From the Associated Press:
Obama, McCain’s Democratic rival in the race for the White House, also lists bipartisanship as a congressional credential. A recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll showed about 40 percent of the electorate believes both men would work across party lines.
Even so, none of the examples cited by Obama’s aides, beginning with a bill to secure nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, placed the Illinois lawmaker at odds with the leaders of his own party or gave significant offense to outside interest groups aligned with Democrats.
Not so, McCain.
The Arizona Republican “took on his own party’s leadership, and that takes enormous courage,” says former Rep. Martin Meehan of Massachusetts, a Democrat who worked closely with McCain for years on the campaign finance legislation that Bush reluctantly signed into law. He added that such defiance can often lead to retaliation by the leadership.
“He’s a tough adversary. He’s a very effective legislator,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview.
As a longtime member of his party’s leadership, McConnell has often borne the brunt of McCain’s bipartisanship, yet he said he has never seen him cross an imaginary line into foul territory.
There is one very good reason why Obama has not strayed from the leftwing base of the Democratic party: No Democrat who strays from the leftwing base in any serious way would ever be the Democratic nominee for President. Why is the feckless Obama the nominee while the very much more qualified Hillary forced to campaign for a man she is, apparently, convinced will lose in November? Because Hillary strayed from the left – she voted for the war and then, much worse, when the left demanded that all Democrats who so voted denounce their vote, she refused. Oh, she went as close to the wire as she could – but somewhere deep inside Hillary Clinton is someone who isn’t stupid enough to really believe (a) that the war is lost and (b) that its all a corrupt scheme by Bush and the PNAC/Neo-Con/Likud cabal. And so she wouldn’t say she was wrong for casting her vote for the liberation of Iraq. Obama, on the other hand, conveniently denounced the war in 2002, even more conveniently forgot his 2004 support for the war and all through 2006 and 2007 trumpeted the leftist, defeatist line. And so he’s the nominee.
While McCain from time to time angers movement conservatives, we should be happy to take a man who does what he thinks right even at political risk over a man who won’t risk anything. Obama wanted to be a State legislator; then we wanted to be a United States Senator; now he wants to be President and in each step of his rise he’s never – not even once – stuck his neck out beyond the leftwing worldview. There is nothing in Obama which isn’t entirely predictable – from defeatism in Iraq to “windfall profits” taxes on oil, each and every Obama opinion comes right out of central scripting at the leftwing wordshop. In any given situation, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of politics will be able to tell precisely what Obama will say and do – and this is why we conservatives know that the election of Obama means a disaster for the nation.
In these terribly dangerous times, we need a President – like McCain – who will tell it like it is and who will be willing to defy everyone in service of the right policy for the United States of America. We don’t need an Obama who will always seek the blessings of the left before he even opens his mouth.
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