I'd also like to go on a brief tangent here - as you may have gathered, I quite strongly support Obama over McCain here. But before the election season began, McCain was my first choice over anyone else in the whole field of candidates. He waged a great and honorable primary campaign in 2000...but it didn't work. Bush's nasty and very dishonorable campaign (having people call voters in South Carolina and ask "are you aware that McCain has a black child," referring to his adopted Bangladeshi daughter, but obviously trying to imply that he had some "negro love child" or some such horror) did win. Sadly, I think this taught the Republican Party a lesson.
McCain's campaign in 2008 has been downright shameful. First, the pick of Palin. Completely irresponsible. When asked how he would make his decision he said he'd pick whoever he felt was the second best qualified person to be President. And I believe he sincerely intended to. All reports indicate that he wanted to choose Joe Lieberman, but his advisers said that it would be political suicide, that such a liberal pick would alienate the neoconservative base that the Republicans have come to rely on. So he went the other direction, and picked Sarah Palin.
Two reasons to do this. One - she is extremely conservative. She opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. If a teenage girl is raped by her father, Sarah Palin would be against her having the right to abort the child. This is the kind of stuff neocons love. Second reason - women. And this was the key. Hillary supporters, right after the primaries wrapped up, were disillusioned, upset that Hillary didn't get the respect they thought she deserved. The McCain campaign thought that these women were idiots, that they would switch over to vote for a ticket with a woman on it, even if that woman had practically opposite views from Hillary, even though Obama's views are practically identical.
The best way to do this would be if Obama or gaffe-prone Joe Biden slipped up and made some comment that could be construed as sexist. Neither of them did. So the McCain campaign made one up. The "lipstick on a pig" comment. A common expression - one that McCain himself had used to describe a policy of Hillary Clinton's! This backfired. No one bought it, and the credibility McCain had so thoroughly won in 2000 started to disappear.
Palin is currently being investigated for corruption by the Alaskan legislature. She had never met a foreign leader until a couple of weeks ago - hell, she never even
owned a passport until a year and a half ago. She went to the renowned institution of Idaho State University, where she majored in...journalism. She has demonstrated a lack of knowledge on practically every issue in all of her interviews - anyone who doubts this needs only to watch hers with Katie Couric. For McCain to put this woman one elderly heartbeat away from the presidency is beyond irresponsible.
And now his campaign tactics are getting worse. According to a report by the University of Wisconsin, "nearly 100 percent of the McCain campaign’s advertisements were negative" from Sep. 28 - Oct. 4. Say what you will, but Obama's numbers were nowhere near that - only 34% during the same week. And this Bill Ayers garbage. See my post above about that. William Timmons, a man who defended Saddam Hussein and whom McCain has trusted with one of the highest positions in his campaign, is the person we should be afraid of.
At this point the polls suggest that a McCain victory is very unlikely. He is currently behind in Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, and neck-and-neck in North Carolina. Unless a state that Obama is currently winning handily flips, McCain must win literally all of those states to win. And if he does lose, this campaign is going to destroy the legacy he built over decades in the Senate. He won't be remembered for his classy showing in 2000, for his courage to stand up against the Bush administration on issues like torture, none of that - his legacy will be that of the guy who sold himself out to try to win in 2008. For a guy who's been one of America's best Senators for years, that's truly saddening.
Well I definitely didn't mean to go on this long in these posts, but I really felt that newIdea's statements needed addressing, and I wanted to clarify that I've always respected McCain until recently; I'm not some rabid liberal. But anyway, enough of that now [This message has been edited by Enraged Orange (edited 10-17-2008 @ 06:43 AM).]