This posting is in response to Tim Dickenson's piece, Make Believe Maverick on Rolling Stone.com. (Link below) There are some parts of it that I thought were appropriate to discuss: other members of his own party failing to endorse his bid. McCain deals with that by spinning himself as a "neocon" or whatever, but according to the article McCain is as far to the right as Bush and his cronies. My gut feeling is that if McCain wanted to pander to the center, he would have asked Lieberman to run with him.
In some ways McCain is classically to the right: wealthy guy, looks out for the rich and corporate America, so long as they contribute to his campaigns. Flip flops on the stuff that matters most: offshore drilling, immigration, and Iraq.
Given the complicated host of problems the new President will face in January, credit crisis, housing mess, Iraq war, immigration, energy, and what will likely be by then a recession, what we need is a politician elected President with the courage to do what is right, regardless of the initial popularity of the policies.
When I ask myself how people become Republicans, I come back to one idea. True right wingers only know wealth, and so they feel it is the job of government to assist them in protecting that wealth. The right is not without support for this position. The Federalists stated that the job of government is to protect land owners from non landowners, so there is some merit to the right's position. The right, being the present day landowners, want to be free from taxes and other irrelevant regulations on their ability to grow said wealth. They reject the role of government that the left sees, to utilize the power of government to the economic advancement of all. The left is proud of social security and medicare, welfare and food stamps. The left is glad that the rich pay taxes to help the minimum wage workers that the corporations fail to pay a living wage afford a roof over their heads and health care. While the right's traditional stance has been that true economic expansion raises living standards for all, what we have seen over the past 8 years has been that along with deregulation, industries expanding economically will keep profits close and raise their own wages rather than share the increases in wealth with the middle class. (What I am citing here is the average increases in wages and productivity over the past 8 years, not one specific industry.) Again, this is due in part to the anti-union position of the right and corporate America, however the result has been the same: those at the top earning more and more while those in the middle and bottom work harder for the same money. Hey, its great if you are the guy at the top, yet not so great if you are the guy in the middle or bottom.
I believe in my heart that most members of the right have no concept of the fear that the poor has regarding their inability to provide, either for themselves, their families, or both. This is why I couldn't fathom back in 2004 when I heard on 97.1 an ad for "Blacks for Bush." I remember thinking, they must be very rich and with absolutely no ties to their communities in which they grew up. Also, this idea of Latinos for the Republicans. Supposedly in Florida there are right wing Latinos who fled communist Cuba that are against anything leftist, yet still, could they all be so rich that they require no public assistance whatsoever?
I have heard a Republican say they are against the "free lunch" many people think that they deserve. I think there is a difference between a "free lunch," being a true handout from the government to people whether they need it or not, and a "free lunch" being food stamps to someone who is starving and needs food to eat. Given the lack of wage growth for the poor, lower class, and middle class over the past 8 years, many people that were middle class 9 years ago may today be poor, and given the rising costs of food, fuel, real estate, education, insurance, and health care over the past 8 years may need said government assistance. The crisis on Wall Street is resulting in the evaporation of wealth, so whatever gains were made under Bush must surely be gone now. I fear that under Obama the needs of the social welfare state will be so large that the war will be stopped and taxes will be raised just to help take care of the "Bush refugees." These people will be former CEOs, high level bond traders, former home building executives, and many others that used to have wealth and now need public assistance. Lets hope McCain doesn't get elected and still think the job of the President is to make the rich richer and deregulate industry. I don't think the American consumer can take too many more hits.
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