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class=052014016-31102008>Siarlys, try this one.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2><B>Subject:</B> McCain for President, Part 1 and 2 - By Charles
Krauthammer <BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=dateline><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=dateline><SPAN class=dateline>October 24, 2008 </SPAN>
<H2 class=h2-article>McCain for President</H2><STRONG>By</STRONG> <A
href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/charles_krauthammer/"><STRONG>Charles
Krauthammer</STRONG></A><BR>
<P>WASHINGTON -- Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not
talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before
it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives
leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single
state dinner for the next four years. </P>
<P>I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo
(Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and
socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part
of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an
election than lose my bearings.</P>
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<P>First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting
for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory.
The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and
unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way
through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit
for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in
the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily
navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the
collapse of his campaign just a year ago. </P>
<P>McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record
testifies to McCain the stalwart. </P>
<P>Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double standard
here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating
McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed McCain supports
"cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted
that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq. </P>
<P>McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers.
What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.</P>
<P>Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season
is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary)
conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama's most
egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty
campaigning, indeed. </P>
<P>The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us
forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a
generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic
soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A
rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come
Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.</P>
<P>Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on
these issues for the last year, who's never had to make an executive decision
affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice
instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g.,
the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who
refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of
9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?</P>
<P>Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most
serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only
has the best instincts, but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country
first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from
catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory? </P>
<P>There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that
Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis
"generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security
and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test? </P>
<P>And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant
foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was
the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to
denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success. </P>
<P>The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with
evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not
have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.</P>
<P>Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass.
But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet?
I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb. </SPAN></P></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=dateline>
<HR>
</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=dateline>October 31, 2008 </SPAN></DIV>
<H2 class=h2-article>McCain for President, Part II</H2><STRONG>By</STRONG> <A
href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/charles_krauthammer/"><STRONG>Charles
Krauthammer</STRONG></A><BR>
<P>WASHINGTON -- Last week I made the open-and-shut <A
href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/security_first_why_im_voting_f.html">case
for John McCain</A>: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled
nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign policy
candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest
one-world instincts is not a close call.</P>
<P>But it's all about economics and kitchen-table issues, we are told. OK. Start
with economics. </P>
<P>Neither candidate has particularly deep economic knowledge or finely honed
economic instincts. Neither has any clear idea exactly what to do in the current
financial meltdown. Hell, neither does anyone else, including the best economic
minds in the world, from Henry Paulson to the head of the European Central Bank.
Yet they have muddled through with some success</P>
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<P>Both McCain and Barack Obama have assembled fine economic teams that may
differ on the details of their plans but have reasonable approaches to managing
the crisis. So forget the hype. Neither candidate has an advantage on this
issue.</P>
<P>On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative
that the Washington/media establishment once loved -- the champion of myriad
conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional
Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an
audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on
the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.</P>
<P>Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he
sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin)
to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle
large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free
up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to
employment -- a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and
price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility
and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into
insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage
entrepreneurship and job creation. </P>
<P>An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally
given to bipartisanship. </P>
<P>Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his
calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he
wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike 1992,
Obama is no Clinton centrist. </P>
<P>What will you get? </P>
<P>(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the
certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at
night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.</P>
<P>(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading
Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chavez-style travesty designed to abolish
conservative talk radio. </P>
<P>(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from
Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama's publicly declared
criterion: "empathy" for the "poor or African-American or gay or disabled or
old" -- in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice
entirely blind to one's station in life. </P>
<P>(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has
already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized
the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of the largest U.S.
banks. </P>
<P>This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current
crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are
instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an
Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the
temptation to use the tools inherited -- $700 billion of largely uncontrolled
spending -- as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American
economy and social compact.</P>
<P>This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however,
be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The
alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding
over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European
social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for
example, wealth-distributing growth-killing marginal tax rates. </P>
<P>The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic
policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the
quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right
country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and
the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes
in the morning.</P>
<DIV id=article-author><A
href="mailto: letters@charleskrauthammer.com">letters@charleskrauthammer.com</A>
</DIV>
<DIV id=article-footer>
<P>Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group </P></DIV></BODY></HTML>
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