Sizing up the candidates

Columns

October 30, 2008

By William Rusher Picayune Item Thu Oct 30, 2008, 03:23 PM CDT

When all is said and done, every voter must decide which of two (it is usually two) candidates to vote for. For many people, it’s easy: “Vote for the Democrat” or “Vote for the Republican.” And there’s nothing wrong with that: The two major parties have established positions on a broad range of issues, and people who agree with these can conscientiously vote for the candidate of the party whose positions they prefer.

But some people, faced with the selections of the two parties for the presidency of the United States, will feel obliged to examine the candidates more closely and more personally. What are they like, simply as human beings? There’s nothing wrong with this, either. It isn’t necessarily more virtuous than voting for a candidate on the basis of his party affiliation; rather, it tends to reflect a conviction, on the part of the voter, that he or she may have qualifications (or disadvantages) that simply outweigh party affiliation.

So let’s look at the qualifications of the candidates, independent of their parties. What do we know about John McCain?

We can hardly plead ignorance. He is 72 and has been in the United States Senate for 22 years. Born in the Panama Canal Zone, he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958 and from the National War College in 1974. He is an Episcopalian and married. The son and grandson of Navy admirals, and a decorated Navy pilot himself, he volunteered for service in Vietnam. Injured in a flight-deck explosion on the carrier USS Forrestal, he declined to return home, and in October 1967, was shot down over Vietnam. He spent 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war, refusing an earlier release offered because of his father’s rank. Home at last, he was elected to an open House seat in 1982, re-elected in 1984, and then went to the Senate.

In the Senate, McCain’s record puts him squarely among the Republican “moderates.” The liberal Americans for Democratic Action him rated him at 15 (in 2006) out of a possible 100. The American Conservative Union, in the same year, scored him at 65. His specialties, not surprisingly, have been defense and foreign affairs. Over the years, he has been particularly active in the field of campaign-finance reform. He has strongly supported our military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As for Barack Obama, he is 47 and has been in the Senate for four years. A graduate of Columbia (Bachelor’s), he worked for three years as a community organizer in Chicago and then attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He married a fellow Harvard Law graduate, then became a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school. He is a member of the United Church of Christ. After serving eight years in the Illinois State Senate, from 1996 to 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

There, Obama’s record has been broadly liberal. Americans for Democratic Action award him 95 points out of 100; the American Conservative Union rates him at 6. In November 2005, he called for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, starting in 2006. But he has also generally worked well with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in the Foreign Relations Committee.

In January 2006, Obama told Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” that “I will not” run for president or vice president in 2008, but on Oct. 22 that year he went on “Meet the Press” again and told Russert he had “thought about the possibility.” Today, two years later, he’s running.

So there you have it — the essentials concerning next week’s presidential candidates (or as many of them as can be fitted into a column the size of this one).

You pays your money and you takes your choice.vice chairman of the American Conservative Union.)

Text Only

Columns

Hood loses hired counsel fight
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
The impact on John Q. Public from the passage of the so-called “sunshine law” regarding the implementation of restrictions and oversight of the hiring of outside counsel attorneys by the Mississippi Attorney General’s office has been vastly overstated by Attorney General Jim Hood and, to a degree, by Hood’s Republican political antagonists who passed the law over his objections.

May 26, 2012
Remembering war dead on Memorial Day
By Wyatt Emmerich/Northside Sun The photo of Billy Elmore has always haunted me. It pops up every now and then as my computer screen rotates through thousands of stored photos.

May 26, 2012
‘Calico Joe’ evokes memories
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
The new “small” novel “Calico Joe” — John Grisham’s much-anticipated paean to the game of baseball — was the perfect traveling companion on a long drive from Mississippi to Fayetteville, Ark., to witness my niece’s graduation from the University of Arkansas last week.

May 19, 2012
Is there a censored race war?
Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.

May 19, 2012
The virtues of grunt work
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
Occasionally a really bad idea gains currency and credibility. Here’s one: College students who work at unpaid internships are unfairly exploited by money-grubbing capitalists. In fact, goes this argument, the whole system is not only immoral but probably illegal and should be abolished.

May 19, 2012
Once, there were no words
By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No matter how many times I stand in front of a group to speak, I get nervous. One of the reasons I went into print journalism was because I figured I’d never have to do any public speaking or wear grown-up clothes.

May 19, 2012
‘Finding Your Roots’ good show
By Cal Thomas/Syndicated Columnist
“Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” is another of the Harvard professor’s wonderful television series for PBS. This is “must-see TV” and a more than worthy sequel to three previous projects Gates has hosted about how some of us came to be what and who we are.

May 17, 2012
Moral duties in a muddied world
By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist
In an election season in which the White House has instituted a policy that puts unprecedented limits on the constitutional right to freedom of religion, questions of conscience, duty and spiritual and moral obligation are of critical importance.

May 17, 2012
Colleges, development intertwined
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
At his speech here to the movers and shakers in the Mississippi Delta’s business, agricultural, educational and political circles, Gov. Phil Bryant’s remarks were met with more than polite applause. Bryant, the mechanic’s son from Moorhead, understands the Delta region’s challenges as lessons from his boyhood.

May 16, 2012
Prolific circuit judge relieved of duty
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
Relieving the best criminal judge of all his criminal cases is not the way to exercise responsibility as senior circuit judge. What on earth is Hinds County Senior Circuit Judge Tomie Green doing?

May 16, 2012
More Columns Headlines

Columns

Search Results

Sizing up the candidates

Site Map

Contact Us