Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, October 31, 2008 2:16:43 PM
Charles Krauthammer wrote a definitive piece last week on why the
nation should support John McCain over Barack Obama. At least, it seemed definitive, but apparently Krauthammer had more to add. In what looks like the longest post-script in history,
Krauthammer details the similarities and differences between Obama and
McCain, and draws at least one important distinction for dispirited
conservatives
Of course, this is the point that conservatives opposing the bailout
made all along. The government can’t be trusted to make these
solutions temporary, especially with Congress in the hands of Nancy
Pelosi and Harry Reid. Allowing the partial nationalization of banking
and insurance companies ceded important philosophical and political
ground to the statists, and instead the direction of the bailout should
have been limited to fixing what government broke in the first place:
the mortgage-backed securities that infected the entire system.
And Obama has no track record at all of bipartisanship. McCain has
a long history of working across the aisle, to the consternation of his
party at times, but Obama has none. In an Obama administration with a
Democratic Congress, Republicans will become irrelevant for at least
the next two years. The only bipartisanship Obama will show will be to
name a couple of Republicans as advisers, people who will keep those
positions only as long as they can stomach being mouthpieces for policy
they won’t influence one single degree.
Krauthammer says it won’t be the end of the world, and he’s right.
We survived the Great Society and the Jimmy Carter presidency, too.
Unfortunately, we haven’t yet gotten past the economic and
foreign-policy hangovers of either yet, and we certainly don’t need to
add to that burden with the sharp left turn we’ll get in four years of
Barack Obama’s leadership.