The McCain Supremacy

Yesterday, Nancy Rommelmann posted an entry about Barack Obama's North Carolina victory speech, writing:

...and damn if at one point I did not have tears in my eyes, which shocks me but does not shame me. I think what it was, besides his real gift as an orator, was his grace, and his talk about how politics plays on fear, plays on division, and sure, this seems expedient to those who perpetrate it, but it's bullshit. I've heard a lot of speeches, but I have never heard one quite like this.

To which I replied:

William Shakespeare said it best centuries ago: "It is a tale … full of sound and fury; signifying nothing."

McCain will win this election in a walk.

That, however, should not be read as an unqualified endorsement of McCain. I didn't vote for McCain in the primaries, and in fact Ron Paul was the only Republican candidate whom I disliked more. Nonetheless, we don't always get what we want in life, so Republicans like me are stuck with McCain for the general election.

As lofty as his rhetoric may seem, Barack Obama, in my estimation, comes off as a run-of-the-mill Democratic machine politician dedicated to expanding domestic entitlement programs at the expense of maintaining our interests abroad.

To be sure, McCain has many faults as well – pointed out succinctly by Matt Welch in an article Nancy linked to in her reply to my comment. McCain, like many politicians Republican and Democratic alike – is first and foremost a pragmatist, albeit one who more often than not prefers big government solutions to market-based ones. As Welch notes, during McCain's long congressional career:

Everything from the trivial to the sublime became a "transcendent issue" requiring urgent federal attention. McCain has used the "transcendent" tag not just for campaign finance reform, the War on Terror, and Iraq, but for expanding Medicare, cracking down on Hollywood marketers, even banning ultimate fighting on Indian reservations. "National pride will not survive the people's contempt for government," he wrote in Worth the Fighting For. "And national pride should be as indispensable to the happiness of Americans as is our self-respect."

Occasionally this impulse translates into a libertarian stance, as with the senator's long-running rhetorical war on pork-barrel spending. More often it results in more government, even at the expense of the First Amendment.

McCain's ambivalence toward the First Amendment, best exemplified by the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, is just one of many problems that rank-and-file Republican conservatives have with the Arizona senator. There is also the matter of McCain's support for amnesty for illegal immigrants, his bitter denunciation of religious conservatives during the 2000 Republican primaries, among other issues that aren't coming to mind at the moment.

But what will likely rally disaffected conservatives to McCain's side is his solid support for our country's efforts in Iraq and the Global War on Terror. Like his father and grandfather, John McCain has long been an unapologetic advocate of maintaining a global Pax Americana:

The McCain men switched from Army to Navy right when Teddy Roosevelt dramatically expanded the country's naval force—the "big stick" he waved whenever a rival colonial power got uppity in the Americas or the Pacific. McCain's grandfather was on the flagship of the famous Great White Fleet when it finished its demonstrative 14-month world tour in 1908. "For the McCains of the United States Navy, as well as for many of our brother officers, presidents just didn't get much better than Teddy Roosevelt," McCain wrote in his 2002 book Worth the Fighting For. "He transformed the American navy from a small coastal defense force to an instrument for the global projection of power."

The senator, his father, and his grandfather all took as a given that the U.S. Navy should control the world's shipping lanes, guarantee the political stability of far-flung continents, and use overwhelming force at the hint of a threat to national interests.

By contrast, Barack Obama has spoken of pulling our troops out of Iraq, reducing military spending, and replacing our national interest-based foreign policy with a multi-lateral approach. In doing so, Obama has demonstrated a disturbing naiveté regarding our country's military and diplomatic history; suggesting that Franklin Delano Roosevelt negotiated with Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo during the Second World War.

If Obama wishes to recall any foreign policy lesson from the Democratic Roosevelt, it should be this one – enshrined in a quote from FDR himself: "…when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him."