, I know that. But, my goodness. The world is blowing up everywhere, and I just don’t think that is a responsible way to see the world, on that one issue. And, interestingly enough, that is one issue that stopped John McCain from picking one of the people he really wanted, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge”-- the Independent senator from Connecticut and the Republican former governor of Pennsylvania. (Both men are pro-choice.)

How Badly Will McCain's Collapse Hurt Down Ballot Republicans?

It isn't even clear if it'll be a landslide or not and Republicans are already picking over the bones trying to figure out who to blame. There are still dozens of congressional seats hanging in the balance and the GOP is still looking like they have a chance-- albeit a slight chance-- to save seats for far right extremists like Vern Buchanan (FL-13), Brian Bilbray (CA-50), Sam Graves (R-MO), Thelma Drake (VA-02), John Culberson (TX-07)... maybe even Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) and Dean Heller (NV-02). And then there's the anticipation of the one sure victory they know they will have when right-wing extremist Tom Rooney beats moderate Republican Tom Mahoney (FL-16) and the GOP has something to celebrate. But instead of savoring the end of Tim Mahoney-- something that should bring both Democrats and Republicans together on-- they're gnashing their teeth over that Governor of Alaska's sinking poll ratings and the ugly tensions over her inside the campaign. The lobbyists who run the Double Talk Express seem to have decided that she will be the star of the post mortem: "Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image-- even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline. "

A majority of likely voters in a new Washington Post-ABC News national poll now have unfavorable views of the Alaska governor, most still doubt her presidential qualifications and there is an even split on whether she "gets it," a perception that had been a key component of her initial appeal.

Palin's addition to the GOP ticket initially helped McCain narrow the gap with Obama on the question of which presidential hopeful "better understands the problems of people like you," but at 18 percentage points, the Democrat's margin on that question is now as big as it has been all fall. Nor has Palin attracted female voters to McCain, as his campaign had hoped.

Bill Kristol rarely gets anything right-- and never on any of the big stuff-- but in today's neo-fascist propaganda sheet, the Weekly Standard, he hits the nail on the head: McCain's going to lose. What he doesn't say is that it was the fact that his always bad judgment was exposed to the American people through the cynical Palin pick and that that was the decisive blow against his candidacy. The only lines worth reading in this week's Weekly Standard:

It's always darkest before it goes totally black... Well, with 10 days to go before the election, it's getting pretty dark out there.

Kristol, neo-Con loon 'til the end and beyond denounces the Republicans who have been abandoning McCain's sinking ship as rats. He may be right but one of the worst of the rats, Kenneth Adelman, defends himself today at, of all places, HuffPo:

McCain's tempera- ment -- leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke-- and his judgment-- leading him to Wasilla -- depressed me into thinking that "our guy" would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.

One of the hateful Republican extremists on the fringes of the far right, who basically admits what most right-wing loons believe-- that he would rather see America on its knees, its working families starving and desperate, than see Obama succeed as president-- ripped into Adelman on a Republican hate site:

...it is ironic that Ken Adelman-- the man who assured us Iraq would be a "cakewalk"-- would criticize Bush's competency. Second, if Adelman values conservative philosophy above all else, shouldn't he consider a "competent" liberal be the worst possible combination?  After all, an incompetent liberal might not be able to pass liberal legislation-- but a competent liberal would use his intellect and ability to pass tax hikes, create more departments, nationalize more industries, etc.

So while McCain desperately tries to win solid red states like Indiana, Ohio and Montana, where he's behind, and even Arizona, where observers say McCain's own state would slip away if Obama would schedule just one rally in Phoenix, the Obama campaign has its eyes on areas where Democrats haven't tread in far too long. He is the culmination of Howard Dean's 50 state strategy.

By every metric, Barack Obama's presidential campaign appears headed for the upper deck. Polls (both national and state-by-state), organization, money, and momentum are all running strongly in Obama's favor. At this point, one wonders whether Obama's winning margin could be greater than Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton's 5.6-point win over President George H.W. Bush in 1992, more than Bush's 7.7-point win over Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988, or more than Clinton's 8.5-point win over Sen. Bob Dole in 1996. Even higher on the landslide roster is California Gov. Ronald Reagan's 9.7-point victory over President Carter in 1980 and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's 10.9-point win over Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

For many professional politicians on the right the only question worth talking about between now and election night is how badly McCain's toxic coattails will hurt the Republican Party and how many rightists' careers will be destroyed. The GOP has completely written off incumbents like Don Young (AK), Tom Feeney (FL), Randy Kuhl (NY), Tim Walberg (MI) as well as "up-and-comers" like Darren White (NM), Leonard Lance (NJ), and Tom McClintock (CA). And they now view races to retain the seats of Robin Hayes (NC), Ric Keller (FL), Marilyn Musgrave (CO), Joe Knollenberg (MI), Chris Shays (CT), Mark Kirk (IL), Jon Porter (NV), Dave Reichert (WA), Steve Chabot (OH), and Michele Bachmann (MN) as a waste of time and resources. Instead the battleground has moved to saving incumbents once thought untouchable-- like Dana Rohrabacher (CA), John Shadegg (AZ), Virgil Goode (VA), Scott Garrett (NJ), Michael McCaul (TX), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Bill Sali (ID), Frank Wolf (VA), and Lee Terry (NE).

On the Senate side, they've written off New Mexico, Virginia, Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, and North Carolina entirely and are hoping for miracles to save their incumbents in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oregon. Their last stand against a filibuster-proof Senate is taking place in Kentucky, Georgia, Maine, Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Back to McCain for a second: it looks like the new battleground state is Georgia, where Obama has just pulled ahead. Bob Barr, a former conservative Republican Georgia congressman says it isn't so much that Obama is winning; it's just that McCain is losing.

If you're looking to help: one stop shopping-- for our nation's future.

Oh, No! Now Even The Really Bad Republicans Are Endorsing Obama

Please don't tell me John Ashcroft will endorse Obama too!

Forget for a moment that "really bad" and "Republicans" are kind of oxymoronic. I mean point out a post-Jacob Javits Republican who isn't "really bad." (Keep in mind that John Lindsey and Lincoln Chafee both abandoned the party of hatred and greed and that Olympia Snowe may wind up doing the same thing in January.) So... not one! And a whole slew have been jumping off the McCranky-Palin sinking ship as it lists this way and that, erratically, from one disaster to another.

But beyond the Chris Buckleys and Wick Allisons and the Colin Powells, we're now starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel as some real scummy opportunists pop up their heads and try running to the front of the parade. A few days ago it was war criminal Kenneth Adelman and then today...

When I saw the headline, I thought it came from The Onion. But it was today's Wall Street Journal: Bernanke Endorses Obama. Huh? Hyperbole aside, did he really? Not exactly. What he did do was admit that what the Democrats are suggesting, a stimulus package that puts cash into the hands of consumers and workers is what's needed to get the economy going. In other words, "Jobs, baby, jobs!"

The Journal editors aren't pleased that more money that could go into the pockets of corporate criminal executives might be wasted on... common people. In fact they're so outraged that they're assigned dark motivations to Bernanke's pronouncement. "Ben Bernanke apparently wants four more years as Federal Reserve Chairman. At least that's a reasonable conclusion after Mr. Bernanke all but submitted his job application to Barack Obama yesterday by endorsing the Democratic version of fiscal 'stimulus.'... Perhaps Mr. Bernanke's blunderbuss political intrusion will win him more Democrat friends, and maybe even Mr. Obama's goodwill. To the rest of the world, he has harmed the Fed and made himself less credible." By "the rest of the world," they mean themselves and the criminal elite they represent.

Obama should start rejecting these endorsements by the authors of our misery. What's next? An endorsement by Republican child molester Mark Foley? Yep, Foley, now openly gay and in L.A. for [oops, I'm not allowed to tell] admitted to fellow celebrities that he's for Obama. Having gone through quite a bit of therapy, I guess he's not as self-loathing as the even sicker Republicans who have actually endorsed McCain-Palin.

Who Knew Kenneth Adelman Is African-American?

Ken Adelman-- Is that a tan? Or something else?

Like clockwork, the minute General Colin Powell announced that, although still a Republican, he is voting for Barack Obama, a whole slew of GOP media hacks, from drug addled walking freak show Rush Limbaugh to the marginally more respectable Pat Buchanan and almost respectable enough to invite over George Will all chirped in that Powell only endorsed him because they're both black. None of them were even so much as given a time out for broadcasting this kind of disgraceful and blatant racism.

I wonder what they'll say today when they find out that a far more conservative, doctrinaire Republican than Powell, Ken Adelman, has also endorsed Obama over McCain-- and for many of the same (actual) reasons. George Packer in the New Yorker:

In recent years, Adelman and his friends Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz fell out over his criticisms of the botching of the Iraq War. Still, he remains a bona-fide hawk (“not really a neo-con but a con-con”) who has never supported a Democrat for President in his life. Two weeks from now that’s going to change: Ken Adelman intends to vote for Barack Obama. He can hardly believe it himself.

Adelman and I exchanged e-mails today about his decision. He asked rhetorically,

Why so, since my views align a lot more with McCain’s than with Obama’s? And since I truly dread the notion of a Democratic president, Democratic House, and hugely Democratic Senate?

Primarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment.

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office-- I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign-- Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

Even if they don't claim he's African-American, I'm sure they'll find some excuse to denounce him. Stay tuned.


UPDATE: FRINGY RIGHT-WING WEBSITES CHIME IN

"Condescending, arrogant, and dare I say out of touch" was what one of the loons said, not just about Adelman but about any Republican who deserts the sinking ship. Adelman and Powell, she claims, also have backscratching involved. Other conservatives, more mainstream ones, are just being... more realistic.

Another Conservative Thinker Endorses Obama

Yesterday was shaping up to be another one of those Republicans-deserting-McCain days. For most thoughtful conservatives the cynical choice of a patently unqualified Sarah Palin was the straw that broke the camel's back. But for others it has been McCain's erratic and dishonorable behavior; it is now clear he would do anything to get into the White House, regardless of what damage he causes to America. Others just looked at his insane mortgage proposal or his catastrophic healthcare plan... and fled in horror.

Joining National Review colleague Chris Buckley, that right-wing publication's former editor and publisher, Wick Allison, wrote a scathing piece on the danger of electing McCain and why he's voting for Obama. Allison is now editor-in-chief of D Magazine. At the age of 16 he organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater and that's been his world ever since. "Today," he confesses, "it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work."

The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war-- led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

More Mainstream Republicans Deserting McCain: Michigan

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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.

Former Congressman John Buchanan (R-AL) Wonders What happened To The John McCain He Knew And Supported

I serve on the board of directors of a large, esteemed, nonpartisan public affairs organization in Washington-- my one official connection to the world Inside the Beltway. A few years ago I sat next to a Board member I was just getting to know, former Congressman John Buchanan of Alabama, a Republican. He represented a part of northern Alabama that takes its Republicanism seriously. He told me a fascinating piece of history I had never heard, about how one county, Winston, even seceded from Alabama when Alabama seceded from the Union. Congressman Buchanan was still an Abe Lincoln type Republican when he became the first victim of the Christian Coalition a century later. The fledgling Coalition ran a far right extremist in a primary against him, a successful primary (which eventually resulted in the district falling to Democrats). Anyway, my fellow-board member sent me a requiem for an old friend of his today: John McCain, someone who had had voted for in the Republican Party primary just a few months ago. Congressman Buchanan's letter:

I write to mourn the passing of a true American hero, Senator John McCain of Arizona. Like millions of other Americans, I have thanked God for his courage, enduring years of hardship and even torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, being a source of strength to his fellow prisoners and becoming a role model for us all. I have celebrated his integrity and straight talk through later years as a long-term United State Senator.

As a Republican, I voted for him in his run for the Presidency eight years ago, and marveled at how well he handled the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, conceived in Hell and brought to earth through the merciless, evil forces of Karlrovian politics, which cost him the race, but not, in the words of our founding fathers, his sacred honor...

I voted for that same man of character again in 2008. And now he is no more, leaving our country less than it would be if he remained among us, and leaving people like me only fond memories of the man he used to be.

The Republican candidate this year for the Presidency of the United States is proving himself to be a very unfunny caricature of the John McCain we knew and loved and now have lost, and we have reason to grieve. He 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.

Even worse, the pseudo John McCain has put within a heartbeat of the Presidency, should he win, someone totally unprepared to lead our country, much less the free world, in these perilous times. There are people of both genders in both parties with the knowledge, experience, judgment and character to assume the helm if necessary. His nominee is not one of them. He recklessly chose someone with no such knowledge or experience, who is on the far right extreme of the political spectrum, and who is joining him in setting truth on its head in this campaign.

Those who choose to poison the well of American politics can win elections that way, while truth and justice weep. Those who call forth the best that is in us can also win, and truth, justice and our country win with them. I mourn the passing of John McCain. The best way we can honor him and serve the American people is to roundly defeat the Republican ticket in this election.

John H. Buchanan

Former Member of Congress

(R) Alabama

In a postscript he added that "for our country's sake, I hope... Barack Obama, becomes our next president." One hears more and more Republicans saying that nearly every day. I know it's very difficult for some of them. Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, who seems to have become a family friend of the McCains over the years, expressed much the same sentiment, writing about McCain at HuffPo today.

"I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated-- whatever his words-- it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to "lose" it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.

Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country's security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate. He is 72 years old; has had four melanomas, a particularly voracious form of cancer; refuses to release his complete medical records. Three of our last eleven presidents (and nine of all 43) have come to office unexpectedly in mid-term from the vice presidency: Truman, who within days of FDR's death was confronted with the decision of whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan; Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath in Dallas after JFK's assassination; Gerald Ford, sworn in following the resignation of Richard Nixon. A fourth vice president, George H.W. Bush, briefly exercised the powers of the presidency after the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan.

Given that history, what does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin-- the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since-- reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor? "Two things I will never do," McCain told me, "are [to] lie to the American people, or put my electoral interests before the national interest"-- an obvious precursor of "I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war."

A tribute to Young Johnny McCranky's honesty and trustworthiness, as viewed by "some of those who know him best": Republicans for Obama

"If John says 'I’m going with so and so,' you can’t count on that the next morning. That's not the man we want for president."

-- Rita Hauser, a legendary Republican financier and fund-raiser,
and cofounder of and spokesperson for Republicans for Obama

by Ken

I'm just catching up with Frank Rich's column in yesterday's NYT, in which he pointed out -- obviously correctly -- that beyond the story of Young Johnny McCranky's Vietnam imprisonment Americans know virtually nothing about him, and that almost all of what little they think they know is simply untrue. He seems more optimistic than I am that the candidate's "real story" will eventually be told, but he does add some pungent detail to a story that was reported last week by Michael Luo on the NYT's political blog, but apparently not in the newspaper:

Some of those who know McCain best -- Republicans -- are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration's first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama -- temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others -- are missing in McCain. "He doesn't listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments," Hauser told me. "If John says 'I’m going with so and so,' you can’t count on that the next morning," she complained, adding, "That's not the man we want for president."

Note: The other cofounder of Republicans for Obama mentioned in the Luo NYT blog account is former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee.


UPDATE: BACK ON LINE

While I was without Internet access, I did a lot more TV viewing than normal. I even watched Pastor's Rick's little infomercial for McCain, starring Barack Obama. I like Ken's twist on the futility of pointing out the truth to McCrankyites. But I was also taken by the heavy lack of credibility McCain's lifting of Solzhenitsyn's story about life in the Gulag aroused among right-wingers who have been watching his shameful career and long ago learned about his tendency to say whatever it takes to please the audience he's standing in front of at the moment.

-Howie

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