Brad Warthen's Blog

McCain to go to bat for McMaster (as well he should)

The Hill reports that John McCain is going to be raising funds for Attorney General Henry McMaster's (yet undeclared) bid for governor in 2010:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is hitting the fundraising circuit to return the favor to a local Republican who proved a key supporter in the 2008 primaries.

McCain and many of his top advisers will throw a fundraising reception on behalf of Henry McMaster, the South Carolina attorney general who backed McCain during his run for president in 2008.

The event's host committee includes McCain loyalists like one-time senior advisors Charlie Black, former campaign manager Rick Davis and former Republican National Committee deputy chairman Frank Donatelli. McCain will make an appearance, a spokeswoman confirmed.

And well he should, because Henry was right with him through thick and thin in his most recent presidential bid. He and Bobby Harrell, all the way, even when people were counting McCain as out of the GOP race. Note the video from above (this is the slightly more extended version of my most-viewed video of all time, at 59,850 views), in which Henry warmed up the crowd for McCain one night in the Vista in 2007 (the night of the first S.C. presidential candidate debate, as I recall).

Not that 'Morning in America' hubris again...

Just got this e-mail a little while ago from a reader (I guess it was a reader, anyway):

The headlines today said that McCain claims Obama "must" consult with the GOP on stimulus talks. That's not true, any more than saying that Ronald Reagan was required to allow Dems much input in his 1981 plans. On election eve 1980, even old democrats like me realized that the public had said no to government spending, said no to government meddling and no to more regulations. I believed the public was wrong, but also understood that Reagan's mandate was to proceed as he'd promised.
 
Thirty years later, Americans' have decided that we need government, government to stop us from dying from eating peanut butter, government to stop bankers from stealing from us, and government to provide jobs until the economy picks up. That's Obama's mandate, and to do anything else would be to back off from his promises. McCain is wrong. He and his party lost. Obama wants to be nice and extend an olive branch to the losers, but it is not necessary that he does so. What's necessary is he goes forward with his plans.

To which I felt compelled to answer as follows (slightly edited, as I read back over it):

Interesting you should mention 1981. I'm still ticked off that Democrats back then took just the attitude that you're calling for. Tip O'Neill and the rest said, well, Reagan won the election, so let's give him anything that he wants. This, after four years of that same Democratic Congress not giving Jimmy Carter ANYthing he wanted.

I'm still mad about it. I'm still mad about how the whole world just rolled over for Reagan. Much of the media was full of that "Morning in America" hoopla, and I felt like .... well, have you ever been the only person in the room who was not drunk or stoned, and everybody around you thought everything was just SO funny, and you just thought they were all very irritating? Not much fun, huh? Well, that was me in the Reagan era.

I don't feel that way this time. I sort of thought Reagan's win in 1980 was the end of the world -- not because I was anti-Republican, but because I had liked Jimmy Carter so much (I don't like him as much as I did then, but I really liked him then). I don't feel that way at all about Obama. Out of all the people running for president last year, McCain and Obama were my first and second choices. So while I'm sorry McCain didn't win, I'm glad Obama didn't lose. I'm highly ambivalent on that score.

But one reason I DO like Obama so much -- and liked him so much more than Hillary -- is that he IS about post-partisanship. (That's one of the main things I liked about McCain, too.) He's nothing like Reagan; he's far less the ideological warrior. And if he doesn't work with McCain (something which, to his credit, he's already demonstrated a willingness to do), then he's not the guy that a LOT of people voted for. I would expect exactly the same from McCain -- a willingness to work across the aisle -- had he been elected.

And I have little patience for Democrats who act the way the Reaganites did in the early 80s -- We won, so we'll do what we damn' well please. Unfortunately, I do hear that from some. Like "Morning in America" revisited. And I didn't like that triumphalist bull the first time, not one bit.

And if you don't care about bipartisanship, think about this: There's a good chance this stimulus will fail. There's a good chance ANY stimulus would fail. So how would you feel about it if, once the stimulus fails, the GOP recaptures Congress, and then goes around telling Obama and the world that "We won, so we don't have to listen to you?"

Far better that we have a stimulus plan that both parties buy into. It's a little late for that, but it WOULD have been far better. It's never good to have one of the two major parties politically invested in the nation failing...

(I'll add one more thought: I would not say that Obama "must" work with McCain et al. I'm just saying that to the extent that he can, he should. This is not to say that if you've tried to bring the GOP along and they've just refused and you truly believe your plan is the right one, you don't go ahead -- just as I thought it was right for us to go ahead into Iraq without France, Germany and Russia on board. But I am saying that if you can possibly swing it, bipartisan is WAY better for the country.)

Worrying about the stimulus

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

    “This is your bill; it needs to be America’s bill.”

            — Sen. Lindsey Graham,
         addressing Senate Democrats

What worries me, after all the rhetoric, exhortation, accusations, counter-accusations, fault-finding and blame-laying, is that the stimulus bill that spent the week staggering its way through the U.S. Senate might not work anyway.

     There was always that very good chance. Several weeks back, Paul Krugman — who as a Princeton economist is a Nobel Prize-winner, but as a political columnist is a partisan automaton — said as much. He said it wouldn’t be enough to give the economy the jolt it needs to overcome the lack of activity in the private sector. He made a persuasive case.

    Then, last week, Mr. Krugman wrote that this bill just had to pass, that those blasted Republicans opposing it were “putting the nation’s future at risk.” Obama’s mistake, he now said, was trying “to transcend partisanship” and work with the Republicans at all.

    I believe the exact opposite to be true. I believe the chances of the bill doing any good declined with each step into the thicket of partisanship.

    I never won so much as a Cracker Jack prize for economics, much less a Nobel, but there’s one thing I think I understand: Whatever Washington does in the way of stimulus — and it needs to do something (with the private sector in paralysis, this is a job for the Keynesians) — it won’t work unless America can believe in it.

    Just as Mr. Krugman is right about some things, so is Phil Gramm. Remember how indignant the Democrats got when the McCain adviser said, in mid-campaign, that we were experiencing a “mental recession”? Well, he had a point. While it doesn’t make the real-life pain any less, the mechanisms that get us into a predicament like this have an awful lot to do with what’s going on in our heads.

    When businesses think they have a chance to grow, they invest and create jobs. When they’re scared, they freeze up. When buyers and sellers believe home values will keep appreciating, the real estate market is hot. When they start to doubt values, buying and selling stop. When everyone believes a stock’s value will keep rising, it does keep rising; when they don’t, it crashes. When you think the lousy economy is threatening your job, you stop spending and stuff your earnings, literally or figuratively, into a mattress, and the workers who depended on you to buy what they produce lose their jobs, which of course increases everyone’s pessimism.

    No, it’s not all in our heads. At some point, certain things have real value. But we’re not going to start buying and selling and hiring and investing and taking risks at the levels needed to pull ourselves out of this tail-spin until we reach a consensus that things are getting better, or about to get better.

    You can argue about the specific provisions in the stimulus all you want, and Democrats and Republicans have been doing so enthusiastically. But I don’t think I’ve seen a specific idea yet that couldn’t be argued both ways. Even the worst idea pumps some juice into the economy; even the best one is no silver bullet.

    With private sector leadership — especially on Wall Street — having failed us so spectacularly, we need something intangible from our political leadership every bit as much as we need infrastructure spending and/or tax cuts: We need to look at what Washington is producing and believe that it actually is for the good of the country, and not for the good of the Democrats or the Republicans or this or that politician.

    As he entered office, I thought Barack Obama had what it took to lead us in that direction — to pull us together and help us believe that we can solve our problems. To persuade us, as FDR did, that we had nothing to fear, that we were going to get through this, together.

    I still think he can. But last week, I saw him stumble. I’m not talking about the Tom Daschle business. As the stimulus package faltered, he reverted to campaign mode, blaming Republicans who wanted to cling to those failed policies of the past eight years we heard so much about in 2008.

    Helping him in this counterproductive effort were such Republicans as our own Jim DeMint, who most certainly was clinging to the ideologies that have failed his party and the nation — such as the stubborn idea that tax cuts are the only kind of stimulus anyone needs.

    A far more sensible position was taken by our other senator late Thursday. Lindsey Graham grabbed headlines by saying “this bill stinks,” but he had smarter things to say than that:

    You know, my problem is that I think we need a stimulus bill. I think we need to do more than cut taxes. But the process has been terrible. The House passed this bill without one Republican vote, lost 11 Democrats. Nancy Pelosi said, We won, we write the bill.... (W)e’re not being smart and we’re not working together, and people want us to be smart and work together, and this has been a miserable failure on both fronts.

    As I wrote this column, much remained unsettled. By the time you read it, something may have passed. But as I wrote, I was sure of this: If the Congress gave the president a bill that was pleasing only to the Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis, it wouldn’t help the president inspire the kind of confidence that the whole nation needs to recover. (The same would be true if Jim DeMint got all he wanted, but there was no danger of that.)

    But if the president has a bill that Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine all voted for, the nation would have a chance of moving forward together. And together is the only way we can recover.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

McCain, Graham support Obama on Gitmo

FYI, I just got this release from Lindsey Graham's office:

JOINT STATEMENT FROM U.S. SENATORS LINDSEY GRAHAM AND JOHN MCCAIN ON GUANTANAMO EXECUTIVE ORDER

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John McCain (R-Arizona) today issued the following statement regarding the executive order put forth by President Obama calling for the closure of the prison at Guantanamo:  

“We support President Obama’s decision to close the prison at Guantanamo, reaffirm America’s adherence to the Geneva Conventions, and begin a process that will, we hope, lead to the resolution of all cases of Guantanamo detainees,” said Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John McCain.  “The executive orders issued today constitute an important step in the right direction but leave several major issues unaddressed.”
“Numerous difficult issues remain,” Senator Graham and Senator McCain continued.  “Present at Guantanamo are a number of detainees who have been cleared for release but have found no foreign country willing to accept them.  Other detainees have been deemed too dangerous for release, but the sensitive nature of the evidence makes prosecution difficult.  The military’s proper role in processing detainees held on the battlefield at Bagram, Afghanistan, and other military prisons around the world must be defended, but that is left unresolved.  Also unresolved is the type of judicial process that would replace the military commissions. We believe the military commissions should have been allowed to continue their work.  We look forward to working with the President and his administration on these issues, keeping in mind that the first priority of the U.S. government is to guarantee the security of the American people.”

            ####

... which seems to me an appropriate stance for the loyal opposition. They support their commander in chief because they share his concerns that our nation live up to its highest ideals -- which is completely consistent with their advocacy during the Bush administration. (And remember, McCain said that he, too, would have closed the Gitmo facility if elected.) At the same time, they make sure they get on the record the unresolved problems inherent in this move. Smart, principled and appropriate.

The Obama-McCain meeting

Not a lot to emerge from the president-elect's meeting with John McCain (and Lindsey Graham and Rahm Emanuel) today, which is to be expected. Here's the closest thing to substance I've seen, from their joint communique:

We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

Of those items, seems to me the greatest potential for collaboration would be on energy. (But I would think that, wouldn't I?)

Here's a scene-setter from the NYT politics blog:

Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama are sitting down together now and metaphorically smoking a peace pipe in their first face-to-face session since the bruising campaign.

The two are meeting at Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters at a federal building in Chicago, where they just posed for the cameras.

The meeting space has a stagey look, in front of the kind of thick royal blue curtain you see in an auditorium, not the usual campaign-rigged blue backdrop. Flags are strewn throughout, with one planted between the two principals, who are sitting in yellow, Oval-Office-like chairs.

To their sides are their wingmen, Rahm Emanuel on Mr. Obama’s left and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on Mr. McCain’s right.

They’re all looking jolly (Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanual the jolliest), and we’ll soon get a read-out on the discussion.

The Obama team is hoping they can smooth any ruffled feathers and build an alliance with the old John McCain — not the one whom the Obama camp called “erratic” during the presidential campaign but the self-styled “maverick” who worked across party lines for various causes that Mr. Obama wants to advance — global warming, immigration, earmark spending among them.

In the brief moment before the cameras, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to fix up the country, and also to offer thanks to Senator McCain for the outstanding service he’s already rendered.”

Mr. McCain was asked whether he would help Mr. Obama with his administration.

“Obviously,” he said.

Those pesky reporters tried to shout out other queries, like about a possible bail-out for the auto industry, but the pool report says they were “shouted down by the pool sherpas,” and that “Mr. Obama finally said with a smile, ‘You’re incorrigible.’”

The last in-person meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain took place more than a month ago, at the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra, remembered chiefly as the coming-out party for Joe the Plumber.

Updated | 2:12 p.m.: A joint statement was released from President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.”

Beyond that, here are versions of the story from:

• The Associated Press (on thestate.com)
• The Chicago Tribune
• The Wall Street Journal (really just an update of their story from this morning's paper)
• The New York Times

One war, two wars: But who's counting?

This morning we ran an editorial calling upon the nation to unite after the election, and quoting something S.C. Supt. of Ed. Jim Rex had said:

“What’s important for our students to know is that after elections, Americans come together,” Dr. Rex wrote. “We have enormous challenges ahead of us — a war on two fronts, an economy in crisis, a broken health care system, and so much more. We cannot stand to be divided one more day. Regardless of who wins, it’s time for us to work together to move this country forward and create a better, more stable America for our children and grandchildren."

Did you catch the little grace note there that made his message truly bipartisan -- his reference to "a war on two fronts?" In case you missed it, that is decidedly not the official Democratic Party version.

We were reminded of that last night in Barack Obama's otherwise gracious, affirming victory speech, in which he sincerely called on the nation to come together, but nevertheless repeated the official Democratic Party version of reality:

we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril...

And so we continue with the refusal to acknowledge either a) the global war on terror, or b) that Iraq is part of it. It makes me wonder: When we act against al Qaida in Somalia, or Yemen or Pakistan or Indonesia, are those third and fourth and fifth and sixth wars, etc.?

Sorry to be such a nitpicker. I truly thought Obama's speech was good, and appreciated its attempts to reach beyond party.

Likewise, I appreciated the graciousness of John McCain's acceptance speech, even though one could detect partisan difference in that even when he was trying the hardest to reach out:

In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.

Did you catch it? Yes, it's a very Republican thing to say those Americans "WRONGLY  believed that they had little at stake or little influence." Democrats would likely leave out the "wrongly."

Bottom line, I appreciated both speeches, for what they did, and more, for what they meant to do. I can think of no recent election in which both victor and defeated were so gracious at the critical moment.

But I'm an editor; I pick at words. And even while I'm applauding, these little flaws jump out at me. File them under the heading of "how far we have yet to go," even on agreeing about the nature of reality.

Congratulations to President Obama!

Obama's done the expected, and done it on deadline, which certainly warms my heart toward him.

Here's hoping his leadership as president is on a par with the highest notes he struck during the presidential campaign. And he has struck some fine ones, such as on the night of his triumph in S.C. I certainly had an undivided mind about his victory on that night.

He's shown he can inspire; let's all hope and pray he can unite the nation. We need it. No, I'm not as happy about this as I thought I would be several months ago. But I'm hopeful, so call me audacious.

I now turn the floor over to you, the reader -- I'll have more to say in the coming days, but I'm going to go get some sack time now.

My predictions

Here are my predictions as to what I think will happen on the contested races that we dealt with in our endorsements. As always, endorsements are about who should win, not who will win. To fill that vacuum -- and to help you see the difference -- here are my prognostications (in which I place far less faith, because they are not nearly as carefully considered):

• Obama will win the presidential election -- the real one (electoral college, with at least 300 electors) as well as the popular vote. He'll win it decisively enough that we'll know by midnight. BUT McCain will win in South Carolina, probably 55-45. We endorsed McCain.
• Lindsey Graham will easily win re-election. No prediction on the numbers; I have no idea. In fact, I'm only doing numbers on the presidential, because I really have no idea on any others. We endorsed Graham.
• Joe Wilson will win against Rob Miller, but it will be close. We endorsed Wilson.
• Jim Clyburn will have a blowout victory over his GOP opponent. We endorsed Clyburn.
• John Spratt will win with a margin somewhere between Wilson's and Clyburn's. We endorsed Spratt.
• Nikki Setzler will survive the challenge from Margaret Gamble, and thanks to the Obama Effect, it will be the first time it helped him to be a Democrat in 20 years. We endorsed Setzler.
• Anton Gunn will beat David Herndon, but it will be fairly close. We endorsed Gunn.
• Joe McEachern will cruise to victory over Michael Koska. We endorsed Koska.
• Chip Huggins will roll right over Jim Nelson, who will NOT benefit appreciably from the Obama Effect. We endorsed Nelson.
• Nikki Haley will win big, again in spite of Obama. We endorsed Ms. Haley.
• Harry Harmon will again be Lexington County coroner. We endorsed Harmon, although we again made the point that this should NOT be an elective office.
• Elise Partin will -- I hope I hope -- win the Cayce mayor's office (this is the one I have the LEAST feel for, since we've never endorsed for this office before). We endorsed Ms. Partin.
• Gwen Kennedy, despite being best known for a Hawaiian junket the last time she was on Richland County council, will ride the Obama Effect to victory over Celestine White Parker. We endorsed Ms. Parker.
• Mike Montgomery should prevail (note my hesitation) over challenger Jim Manning, who seems to be running as much as anything because he felt like there should be a Democrat in the race with Obama running. We endorsed Montgomery.

Oh, and Ted Pitts will roll to victory over his last-second UnParty challenger. We didn't endorse in this one, but if we had, we would have endorsed Ted.

The creeping sense of letdown

This feeling has been creeping up on me in recent weeks, and it's just emerged into my consciousness in the last days. I hesitated to mention it, and it seems particularly inappropriate given the fact that people are turning out in droves to vote, but...

The election has been a real letdown for me. And I didn't expect that.

Remember back in January, when I said that if our two endorsees for the major party nominations both made it to the November ballot, it would be a win-win proposition for the country? Well, I did say it, and I meant it. But somehow, between then and now, my enthusiasm has just dissipated, like air slowly but steadily leaking from a balloon.

Part of this is just due to the fact that I was never going to enjoy the general election campaign as much as I did the primaries, nor would I appreciate these two candidates as much as party standard-bearers. They were SO much more appealing as insurgents -- McCain running and prevailing against all the diehard GOPpers, over their vehement protests, and doing it even after his candidacy was declared dead. Obama running as the alternative to continuing the vicious, pointless partisanship of the Clinton-Bush years. But the climax of this drama seems to have occurred when they triumphed over their parties' orthodoxies. Nothing has seemed that fun or that inspiring since then.

McCain picking Sarah Palin to please the base was bad, but Obama leading the charge of the crowd pretending that John McCain was some sort of incarnation of George W. Bush was, if anything, worse. All of it was dispiriting. I first noted that during the Democratic Convention; and while there were moments in McCain's acceptance speech where he was almost the guy he needed to be to keep me applauding, he fell short of the mark.

Beyond those factors, three things contributed to my present political ennui:

1. McCain utterly failing to put his best foot -- or even his second-best foot -- forward. Every time he opened his mouth, I kept hoping he would explain clearly, in a way undecided voters couldn't miss, why he was the guy. I still thought he was the guy myself, but it would have been nice if he had helped others see it. It's like he was going through the motions ever since he upstaged himself with the Palin selection. This is a weird and unfair thing to say, but... you know those appearances he did on SNL Saturday and Monday nights? He was game, and I give him that, but... he just fell flat. It wasn't funny. No, he's not a professional comedian, but he can be funny -- one moment when he was his old self, but I think too few people saw it, was at the Alfred E. Smith dinner. He was hilarious. His timing, and his feel for his audience was impeccable. But the SNL appearances were a letdown. Blame the writing if you will, but it was sort of symbolic to me of the way he generally failed to connect throughout the fall. Sometimes you click; sometimes you don't. Yeah, I know that seems stupid, but what I'm trying to say is that he no more clicked as a presidential candidate during these weeks than he did on SNL. If you don't know what I mean, go back and watch the debates. He was saying the right things, but not clicking. As I mentioned in a previous post, our endorsement was about his record, not about what we saw in the campaign. I'd endorse him again given the chance, but next time I would hope he'd help himself out more.
2. That shouldn't have mattered given the "win-win" situation I had predicted back in January. With one guy faltering, that left us with Obama. But I found myself less and less enchanted with him as the campaign wore on. He, unlike McCain, never missed a step. He was on his game at every moment of every day, with a steadiness and discipline that seemed superhuman. That wasn't the problem. The one real up-side I saw to the future, contemplating the future with a President Obama, was that he has consistently shown such stellar abilities with the intangibles of leadership, from his general unflappability to his rhetorical talents. The problem was that I started paying more attention to what he actually had to say about some issues, and started doing so in a more critical fashion, as I pondered our upcoming endorsement. And, as I've said in recent days, I got really, really disturbed about some of the things he said, because they were SO off-the-shelf, liberal Democratic dogmatic. (Ironically, the debates had a big impact on me here -- even as I was disappointed at McCain's political skills on those occasions, I became more and more disturbed by precisely what Obama was saying so smoothly.) Before, I had just accepted that he and I wouldn't agree on abortion, for instance -- something I had to accept in backing Joe Lieberman or practically any other Democrat. But then I started peeling the layers, and each new layer worried me more. First, his lack of concern for the moral value of the unborn seemed to go beyond most Democrats, and I just started fully noticing that near the end. Then there was his unwillingness to consider judicial candidates who didn't agree with him on the issue. Then there was his equating the nebulous "right to privacy" with the right to free speech. Then there was his utter dismissal of the rights or duties of the political branches to decide such issues with that "state referendums" nonsense. Then I saw similar patterns on free trade, and there was a disturbing willingness to be doctrinaire on Big Labor's agenda, not a transformative figure at all. Combine that with the inevitability of bigger Democratic majorities, and instead of a post-partisan president, you've got textbook Democrat, and that set us up for more partisan warfare in the coming years, not less.
3. Finally, there was the staggering economic news of the last couple of months. On a pure electoral plane, this as much as anything is what has delivered the election to Obama. But I gotta tell you, I sure wish I could be as sanguine as the Obamaniacs are about his ability to lead us through this. Don't get me wrong; I don't think McCain could, either. It's just that I have seen little to make me think Obama has a better idea of how to approach this. I wasn't kidding when I said, several weeks back, that what we need is another FDR. And neither of these guys fills the bill, the way I see it. This factor has done as much as anything else to grind down my enthusiasm, day after day. Did you see the lead story in The Wall Street Journal today? That's our reality, folks. I really, really hope that the Obama supporters are right and I'm wrong, and he WILL have what it takes to lead us to turn back the tide. But I remain worried.

Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe this is just physical exhaustion. Maybe it's the wild ride of the past two years, all the excitement -- all the fun we've had here on the blog, for that matter, with page views now essentially double the year before. And so on pure adrenaline, I'm due for a letdown. But I think it's more than that.

In the last few weeks, I've said a bunch of times that I looked forward to this being over. But I just realized today that I won't feel that way at all. Instead, I fear, the letdown will be complete rather than merely imminent, and I've just come to realize that. No, not because "my guy" lost the presidential election. It's more because I thought it was win-win, and then I realized that it wasn't, and that whoever won, we were going to have a mess that we still have to get through. The economy will still be a mess. We'll still have the same problems with Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China... and ourselves. We won't even be poised to solve our health care crisis, because even with a bigger Democratic majority and a liberal Democrat in the White House, no one will say "single-payer." The irony of that is palpable to me. (We'll get the BAD stuff of liberal Democratic ideology -- the activist judges, the intimidation of unwilling workers into unions, trade isolationism, and the like -- without a National Health Plan. Sheesh.)

Basically, I realized fully, on an emotional level, that neither McCain nor Obama was going to deliver us from all that. And once the election is over, we no longer have the luxury of pretending that they might do so. So I think that's why I'm down.

Sorry to rain on the parade. Y'all go ahead and have a nice time, though ...

Of presidents, courts and the rule of law

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
AT THE OUTSET, John McCain had a great head start with me — on experience, national security, foreign affairs, bipartisanship, and his oft-demonstrated willingness to do the right thing regardless of political consequences.
    As Labor Day approached, I began to doubt. First, he picked Sarah Palin. I don’t have as low an opinion of her as many seem to, but she’s no Joe Lieberman. Then, Sen. McCain ran a particularly ham-handed fall campaign, one that simply did not communicate his virtues clearly to the voters. As I had with Bob Dole in 1996, I wondered: If he can’t run a campaign, how can he run the country?
    But my doubts ended during the third debate. Sen. Barack Obama “won” on style, on cool, on demeanor, much as John Kennedy did in 1960. But I was paying attention to what they said. That’s when I decided I had to stick with McCain.
    Let’s consider several things they said about one subject, judicial selection.
    This column is not about abortion. I knew already that I disagreed with Obama about abortion. I’m a Catholic, and I’m not a Joe Biden kind of Catholic. But I’ve supported Democrats (such as Sen. Lieberman) who didn’t challenge their party on abortion; I’m not a single-issue voter.
    Aside from abortion itself, I find Roe v. Wade appalling in two ways: I don’t find a “right to privacy” in the Constitution. Secondly, the ruling has had a devastatingly polarizing effect on our politics. My respect for the rule of law is such that I’d be willing to put up with the political division for a ruling rightly decided, but this one didn’t qualify.
    So the sooner Roe is overturned, the better. Obama strongly disagrees. And in rationalizing what he sees as the imperative to protect Roe, he turns against several other important principles that I believe a president should respect, from the separation of powers to the proper role of politics.
    I’ll review each of these points briefly, starting with the one that concerns me least:
    Sen. Obama seems to judge court rulings based more on their policy effects than on legal reasoning. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he wrote, “The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me — for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.” That hinted to me that he cares more about good outcomes than law. But I forgot about it until I heard him say in the debate that “I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.” That third qualification disturbed me because it seemed to demand a political sensibility on the part of judges, but I wasn’t sure.
    Much harder to overlook is the hard fact that despite his opposition to Roe, John McCain voted to confirm two Clinton nominees, Justices  Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Why? “Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences.” Senators should respect the president’s prerogative to the point that they should refuse to confirm only those nominees who are obviously unqualified. “This is a very important issue we’re talking about,” he added. Sen. Obama has had two opportunities in his brief Senate career to confirm highly qualified nominees — Samuel Alito and John Roberts — and voted against both. Yes, confirmation is different from nomination, but I would rather have someone who has demonstrated McCain’s relative freedom from ideology doing the nominating.
    Perhaps worst of all, Sen. Obama was dismissive and misleading regarding the proper roles of the states with regard to the federal government, and the political branches with regard to the judiciary. Regarding Roe, Sen. McCain said, “I thought it was a bad decision.... I think that... should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist.” He was saying abortion law should be returned to state legislatures, where we make most of our laws, rather than having it in a special, hands-off category.
    In answering, Mr. Obama shocked me in two ways, saying “I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.”
    If a right to privacy exists, it is at best inferred from the Constitution. The author of the “right,” Justice William O. Douglas, found it in “penumbras” and “emanations.” And yet Sen. Obama equated it to the very first rights that the Framers chose to set out in black and white, and subject to ratification. That a Harvard-trained attorney would do that may not boggle your mind, but it surely does mine.
    Then there’s that bit about not subjecting such a hallowed “right” to “state referendum,” or “popular vote.” Sen. McCain had suggested nothing of the kind. In a representative democracy, such questions are properly decided neither by plebiscite nor by judicial fiat, but by the representatives elected by the people to make the laws under which we will live.
    There are many issues to consider in this election, from national security to the current economic crisis. I can’t go into all of them in this column. But in just those few moments in that one debate, John McCain clearly demonstrated to me a far greater respect for the proper roles of the president, the Congress, the courts, the states, and the people themselves in making us a nation of laws and not of men.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.