I don’t have to agree with everything a politician has done for whatever reasons in order to vote for the guy as the lesser of two evils. Personally, I’ve always voted defensively. The first President Bush was a country club liberal but he was better than Dukakis or Clinton. Bob Dole was no great conservative but better than Clinton. I had no use for George W. Bush’s bloating of the federal budget to please Ted Kennedy and a bunch of the other stuff he did and proposed. But he was better than Gore or Kerry. I voted for all of them without great enthusiasm and, in some cases, no hope at all. But they were better than the available alternative. So’s McCain.
I’m OK with disagreeing with politicians on some issues. I understand the world of politics enough to know that private citizen me wouldn’t agree with politician me (assuming that transformation ever happened) 100% of the time. The question that comes up is how many issues and how big are they. For me Campaign Finance Reform is HUGE, it’s a big time non-starter. Living in AZ when he made that a top goal of his career I swore off voting for him, I always hoped it would just be a Senate thing, unfortunately it looks like it’s going to be a president thing. Unless he can give a serious and believable explanation on how he’s realized CFR was a stupid thing to do and he’s making a priority of reversing I cannot vote for him.
McCain simply is NOT better than the alternative, at this point in his career there’s no functional difference between him and the alternative. He agrees with Hillary and Obama a hell of a lot more than he does with me.