When it comes to foreign policy (which still matters no matter how much the media and the general public want the economy to be the one and only election issue) Krauthammer has shared his “open and shut” case for Sen McCain. It is a “no brainer”.
On domestic issues it is not a “no brainer” – the choice is more “equivocal” (Krauthammer’s words). But McCain is still the better choice:
McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment — a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.
An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.
As opposed to Sen Obama. Who is opposite in almost every way.
There is a sense in which a vote for Sen Obama is a vote for a new and radically different vision of what the United States of America – excuse me of what America forget the united and the states – is all about. America as a social-democratic nation-state. We get to be just like those Europeans! (I have lived in Europe. And I have never understood why European is supposed to be something for the United States to emulate. Not that there is nothing good about Europe or European.) Not so much about opportunity and liberty but about how the state will take care of us. And the state will implement the social-religious-ideological vision of the people with the most power. What truly concerns me is how Sen Obama is already proceeding against those who question or criticize him in any way. It is one thing to have a president you disagree with. It is another when you pay a heavy price for dissent. And that is what will – or can – happen under an Obama presidency.
Krauthammer concludes:
This {an Obama preidency} is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-redistributing growth-killing marginal tax rates.
Read the whole thing here. You do not have to register.
