John McCain simply does not understand the nature of a candidate's compact with his constituents.
First principle: the conservative movement, indeed the Republican Party, owes John McCain no loyalty whatsoever. Yet McCain solicits our loyalty and our support, our money and our votes. What does he owe us in return?
The facile response to be expected from most candidates is that the candidate owes his constituents only that he be honest, industrious and to exercise his best judgment if his supporters' votes put in office. But the problem with John McCain is that we conservatives have no trust in his political judgment. Most of us have no doubt that he would be honest but we are very concerned that he will not adhere to the conservative values he embraces now to get our votes. We admire greatly his physical courage and understand his moral courage. I for one accept as true his account of his epiphany in his cell after brutal torture which brought him to understand: " I was no longer my own man, I was my country's". So we conservatives accept his patriotism and his honesty, but we remain concerned about his conservative moorings. Frankly, we're afraid that John McCain, like George Bush, once elected will slip his moorings and sail away from conservative principles on his own compass.
We conservatives are not supporting John McCain out of his fealty to his conservatism or to his Republicanism nor even to him personally as much as we admire his character. We are doing so out of fear, fear that his opponent, will pervert the Constitution and subvert the Republic. We question Obama's loyalty to America, we suspect his proclivity to act in concert with thugs, both domestic and foreign, who gain political ends through violence. We are afraid of his racism. We are justifiably frightened that when he makes summits with despots without preconditions he really means he will sell us out. We believe he will sell out its country because we know that he attempted to sell out our soldiers in Iraq on his visit there by underlining the ongoing bilateral negotiations for the return of our soldiers home. We fear for our children if a financial tsunami breaks over us. Fear that they will have their birthright stolen from them and never be able to become what they might have been in a free, capitalist, system because the American dream will have been stolen from us by a demagogue who would manipulate the masses vulnerable in the misery of the worldwide depression. In short, most of us who support John McCain do so because the stakes in this election have literally never been greater for America, at least not since 1864.
The undeniable evidence in this campaign shows that facts have simply ceased to matter because the media either will not report them or report them in a backhanded way that redounds against any Obama opponent. We Freepers have tried to break through the media wall and alert the still persuadable middle third of the electorate that the cumulative evidence of Obama's radicalism means that our fears are at least plausible and prudent and not, as the mainstream media would have it, paranoid, delusional, or even racist. We have tried to convince the world that there is very little upside to Obama and the downside is so terrible that to accept the very real risk to our country and our children is madness. Alas, we failed to break through the media's Iron Curtain.
Growing more desperate as we read the polls, we exhorted John McCain to go on the attack, believing that it was only the candidate himself who could get around the media and alert the dwindling number of persuadables to the real and present danger presented by the growing likelihood of an Obama victory. Some of us understood the dilemma that you as a candidate were in. We recognized what your pollsters no doubt have been telling you, that the image of George Bush and the whole Republican brand has become poison and must be shed from your campaign. It is important to understand, though, that this situation was the direct and proximate result of an inexplicable and inexcusable failure of the Bush administration to defend either itself or Republican/conservative principles. When political scientists write the history of this 2008 campaign, they are likely to conclude that it was irretrievably lost not by John McCain but by George Bush.
We are also aware, John McCain, that your pollsters tell you that uncommitted independents often react negatively to negative campaigning and we concede, if only for purposes of discussion, that to some degree this is true. These two factors, the aversion to Bush which created the need to distance the campaign from him, combined with an understandable desire not to offend decent Americans with negative campaigning, have led you to commit profound campaign blunders in responding to the financial crisis. They caused the McCain campaign to flounder pathetically. They validated the Democrats' mantra that the financial crisis is the inevitable results of wrongheaded Republican laissez-faire capitalism and despicable (Republican) greed on Wall Street. Once this template was explicitly validated by the McCain campaign, the pivotal issue of this election was lost. Like the apathy of the Bush administration in the face of its own destruction by attacks which featured, "Bush lied and people died", the McCain campaign has placed itself on the wrong side of the most important issue to confront America since at least 9/11. Worse, pandering after the votes of those who mindlessly blame everything on George Bush will not gain the foregiveness of these voters but it will leave future generations wallowing in socialism. It will also leave the Republican party groping about in the wilderness trying for a generation to shed the burden of guilt for causing the second great depression.
Many of us now assume that when you belatedly at last turned to the attack along the lines we have been exhorting you to do, that your pollsters had told you what we instinctively understand: the election is lost unless Obama can be destroyed morally. Let us hasten to stipulate that to morally destroy Barak Obama is itself a very moral act because it does not require 1 ounce of lying. You have to understand, John McCain, that it is the duty of the adversary in a two party system to honestly alert the electorate to the true state of facts which would disqualify a candidate. That is how the system works. If a candidate shrinks from this duty, it is the equivalent of condoning the election of a demagogue under our system.
Happily, our natural inclinations as conservatives to expose Obama are utterly in harmony with our two party system. John McCain, you will never be ashamed of yourself for telling the truth about Obama but, if you shirk that duty out of fastidiousness or from bad political advice, your legacy will not be limited to your own election loss. If you think that Obama represents at least a potential threat, then say so. Do not tease conservatives and show a little leg one minute and then wag your finger at us the next minute for our salacious thoughts. Are you our man or not?
Senator McCain, your history in the Senate simply does not warrant our support. We support you only because the alternative to you is not just undesirable but unacceptable. This is the nature of your commitment to conservatives: In return for our support you must fight our fight. If you are not willing to morally expose and destroy Barak Obama because you do not really believe that Obama constitutes a threat as a stealth radical, then we are entitled to say that there is not a significant difference between a committed liberal named Barak Obama and an eratic conservative named John McCain. We are entitled to go our own way and try to somehow resurrect Reagan conservatism from the ashes of your defeat.
John McCain's duty is clear.
