Senator John McCain, the free-market economic deregulator, whose favorite economic guru was (is?) none other than the great free-market and deregulation champion Senator Phil Gramm, has suddenly become a raging populist. Denouncing the titans and CEOs of Wall Street like the great populist of old, William Jennings Bryan, McCain now promises to take on the greedy Wall Street titans and reform corrupt old Washington.
I'm sorry. This is not remotely believable. This kind of veering wildly from position to position is a sign of desperation, or worse. It is also not appealing in the least, for who wants a candidate who will apparently say anything to get elected. What is there left to believe about him?
Yes, John McCain was a war hero and suffered as a POW. We all honor him for that. But speaking personally now, my deceased father Lennart Lindquist was also a war hero (as a pilot, he flew 35 missions over Germany in a B-17), and my uncle Carl Lindquist was killed in a B-17 crash in 1944, suffering the worst possible fate in war. But that wouldn't have qualified either of them to be President in 2008. And my father and I never agreed on politics. He was, to put it plainly, a member of the John Birch Society. I honored his military service and disagreed with his politics. One can do both of those things at the same time.
It simply takes more than heroic military service to be an effective President.
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