McCain Versus the Juggernaut
KRISTOL, WILLIAM
EDITORIAL McCain Versus the Juggernaut It’s always darkest before it goes totally black. This is one of John McCain’s favorite remarks, ascribed (apocryphally, it seems) to Chairman Mao....
...We don’t need the “supervision” of a conventionally liberal and totally untested junior senator whose most impressive lifetime achievement has been the construction of an effective narrative about himself...
...Well, with 10 days to go before the election, it’s getting pretty dark out there...
...It may be true...
...Still, we hope for a McCain-Palin victory, for the sake of the country...
...Oh well, start a war, lose a war...
...John McCain didn’t move on...
...Van Buren at the next Presidential election” and that Lincoln’s opposition to the Van Buren forces was therefore bound to be in vain, Lincoln responded: Address that argument to cowards and to knaves...
...if it must, let it...
...He’s now teaching Marine recruits at Quantico—and walking with a cane...
...Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed...
...But for now, we can only echo the words of the 30-year-old Abraham Lincoln...
...An Obama-Biden administration— working with a Democratic Congress—would mean a more debilitating nanny state at home and a weaker nation facing our enemies abroad...
...Neville Chamberlain also had a fi ne temperament and a good intellect...
...And how has he proved this...
...And in dealing with other foreign threats, he’d more than likely follow his natural inclination—refl exively liberal, post-nationalist, timid to a fault...
...He’s met them well, and we’d be the fi rst to pay tribute to his disciplined and effective campaign...
...In a fi ne article on National Review Online last week, Byron York reported on a moment at a McCain rally: “I just gave John McCain my Purple Heart,” Marine Sgt...
...We’re proud, in our modest way, to stand with John McCain and Sarah Palin against it...
...He helped to win the war...
...The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just...
...honor besmirched...
...On December 26, 1839, responding to the confi dent prediction of one of his political opponents “that every State in the Union will vote for Mr...
...Reading the endorsements of Obama in the liberal media should strengthen the determination of all believers in American self-government and greatness to fi ght this election campaign to the end...
...York explains that Eubanks saw remarkable progress in Iraq between his 2005 and 2007 tours and is concerned that it might all be for naught...
...with the free and the brave it will effect nothing...
...Jack Eubanks told me a few minutes after McCain fi nished a speech at a campaign rally in Woodbridge, Virginia, Saturday...
...EDITORIAL McCain Versus the Juggernaut It’s always darkest before it goes totally black...
...The “challenges” Obama has met have been political and electoral...
...And also for the pleasure of seeing the dejection of the mainstream media, the incredulity of the leftwing triumphalists, and the humiliation of the pathetically opportunistic “conservatives” who’ve been desperately clambering on board the Obama juggernaut...
...I said, ‘I want to give this to you, sir, as a reminder that we want you to keep your promise to bring us home in victory and honor, so it will mean something.’ ” The 22-year-old Eubanks has been injured twice in Iraq...
...Still, is this “proof” of a capacity to be president...
...But hope is all anyone can do...
...We’re proud to stay off that juggernaut...
...We, of course, have confi dence that the nation would survive such an interlude, and we would even hope that a President Obama might adjust course from the path he’s advertised, especially in foreign policy...
...Gotta move on...
...These days, he can barely be bothered even to mention Iraq...
...But wait...
...William Kristol...
...He’s run a good campaign...
...But if after all, we shall fail, be it so...
...Do the Obama acolytes want to hold up the Bush or Carter administrations as models for the proposition that a good campaign translates into a good presidency...
...Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real fl esh on his early promises of hope and change...
...But the risk of real damage is great, especially when compared with the prospect of a tough-minded center-right McCain-Palin administration that could lead the country sensibly through these diffi cult times...
...So what...
...The New York Times tells us, “After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States...
...As it happens, the Whig ticket Lincoln supported won that 1840 election...
...I think Obama’s just going to pull everyone home as soon as he can, despite what’s going on over there,” he told York...
...Time magazine’s Joe Klein tells us that Obama “seems a grown-up, in a nation that badly needs some adult supervision...
...We also hear a lot of squeaking from rats deserting the McCain ship about Barack Obama’s exemplary temperament...
...But he did—much as he now wishes people to forget it—support the Iraq war...
...Joe Biden, by the way, has neither...
...If he’d had his way, Obama would have lost the war in Iraq—with equanimity...
...To the contrary, we are a nation of adults...
...interests were sacrifi ced and U.S...
...If Obama wins, we wish him well...
...I just don’t want it to turn into another Vietnam or worse where everything we fought for, and all my buddies who died over there, it was just for nothing...
...So might, against the odds, the party of Lincoln win this year...
...Obama has run the most impressive campaign by a non-incumbent since George W. Bush in 2000, and by a nonincumbent Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976...
...Obama does have one great achievement...
...We would hope that Obama might be more responsible with respect to Iraq as president than he was as senator, now that the surge he opposed and derided has worked...
...He would have been calm, cool, and collected as U.S...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 8
