John McCain: What Went Wrong?

[RobH4413]

Originally Posted by Sheriff Gonna Getcha

Rob, believe it or not, but I agree with most of your observations. In particular, I agree with your observation that politicians must walk a fine line between representing the people and offering leadership. With regard to Clinton, I actually think that he was a good President, but I don't think he could ever be called a great President in light of his lack of vision. Clinton and many Dems will never be considered great so long as they base their decisions almost solely on public polls. With regard to Bush, my biggest problems with him are that (1) he has a vision, but it is unrealistic and (2) he is stubborn to a fault. I wish he would be more willing to rethink his strategies, if not his goals. I wish he was more attuned to the general public.

In my opinion, great politicians are ones who understand and represent the people, but lead (as opposed to follow) them. The great politicians is one who is what JFK called "an idealist without illusions." Bush is idealist (in that he has a great vision), but he is surrounded by illusions. The Dems might be more grounded in reality (i.e., polls), but they will never be said to have a great vision and great ideals so long as they are so wrapped up in dumb short-sighted poll results.

Iraq is a good case-study. The Dems didn't oppose Bush's war plan because the majority of the U.S. public supported it and they didn't want to get hosed like they did after opposing the first Gulf War. Now Dems talk about how they were "lied to," but that's a load of BS. I have no clue how Dems can oppose Bush's pre-emptive war doctrine and then say that they supported the invasion of Iraq because they thought we needed to preempt the threat posed by Saddam's possession of WMDs. Now that U.S. public opinion has swung against the war, they have too.

Bush, on the other hand, has been overly reluctant to engage Iran and Syria about Iraq. Bush was also overly stubborn in refusing to acknowledge the existence of an insurgency. Bush was dumb in holding onto Rumsfeld for so long. And the list goes on.

Yeah, I apologize for the semi-sarcastic tone that may have come across.... I just had gotten out of a Chem test and just started ranting... If I was rude, my sincere apologies.

As far as singling out the democrats over the war issue, your absolutely right that the democrats bailed out, but everyone ducked and covered after that whole debacle. That's the reason many political analysts thought Obama had an advantage over the other candidates because he wasn't in office during the vote. He doesn't need to say that he was "misled", or "lied to".

Granted, there was some misinformation presented to congress by the white house, but there is no need to go there.

I guess my whole issue was that IMO singling out one party as being worse than the other, or wussier, or whatever isn't accurate. They're all from the same bloodlines, and the probably 90% of the leaders of both parties are rich corrupt pricks that hire publicists and P.R. people to form there opinion.

What ever happened to all the Teddy Roosevelt's in the world?

At any rate, I don't want to sit here and dissent for no reason. There is something we can do about it, and that's get money out of politics. Which has always been my biggest motivation for supporting McCain. I want to see that attitude spread, and I want that to become the cool thing to do. He's trying to do something about the corruption, removing pork, lobbyist reform, etc, and it's a start.

Is he perfect? No! He's far from it, but I like a lot of what he's trying to do.