Getting to Know John McCain
The deceitful way Republicans conduct elections is nothing new, and Karl Rove has a new piece published in the Wall Street Journal which lets us know that he thinks the next election should ignore issues and, once again, focus on "character".When it comes to choosing a president, the American people want to know more about a candidate than policy positions. They want to know about character, the values ingrained in his heart. For Mr. McCain, that means they will want to know more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal.
The reasons the Republicans concentrate on "character" - as opposed to policies - is because the policies they are pushing are almost poisonously unpopular.
The Iraq war:Three in five Americans (61%) think US forces should get out of Iraq within a year, including 24 percent who favor immediate withdrawal and 37 percent who prefer a one year timetable.
The notion of intervening abroad to promote democracy.
The notion that governments should ignore opinion polls:A new poll finds that a majority of Americans reject the idea of using military force to promote democracy. Only 35% favored using military force to overthrow dictators. Less than one in five favored the US threatening to use military force if countries do not institute democratic reforms.
The effort to promote democracy in Iraq is generating little enthusiasm. Seventy-four percent (including 60% of Republicans) said that the goal of overthrowing Iraq’s authoritarian government and establishing a democracy was not a good enough reason to go to war. Seventy-two percent said that the experience there has made them feel worse about the possibility of using military force to bring about democracy in the future.
In sharp contrast to views recently expressed by Vice President Cheney, a new poll finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe government leaders should pay attention to public opinion polls and that the public should generally have more influence over government leaders than it does.The need to spend so much money on a robust defence.
Eighty-one percent say when making "an important decision" government leaders "should pay attention to public opinion polls because this will help them get a sense of the public's views." Only 18 percent said "they should not pay attention to public opinion polls because this will distract them from deciding what they think is right."
The practice of holding "terrorists" without charging them:A new poll finds that the American public would significantly alter the Bush administration’s recently proposed federal budget. Presented a breakdown of the major areas of the proposed discretionary budget and given the opportunity to redistribute it, respondents made major changes.
The most dramatic changes were deep cuts in defense spending, a significant reallocation toward deficit reduction, and increases in spending on education, job training, reducing reliance on oil, and veterans. These changes were favored by both Republicans and Democrats, though the changes were generally greater for Democrats.
A new poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org shows that the U.S. public, whether Republican or Democrat, strongly supports such protections. Robust majorities said that detainees should have the right to not be held indefinitely without charges or a trial, to have a lawyer, to have their treatment monitored by the Red Cross, and to neither be tortured nor threatened with torture.On the subject of Iran and the UN:
Pew asked three times throughout the course of 2006 whether respondents would favor the US or the UN taking the lead with handling Iran’s nuclear program. Seven in ten or more respondents (70-78%) believed that the United Nations should take the lead, while only a small minority (17-21%) believed that the US should take the lead.On Bush's tax cuts:
Besides reallocating funds to deficit reduction, a clear majority (63%) favored rolling back the tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000. However, when the tax revisions were not specifically limited to the wealthy, only 48 percent favored letting the tax cuts expire and 45 percent wanted them extended. Those who perceive that the deficit is large (62%) allocated more to lowering the deficit ($48.4 billion), and were more supportive of rolling back the tax cuts (68%) and allowing the tax cuts to expire (57%).So, when a party is so disastrously out of touch with what the general public actually wants, it is no great surprise that they would want to fight an election based on "character" rather than policy.
However, even the discussion of character is one that the Republicans would want to have under strictly controlled parameters which define their candidate as a war hero and Barack Obama as a dangerous black man with dubious friends.
They certainly wouldn't want character to be defined by whether or not a man left his wife - after numerous affairs - to run off with a twenty five year old fantastically wealthy woman, whose money he then used to launch his political career.
And they wouldn't want to have flip-flopping used as a character defining issue this time around as McCain has flip-flopped on every issue from tax cuts to the embracing of wild eyed religious loons.
And that's before we get to him calling his wife a c---.
No, no, when Rove talks of "character" and McCain displaying "more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal", he means the fact that McCain was a prisoner of war and other tales of heroism. Because, of course, like most of us you probably have been living on the moon these past few years and haven't heard the constant pushing of McCain's war record.
McCain has promised a clean campaign, but Rove is already letting it be known that the last thing the Republicans are going to want to discuss are the miserable policies which McCain is planning to continue in Bush III.
So they'd rather discuss "character". "That Reverend Wright's a shady creature, wouldn't you say?"
More war anyone?
Click title for full article.
No comments:
Post a Comment