Friday, October 03, 2008
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With One Month To Go: Why McCain Will Close and Win
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Posted by:
Hugh Hewitt at
8:42 PM
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Because the country cannot afford the greatest gamble in its modern history at this moment in time.
A confrontation with Iran looms and instability in Pakistan grows. The Islamist threat has been beaten back in Iraq, but continues to nurse its fanatical hatreds in many other places, from Waziristan to London. Israel is ringed not with an enemy that wants a state but by two enemies that want Israel to be destroyed.
The world's financial system is teetering, and the estrangement between the American people and their government has never been this deep in modern times.
The cost of energy has soared and will continue to climb. The entitlement trap has only grown worse in the three years since George Bush asked the Democrats to work with him on Social Security and they said no. The corrupt, self-dealing culture of the Beltway has poisoned the decision-making of many bureaucracies and in ways only the burdened know, and the credibility of the big media is shattered even as their audiences shrink and many of their news rooms come close to shuttering.
So, despite the rapture of college students and the registration of the homeless in Ohio, the common sense of Americans will override curiosity about Barack Obama and infatuation with his celebrity, and trust John McCain to pilot the country for the next four years.
Obama is a wholly untested Illinois state senator with less than 200 actual days on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Obama has never run anything or faced any significant political crisis in his life requiring the expert exercise of wisdom and judgment, much less this perfect storm of crises.
Obama's rise has been because of machine politics and hard-left coalitions, and his past is checkered with the most radical and the most corrupt sort of characters imaginable --Ayers, Rezko and Wright to name just the big three.
His party is led by hard-left partisans in the House and Senate, and the "grassroots" manning his campaign and ready to demand their patronage jobs are of the Michael Moore-Daily Kos variety. There is hardly anything left of the old Democratic Party. It isn't about a New Deal or a Fair Deal or a New Frontier. It is about radical change, and creepy children singing praises to their leader. It is about a thorough-going contempt of ordinary Americans best expressed in Obama's own description of the bitter God-and-gun clinging small town and rural voters of Pennsylvania.
Obama would be a huge risk in even placid times of peace, full employment, and robust growth, a radical break with America's political traditions even as measured against the McGovern candidacy of 1972.
In a time of war and precarious economic uncetainty, it would be near suicidal to turn the world's most important job over to him.
The hard left's seven year rage against George Bush has disfigured the politics of the country, but it hasn't infected the large center or demoralized the principled right. Three quarters of the country know the sort of enemy we face around the globe and sense as well the seriousness of the economic risk that faces us and which must be met and managed from maturity and a belief in growth and capitalism's essential genius. The country has never embraced class warfare, and knows that a lurch to the left now would cripple the vast engine of productivity that is the key to a steady recovery of confidence.
We do not desire to become Europe. We do not fear our neighbors or hate our political opponents or mock religion. Large portions of Obama's most dedicated supporters do. The MoveOn.org of "General Betrayus" and the Al Franken wing of the Democrats have tried without success to moderate their rhetoric, and the issue of Michelle Obama's lack of pride in the country have been erased from the fall campaign, but as the decision grows close, mist voters will be turning over all of these things in their head, and assessing the very different futures in front of the country.
This is the choice facing the country as absentees begin to be mailed next week, and it is the seriousness of the moment and the radical nature of the Obama candidacy that favors the tried and tested McCain and his populist, optimistic running mate.
America is a great and good nation, and it will not turn itself over to a party in the grip of its hardest left cadres, its most corrupt machine and its least experienced nominee ever.
Especially not when it has a man of enormous courage and proven devotion and sacrifice at the ready to lead through difficult times.
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