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GOP Needs To Be For McCain, Not Just Against Obama

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 20, 2008

DADE CITY - Leaving aside for a moment the obvious difficulties facing Republican candidates this election season, much of what ails the campaign at the tip-top of the GOP ticket could be found Thursday night in, of all places, the kickoff event on behalf of John McCain in Pasco County.

In conversations and in speeches addressing a half-empty dining room in Lazy Susan's, the new restaurant at Scotland Yard, McCain's most ardent supporters could scarcely utter two sentences of praise for the GOP's presumptive nominee before they surrendered to bashing his likely opponent.

Yes, for a certain stripe of political junkie, Barack Obama, the man with the resume made of helium, makes an inviting target. And no one who took the floor seemed eager to resist temptation.

Barack Obama, said rueful speakers, equals Supreme Court disaster, squishiness in foreign relations, cluelessness in the face of military threats and a producer-sapping tax structure to rival the most confiscatory New Deal schemes.

Bill Bunting, county GOP chieftain and recently named chairman of McCain's election effort in Pasco, dangled a Republican nightmare scenario: "Would Obama put Hillary Clinton on the Supreme Court? I wouldn't put it past him."

"Barack Obama," said District 61 state Rep. Will Weatherford, "is so far left" - how left is he? - "he's so far left, he makes Bill Clinton look like Rush Limbaugh." Bah-dah-boom.

Obama, Weatherford said, would shoehorn us into the same socialized medicine scheme that has failed everywhere else it's been tried, then use it to put the American dream on life support. Which is clever, but begs at least a hint about the McCain alternative.

It's not like interesting, traditionally conservative points can't be made on McCain's behalf. He's a hawk on spending and is congenitally opposed to tax increases. But he opposed the "infamous Bush tax cuts," as Democrats like to call them, as though that was the formal name of the legislation.

Easily answered: McCain stood against the tax-cut package because, as he said at the time, it wasn't accompanied by spending constraints. If it's his White House team sending up the proposed budget and his make-my-day hand on the veto pen, McCain's current position on the Bush tax cuts - decried by Democrats as new, pandering and a flip - harmonizes precisely with the tune he whistled in 2001.

As for the preening observation of Gen. Wesley Clark, the desk jockey fired for mucking up Kosovo, that five years languishing in the Hanoi Hilton scarcely qualifies McCain for the Oval Office - who said it was? McCain's brutal incarceration, prolonged by his refusal to play the early release card offered by his jailers, is not a resume point, like rescuing the Winter Olympics, holding together a city roiled by spectacular terrorist attacks or once upon a time giving a really, really good speech.

Heaping Helpings Of Character

Instead, it suggests heaping helpings of character, commitment, loyalty, honor, courage and sense of duty - qualities that might be useful for the leader of the free world during a dangerous age, certainly, but, giving Clark his due, say nothing about McCain's ability to interpret a spread sheet, whether he could manage back-channel communications with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, or whether we could trust him to emcee a Rose Garden ceremony honoring the 2009 national champion Florida Gators football team.

Obama's Sizzling Summer

Still, would it be so awful to begin by saying, "First of all, the guy's an American hero"?

Instead, we get fear-mongering. "I don't know what sort of change Obama has in mind," mused one waggish observer, "but I have a feeling it means that's all we'll have left in our pockets when he's gotten his tax plan in place."

"He's Mr. Change - scary change," Weatherford said. "He's young, articulate, exciting -- he looks like gold, but it's fool's gold."

Even Dave Domino, a Council of Neighborhood Associations officer and early McCain ally, frames his support as a question of whether America can afford a president unfamiliar with the military chain of command in a post-9/11 world. "If you don't know how to keep the country safe," he says, "what difference does it make what you plan to do about the economy?"

OK, an Obama nation would be an abomination. We get that.

But Americans, including Pasco Americans, want reasons to get excited about voting for someone. So far, it's Obama generating the sizzle. Nobody's found the steak? So what? He's change! He's hope! He's change and hope!

Meanwhile, the party that entered 2008 aching for a primary season that would produce the first glimmers of a resurrection is, heading into the Dog Days, demonstrating all the symptoms of buyer's remorse.

McCainiacs, indeed.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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