Don’t give up just yet on John McCain and Sarah Palin. The Examiner endorsed the Republican presidential ticket in this space in September and everything that has happened in the three subsequent debates and on the campaign trail has convinced us of the rightness of that decision. There have been miscues and misfires, to be sure, with McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign and return to Washington during the Wall Street bailout crisis being the most notable. Still, Barack Obama and his most worshipful Democrat followers are prematurely measuring the drapes in the White House. Yes, the major national polls show Obama with an impressive lead, but if the 2008 campaign has done nothing else it ought to have demonstrated the utter unpredictability of contemporary American politics. Just ask Hillary the Inevitable.
McCain remains the clear choice for those who understand the crucial role of experience in weathering crises, be they here at home with the economy or overseas in Iraq, Iran or someplace nobody has much heard of today. It is a fact that there likely will be attempts by those who mean harm for America to test the next president early in his administration, regardless of his name. The difference is that McCain is ready now and indeed was passing earlier, incredibly grueling preparatory tests when Obama was eight years old. And as McCain has said repeatedly, he has seen the world, he knows how it works and how to deal with its challenges. There is simply no substitute for experience when the nation’s vital national security interests are being challenged overseas.
It is on the issue of taxes, however, where the differences between McCain and Obama are perhaps most stark. Put bluntly: Obama has been dishonest with voters in claiming he will cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. The truth is Obama has already voted multiple times in the Senate to terminate the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. And there is no doubt he will support their termination as president. In doing so, Obama will be responsible for the largest tax hike ever on most Americans. McCain supports making those tax cuts permanent. It doesn’t take Joe the Plumber to figure out which candidate will do the most for Middle Americans.
And that is the fundamental choice facing Americans Nov. 4. Either vote for a man who has suffered and served America all of his adult life, and who understands how desperately Washington needs far-reaching reforms because he has fought for them from the inside. Or vote for a man from the Chicago political machine with a remarkable gift for fine-sounding words, but whose actions will mean higher taxes, more government spending and an explosion of new bureaucratic regulation that will stifle the economy, destroy millions of jobs and make the daily lives of most Americans less prosperous. It’s really not a hard choice to make.
