They’ve called Florida for John McCain. He’s ahead of Romney by about four percentage points. Giuliani is way behind. Drudge is even reporting that Rudy may drop out as soon as tomorrow, likely endorsing McCain.
Congratulations to the Arizona Senator and his supporters. Now on to Super Tuesday…
January 30th, 2008 at 12:00 am
I am by no means a fan of John McCain, but one must give credit where credit is due.
And John McCain’s performance in Florida…hell, his performance since his candidacy was on life support and its death throes over the summer has been might damn impressive.
I believe Florida was the first closed primary state for the GOP and he won it. Some exit polling I saw suggested that some “independents” registered as Republicans went heavily toward McCain. However, the exit polling concluded that although Romney carried true Republican voters…it was only by a slim margin.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:00 am
For starters it would be one doesn’t vote against tax cuts, doesn’t support giving amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, and believes in free speech, etc.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:00 am
It honestly boggles my mind how the Romney campaign has resorted to attacking Senator McCain’s position on the Bush tax cuts. Despite Romney’s supposed private sector wisdom, he displays a surprising lack of understanding of economic nuance. (Not to mention hypocrisy; didn’t he raise taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars as governor of MA? But I digress…)
Senator McCain has repeatedly noted that he opposed the tax cuts because they did not coincide with spending cuts. Furthermore, he has stated that he will fight vigorously to make those cuts permanent, as reversing them would be tantamount to a tax hike. I, for one, am happy to hear of a Republican who is genuinely committed to fiscal responsibility. Here in California, where we face a massive deficit, it should be abundantly obvious that true fiscal restraint would have amounted to more than just reversing the car tax.
For years as a “Washington insider,” Senator McCain has been a consistent, albeit lonely voice against government waste and rampant spending. He has pledged to veto every single pork barrel bill that comes across his desk as president, and I believe him.
The Republican Party truly does have a choice to make in the upcoming primaries: are we the party of just tax cuts, or are we the party of genuine economic conservatism?
January 30th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Giovanni:
With respect to true Republican voters…I was going by some FoxNews exit polling data they were recounting as the votes were being tabulated.
According to their data, they broke down Republican voters into two categories…independents and Republicans.
I am not sure how they did this and it struck me as interesting. Be that as it may, the Republican voters they identified as independents heavily favored McCain…whereas the Republican voters who they defined as actual Republicans only narrowly went to Romney.
Sorry for not making that more clear in my initial comment.
With that said…as a federalist I think you know where I come down on Lincoln.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Let us not forget several things. First and foremost, Senator McCain has never supported a tax increase.
Second, of all, let’s look at what ADDITIONAL tax cuts he’s supporting. He wants to eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, ban cell phone and Internet taxes, and make the Bush tax cuts permanent. More importantly, his primary concern, as pointed out, is that the tax cuts did not come with spending reductions. In fact, the Bush administration INCREASED spending (along with support of a costly farm subsidy). Are we now going to blame Senator McCain for being MORE fiscally conservative than President Bush and the other candidates? It’s time to walk the walk and talk the talk. We are the party of fiscal responsibility. We needed tax cuts in 2001, but we also needed to cut spending. Senator McCain recognized that.
Now, we are facing budget shortfalls. Democrats are proposing tax increases and spending increases. Senator McCain is ready to fix the fiscal train wreck buy CUTTING spending and making the tax cuts permanent. If Mitt Romney is elected, I can only imagine if he proposes to do to the country what his health care proposal did to Massachusetts. Mitt Romney will, yet again, increase spending, sending this country deeper into debt.
John McCain is a tax cutter, but he does it for the right reasons and the right way–but cutting spending while cutting taxes. The two go hand-in-hand.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:00 am
Mr. Michaelini –
For someone who stresses intellectual or academic credentials, it seems you know little of history, especially that of the Republican Party, if you want to include Theodore Roosevelt as a standard-bearer. The guy was a Progressive, a eugenicist, and left the party when it didn’t suit him, forming his own Bull Moose Party in order to challenge the sitting Republican President Taft. I’ll grant you he was probably one of our country’s most impressive orators, but the substance of his orations was more often than not un-Republican in the way we’d think of it today.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:00 am
Nicholas,
TR left the Republican Party because it had become a collective shill for oligopolists, monopolists, and other assorted plutocrats who made and kept their vast treasuries by killing free-market competition from small business upstarts and selling shoddy necessities to consumers. By the time TR challenged the status quo, the party was dead and attracting flies – hell, Taft didn’t even want to be in the White House.
Gee, what’s changed in 100+ years?
My useless degree was in political science, not history. However, a few years of life experience outside the inside-baseball world of California politics have informed me that everything that comes around, comes around again. Usually more than once!
Reading your comments about TR remind me of that great comment of his:
“It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”
February 1st, 2008 at 12:00 am
Mr. Finchum –
You would have been great company to those in the left wing of the Republican Party at that time, with your railing (pun intended) against “vast treasuries.”
Your response has prompted me to pull out my Milton Friedman. I’ll assume you had some exposure to economics in political science. In Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom,” published in 1962, he specifically wrote on those “monopolists” whom you hold in contempt:
“Having learned from both [Simons and Eucken], I reluctantly conclude that, if tolerable, private monopoly may be the least of the evils [of private monopoly, public monopoly, or public regulation].
“If society were static so that the conditions which give rise to a technical monopoly were sure to remain, I would have little confidence in this solution. In a rapidly changing society, however, the conditions making for technical monopoly frequently change and I suspect that both public regulation and public monopoly are likely to be less responsive to such changes in conditions, to be less readily capable of elimination, than private monopoly.
“Railroads in the United States are an excellent example. A large degree of monopoly in railroads was perhaps inevitable on technical grounds in the nineteenth century. This was the justification for the Interstate Commerce Commission [a commission TR sought to further empower]. But conditions have changed. The emergence of road and air transport has reduced the monopoly element in railroads to negligible proportions. Yet we have not eliminated the ICC. On the contrary, the ICC, which started out as an agency to protect the public from exploitation by the railroads, has become an agency to protect railroads from competition by trucks and other means of transport, and more recently even to protect existing truck companies from competition by new entrants. Similarly, in England, when the railroads were nationalized, trucking was at first brought into the state monopoly. If railroads had never been subjected to regulation in the United States, it is nearly certain that by now transportation, including railroads, would be a highly competitive industry with little or no remaining monopoly elements.”
TR actually promoted monopolies by expanding government. Friedman, a lion in the defense of free markets, recognized this and was hugely critical of TR, going so far as to provide a positive review and endorsement of “Bully Boy,” a book on TR I’d recommend to all self-identified Republicans who look glowingly upon the twenty-sixth President of the United States.