J. TODD FOSTER: We Chose McCain Because Too Much At State Under One-Party Rule

If several of you readers were betting men and women, you’d owe me enough cash to bail out one of these failed financial firms – or at least enough to send the company’s disgraced executives to a posh spa for the weekend.

Dozens of you swore we were closet Obama advocates and implored us – in the words of one reader – “to go ahead and endorse him already.”

Given the last eight years and the unfocused campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin, we easily could have made a case for Obama. No candidate in history has been forced to weather more smears and outright lies and done it with such grace and dignity. (HE IS NOT A MUSLIM, AN ARAB OR A NON-U.S. CITIZEN WHO WILL TAKE YOUR GUNS AND GIVE THEM TO DOMESTIC TERRORISTS!)

The Democratic standard bearer is an appealing candidate, possibly a transformative politician who might be able to inspire and lead an entire nation much like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Plus, he’s smart as hell.

But in the end, we picked McCain despite his repeated missteps and alienation of independent and moderate voters. Too much is at stake to risk it all under one-party rule – a lesson we’ve learned from the Bush administration during its first six years operating in concert with a Republican-controlled Senate and House.

Current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have not been the least impressive. An Obama presidency could work if he governed from the middle, where most Americans are. But there would be nothing to stop a Democratic-dominated Congress from pulling Obama straight left.

Divided government works best, and McCain has shown a willingness to buck his own party when it was wrong. That’s the McCain we’re pinning our hopes on.

In a previous life, I had the pleasure of interviewing McCain twice before and during his 2000 run for the White House. His candor was striking. Most members of the national press got swept up in McCain’s straight-talk charm; that’s the reason he used to refer to the media as his base. In fact, it was the media that carried McCain after his despicable 2000 GOP primary defeat to George W. Bush, whose staff told South Carolina voters that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child (he adopted a baby from Bangladesh).

When McCain last summer was out of campaign cash and his Straight Talk Express was financially broken down by the side of the road, the national media still continued carrying McCain’s message.

The McCain who won the Republican presidential nomination is not the same man. It’s not just his hostility to the mainstream media. The truth is, McCain was in an untenable position – hated by the Republican base until late August, when the Palin pick energized that wing of the party. But he’s distrusted now by the same moderates and independents he appealed to all these years ago.

The far-right faithful will not be enough to deliver the White House to McCain. He needs plenty of independents and moderates, and the Palin bounce seems to have turned into a thud with the swing voters who matter most.

The GOP ticket’s poll numbers are well down. The word “landslide” is being bandied about.

McCain can still win, but only if he focuses like a laser on how to fix our ailing economy. He needs to reverse the tenor of his campaign and stop talking about Joe the Plumber, William Ayers and ACORN. Poll after poll shows only the GOP right wing cares about that stuff.

Meanwhile, we here at the Bristol Herald Courier will be glad when the general election is over.

We’ve been called liberals, pinko commies and some really bad names for months now because national media have reported the various Palin controversies and we’ve printed those wire service articles in our newspaper, which is one of our obligations.

Even the Doonesbury cartoon tucked inside the Sunday comics section prompted a letter from a regular reader/critic last week. “I have conducted a survey of Democratic vs. Republican criticisms,” he wrote. “Based on my findings in the comics section, your paper is 100% in the bag for Sen. Obama and the Democrats.”

The reader went on to suggest that we move Doonesbury to the editorial page, which is actually a good suggestion although not original. Our Sunday comics section is part of a group buy by Media General Inc. We have no control over the Sunday comics, only the dailies, and Doonesbury is not part of our daily comics package.

One day, some of our most partisan readers will turn off talk radio long enough to figure out that reporting the news and criticizing politicians who deserve it does not put us in the bag for anyone.

We will continue calling it the way we see it, Rs and Ds be damned.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or (276) 645-2513.