If the poll were widened to encompass all presidential contenders, current and dropped out, I would have chosen none of the above. In the poll, however, I went ahead and chose who I would vote for on election day.
I would vote for McCain on election day because I am not in the least bit liberal. Oooh, shock. Yeah, I know.
While McCain is a decent social conservative, he is an anathema to the Reagan Republicans, supporting such things as McCain-Feingold and not supporting tax cuts. He is more of a Keynesian, economically, believing that tax increases actually increase revenue and tax cuts reduce them in all cases, something that is demonstrably false. Even Bill Clinton cut taxes on yachts after raising them in 1993 only to find out the only thing the tax did was put all the yacht builders out of work with revenue drying up to almost zero. Also against the mainstream of the party, McCain supports increasing immigration and opposes large crackdown on illegal immigration. Probably surprising to most here, I generally agree with McCain on this issue, believing that widening legal immigration is the best way to diminish illegal immigration, not a wall or increased Border Patrol.
But compared to Clinton and Obama, there's no contest. Clinton and Obama would not protect the country properly as shown wonderfully by Bill Clinton, whose major feats in office were selling military secrets to China for campaign donations and advancing Chinese ICBM technology 30-50 years so that their missiles can now target America, allowing North Korea to develop atomic weapons by basically ignoring the premise of trust but verify after signing a worthless treaty, treating terrorism as a crime after ignoring the first World Trade Center bombing and raising a wall between the intelligence services and the law enforcement agencies, and completely ignoring the economy and basking in the false prosperity of the dot com boom and handing a failing economy to his successor after the dot com bust. McCain, at least, can be trusted to defend the nation. I'm queasy on what he'll do with the economy, but not nearly as queasy as I'd be with Obama or Clinton in charge.
I've always had this interesting (at least to me <g>) theory about America's popularity. Whenever America is on its knees, as shown in the hostage crisis in 1979 or the immediate aftermath of September 11, America is never more popular in the rest of the world. Whenever America is strong and projects power, its popularity reaches those of Richard Nixon after Watergate. Ronald Reagan was about as popular in Europe or Central America as President Bush is now, for instance, yet he was proven right as he successfully toppled the Soviet Union and took out every communist foothold in the western hemisphere except Cuba. I remember the calls of "warmonger" when he tried to deploy Pershing II missiles in West Germany or when he pushed ahead with SDI, walking away at Reykjavik when the Soviets demanded its dismantling before any treaty could be agreed to. In all cases, he was criticized heavily by America's allies, yet in the end, he won and defeated America's enemies in the Kremlin and in the streets of Managua. Germans owe him their thanks with a reunited Germany, no longer East and West facing each other across barbed wire and mine fields.
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was loved by America's allies, mostly because he did nothing. And also because he was a left-winger like most of Europe. His biggest issue was school uniforms, which he failed at, btw. Yet his popularity was astounding for a guy with nearly no accomplishments, except welfare reform which was heavily criticized by his own party as a betrayal. As usual, though, the left was wrong. Welfare reform was an amazing success. Instead of soup kitchens, we got the lowest unemployment in decades. Europeans would kill for our levels of unemployment. Using Sweden again as an example, their "public" unemployment rate is 8%. In reality, most studies put it at around 20% with an equally astounding statistic that on any given day, an average of 14% of the entire work force is on sick leave. Isn't that universal health care supposed to prevent that? <bg> Then there's the six weeks of paid vacation a year whereas most Americans get two. That's what you get with cradle-to-grave care with no incentive to do any work. The rest of Europe is hovering at 10% unemployment, plus or minus.
My belief is that Bill Clinton remained incredibly popular in polls because he was perceived to be a victim of crusading, self-righteous Republicans, not because of anything he actually did.
Enter our current president, George W. Bush. He was the most popular guy in the world after the twin towers fell. Even Rosie O'Donnell wanted to meet him. America was a victim. That good will all disappeared right after he had the gall to actually take action against the enemy. What he should have done to be wildly popular was to arrest a dozen people and to hold a trial and to leave it at that. Instead the US military went into a war footing. It wasn't about popularity, though, unlike the poll-driven Bill Clinton who would change the part of his hair if it would gain him an extra point in the polls and would avoid any issue that would cost him points. It was about defending against a mortal enemy who had declared they would kill us all. Afghanistan fell in a matter of weeks after his opponents moaned about quagmire, yet Bush put together an amazing coalition among the Pashtuns and the Pakistanis in defeating the Taliban and chasing al Qaeda into hiding. While fighting continues, a fairly popular elected government has ruled Afghanistan for years now.
In Iraq, we have the biggest point of contention and the biggest reason for his fall in popularity. For most of that, I blame the media for its appalling lack of knowledge of history. In Iraq, we have a friendly government in place, remarkably light casualties, and Sunnis turning against al Qaeda, now our principle enemy in the country. We've practically pushed them out of Baghdad and out of the formerly deadly Anbar province. With al Qaeda on the run, we still get calls for immediate withdrawal, i.e defeat.
I ask all those who ask for withdrawal today, if al Qaeda is the main enemy in Iraq today, what are all those al Qaeda fighters going to do if we leave? I'm sure they'll all take up knitting or become honest business people and love Americans. Isn't the entire reason we went to war because of al Qaeda? Didn't Osama bin Laden say that Bill Clinton's weak responses to terrorism were the reasons New York was attacked? Doesn't it make more sense to kill them there than have to face them at home? Even President Bush's harshest critics will have to admit he's kept the country safe for six and a half years. Yet he gets no credit. In fact it hurts him because Americans have turned to other issues that are more "important." So successful was he that Americans have completely lost the sense of urgency that we all had in 2001. Few even know of incidents such as the attempted attack on the Brooklyn Bridge where intelligence led the FBI to the plot, neutralizing the threat before it fully formed. al Qaeda's failures aren't for the lack of trying.
As for the media's woeful lack of historical knowledge, just look at all the other wars America has ever fought. Did you know we lost over 400,000 in World War II? 70,000 on the Korean peninsula? 59,000 in Vietnam? 116,000 in a single year of World War I? 600,000 in the American Civil War? 25,000 in the 8-year Revolutionary War? Today, we stand at roughly 4,000, about 800 of them due to accidents. To put that in perspective, the American military averages roughly 1,000 deaths per year from accidents in peacetime, which is higher than our casualty rate in a shooting war. I'll bet most people didn't know that about our accident rates in the military. At the end of the Civil War, a riverboat caught fire and sank while taking Union soldiers home from the war. 4,000 died in that accident. A single training accident in preparation for D-Day in WWII cost 2,000 lives. Yet, Iraq somehow is considered one of our costliest wars and somehow more inept than the charge by Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Cold Harbor, Virginia, which had 12,000 Union soldiers shot down in 15 minutes. Soldiers pinned their names to their uniforms, many of them knowing they wouldn't be returning from that charge towards Lee's center. Grant lost 60,000 men in one month and was nicknamed "Grant the Butcher" in the North. How do historians see Grant today? He's considered a great general and is credited with winning the Civil War. The people of the time elected him president a few years later. Historically, Iraq has been one of our best-run wars, something you wouldn't know by reading our media. The only better run war would have been the one run by the other President Bush, the Gulf War.
The media obsessed over every single bomb and every single name on the casualty lists. They focused on nothing but for four years, almost ignoring everything else happening in the country. That had the effect of beating down the morale of the country and in the allied countries. There was a reason why attacks were always close to the Green Zone where the reporters sat, safe in their hotels, just in time for the next American media cycle. Sentiment nose-dived with every roadside bomb. It cost Tony Blair his job. Today, our president would not win re-election, even if only Republicans were voting. People outside Iraq were never told by the media that in 15 of the 19 provinces, there are no threats of car bombings and kids play freely in the streets. When WMD were actually found in Iraq, only Fox News covered it. I checked every other major news source I could find that day, wondering what the reaction would be in the mainstream media to this earth-shattering event. Not one other bothered to report it. Even knowing the incompetence and bias of our media, I couldn't believe it.
Ann had this theory that America would become popular if we were only to become more liberal like Europe or Canada. That would probably make us more popular, but it would also bring our economic engine to its knees. The reason why most innovation comes out of America is because of its lack of high, burdensome taxes and government regulations (in comparison to others). In Europe, it's nearly impossible to be laid off. Here, a laid off employee can potentially establish the next eBay or Federal Express. By spreading wealth more evenly, we'd end up just like the permanent economic basket cases of Europe with less overall to go around. There should be no surprise that America leads in almost every high-tech industry in the world. There is no equivalent of Hollywood in any other country. All major computer companies are here like Intel, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, AMD, etc. Even in wireless communications where Nokia leads in handset sales, it's the innovation of American companies like Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Flarion, and others that created our 3G and 4G communications technologies behind those phones (3G WCDMA was based on Qualcomm's CDMA while 4G LTE was based on Flarion's OFDM). And in terms of innovation, be honest, would you rather have an iPhone by Apple or any Nokia phone? American universities created the Internet. (Sorry, Al Gore <g>) The only place where America tends to lag is in manufacturing, a place where innovation is not very important and where cost of labor is king. While it's impossible to eliminate the business cycle, it's cutting taxes and eliminating regulatory burdens that will get our economic machine humming again, not imposing high taxes and cradle-to-grave services. If Europeans want continuing innovation, they don't want us to be like them.
