McCain For President

Sen. John McCain has earned the reputation as an architect of bipartisan compromises and a disciplined budget hawk. At no other time in our nation’s history have we needed a leader with those skills more than now.

Sen. Barack Obama, while a gifted orator and a truly inspirational figure, has a skimpier record of bipartisan work and is proposing new taxes and additional government spending at a time when restraint and frugality are imperative.

For these reasons, the Bristol Herald Courier’s editorial board endorses McCain, the Republican candidate for president.

But it was an extremely difficult choice, further complicated by McCain’s erratic campaign and endless missteps compared to Obama’s consistent calm.

Both McCain and Obama, the Democratic standard bearer, are complex, somewhat flawed candidates. At times, both have played to their respective bases in ways that make them less appealing to centrists of either party or to independents.

Take McCain’s hard-right tack since vanquishing his primary foes. His selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate certainly shored up his base but has caused even noted life-long conservative columnists and commentators to jump from the GOP ship.

Obama, meanwhile, veered left to secure his party’s nomination, but has moved back to the center during the general election campaign.

With both men, this begs the question: Were they being honest about their positions in the past or are they being honest now? We don’t have the answer.

Our support for McCain is conditioned on his lengthy and distinguished Senate career rather than his craven campaign appeal to the far right of his party. We’re reasonably confident that McCain will govern from the center and act as a check-and-balance to Congress, which will remain under Democratic control.

Divided government protects us against the extremes of either party. For an example of the pitfalls of single-party control, one needs to look no further than the excesses of the Bush administration, many of which were facilitated by a supine and complacent Republican Congress.

The Democrats are poised to make huge gains in the House and Senate as a result of Bush’s abysmal eight years in office. Unlike President Bill Clinton, who was forced to govern from the center after Republicans gained congressional control in 1994, Obama – even if he wanted to govern as a centrist – would be pulled to the left by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
While the Republicans have squandered our nation’s blood and treasure through a combination of incompetence, idealogy and greed, now is not the time for the pendulum to swing completely in the other direction.

Centrist solutions are needed, and McCain is the right candidate at the right time to lead us through the most difficult time this nation has experienced in many generations. His five-plus years as a Vietnam prisoner of war give us a glimpse of how McCain responds when everything is on the line – with honor, bravery and dignity.

While Obama campaign commercials might portray McCain as Bush’s alter ego, the senator from Arizona is actually an antidote to our current president, under whom our national debt has nearly doubled through a combination of tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest and unbridled spending.

Our government has never been larger and more unwieldy.

McCain appears to be the most fiscally responsible candidate and the one most likely to deal with entitlement spending. The nation’s obligations in the form of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid threaten to gobble up an ever-increasing portion of the budget – even if the nation does nothing to shrink the number of Americans without health insurance. Reform is urgently required.

Obama has some relevant ideas on the matter of health insurance. We agree that no child should go without adequate health care for lack of insurance, regardless of family income. But Obama’s plan will come at a cost; it isn’t clear that Americans are ready to pay for it.

McCain was slow to propose a health care solution, but has come to embrace market reforms that would end the practice of cherry picking (where insurers only issue policies to the healthy) and provide refundable tax credits to help Americans purchase insurance on their own. It’s not certain that these reforms will work, but they are easier to implement than a massive and far more costly overhaul of the entire system. They are worth a try.

McCain’s commitment to fiscal discipline is a primary reason for our support, but it is not the only one. On a number of issues, he’s shown an independent streak that has put him at odds with his more ideological Republican brethren.

For instance, McCain stood up against torture and called for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. He tried to craft a reasonable immigration compromise that increased security and created a path to citizenship for immigrants who have worked in this country for years. He worked with a Democrat on campaign finance reform. And he’s far more of a conservationist than others in his party – embracing the existence of global climate change and calling for an end to mountaintop removal mining. He, like Obama, understands that a comprehensive energy plan was needed yesterday.

In one area, McCain raises concerns. He’s far too willing to commit troops to Iraq for the long haul and seems to support military action against Iran. He seems poised to embrace the destructive Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. We hope we are wrong.

Obama, meanwhile, tacks too far to the opposite extreme. He has at times supported a hasty pullout from Iraq, regardless of conditions on the ground. But his call to push for diplomatic rather than military solutions to international problems is on the money.

The next president, regardless of who it is, will inherit a mess of monumental proportions. We remain a country at war, and our economy is threatened in ways we never imagined since the Great Depression. Entitlement spending and the national debt are looming crises.

McCain has the experience to solve these problems by working with the Democrat-controlled Congress and nudging it back to the political center when necessary.