Joe Spears

I enjoyed this blog entry.

Frankly, I'd love to see McCain from 2000 go up against Obama, but his 95% voting record with our current "miserable failure" of a president makes him somewhat less of a maverick or a candidate for change. Change can be defined a few different ways, but very few of them would be "95% the same."

It is misleading (imagine that) to say that McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time. While it is numerically accurate to say, based on Congressional Quarterly's analysis for 2007, McCain voted in support of Bush's position on legislation 95% of the time, the phrase "of the time" should have a HUGE asterisk next to it. Due to being out on the campaign trail, McCain was only present to vote on legislation classified by CQ as ones in which Bush took a position 39% of the time. His score of 95% is only based on a small sampling of votes, compared to others. Indeed, if you were to look at his unity score from the year prior(not with Bush but the party), it was 76% (compared to 90% for 2007) and he was present to vote 94% of the time (which would be a better indicator). Now, if he had been present to vote on more unity with Bush legislation, some may claim that his score would still be in lock-step with Bush, but it is certainly just "more of the same" tired political gimmickry that both sides are painfully guilty of employing to say 95%. You can check these numbers out at FactCheck....even though you sort of have to "check" them too, because they have at least two articles on the same topic....one elaborates on the small sampling used to get 95%, the other doesn't bother.

Mentions small sample: http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/is_it_true_that_even_though_john.html

Doesn't Mention small sample:

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/is_it_true_john_mccain_voted_with.html

So if, in your assessment, the sample size doesn't matter when making a judgment, and we aren't allowed to take past history into account, would it be acceptable in your view to make a statement such as, "Obama voted with Fidel Castro 100% of the time," if we had some statement by Fidel indicating support for a particular piece of legislation (even if it were only ONE bill) and if Obama voted in favor of that bill? It would, in my example, be indeed a fact, would it not? Obama and Fidel are 100% in unison. Man, I can't WAIT to find a slew of outrageous splinter groups who are on the record in support of key legislation so I can do my own "unity" calculation...then we'll really know the truth!

I don't really see how Obama's party-lining is relevant to this conversation. Since the current administration and state of the union is the reference point, comparing Obama's voting record to Bush and getting higher than McCain would be the only compelling data regarding which candidate is more likely to bring change.

Interesting thought Andrew, and very timely since as the OP noted, the “change is the mantra of this election.” There is a lot I like about McCain, and perhaps some of the changes in him were necessary to get further than he did in 2000. I’m sure you remember what happened in 2000 to derail his campaign. Often mentioned as one of the worst smear campaigns ever, here’s a quote from McCain’s Wikipedia page:

McCain ran ads accusing Bush of lying and comparing the governor to Bill Clinton, which Bush said was "about as low a blow as you can give in a Republican primary". An anonymous smear campaign began against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, flyers, and audience plants. The smears claimed that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains' dark-skinned daughter was adopted from Bangladesh), that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a "Manchurian Candidate" who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days. The Bush campaign strongly denied any involvement with the attacks.

McCain lost South Carolina on February 19, with 42 percent of the vote to Bush's 53 percent, in part because Bush mobilized the state's evangelical voters and outspent McCain. The win allowed Bush to regain lost momentum. McCain would say of the rumor spreaders, "I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those." According to one report, the South Carolina experience left McCain in a "very dark place".

McCain's campaign never completely recovered from his South Carolina defeat…

We all learn from our experiences and these experiences may change us, whether that is a change for the better or worse. Though I may understand the reason, I don’t know how to answer your question… "Do I want a president who changed the way he conducted politics simply to run for president?"

Here's another interesting point made by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi:

To push back on the McCain claim of “country first” and “the original mavericks who will shake up Washington,” the Obama campaign’s attack of “four more years of George Bush” becomes a problem. In a country that yearns for post-partisan change the Obama campaign risks sounding too partisan and like more of the same.

I think what’s getting overlooked in this discussion about change is that of whether or not a change in presidential administration will result in all that is wrong with America being set right and, more importantly, whether or not America is that bad off. I guess another way to raise this issue is to ask: Is President Bush responsible for all of America’s problems? My answer is no. The Republican-led Congress of Bush’s first six years and the Democratic-led Congress of the past two years are rather involved in the legislative process. And how about state and local governments? They surely impact communities and pocketbooks in very direct ways. I guess in all this insistence from both the McCain and Obama campaigns that the Bush presidency was an atrocity and that “change” is needed—in all this I want someone to point to the one or two pieces of legislation initiated or pushed by Bush that directly led to all these ambiguous, overarching problems with America.

Bush undoubtedly made some bad calls. The size and spending of government has not decreased during his two terms. He never tackled Social Security the way he insisted he was going to do in 2000. Both of these are flaws.

But I guess I just don’t see Bush’s presidency as the abomination of desolation that is the prevailing popular view of it. I’m a Republican, so from that point of view, Bush’s Supreme Court appointments have been very prudent. Blaming Bush for the housing bubble burst would be like blaming Clinton for the dot com bubble burst, which I don’t hear. Market forces were at play in both cases. Congressional activity affected both. Buyers made foolhardy mortgage agreements, and it caught up with them. Blaming bush for Hurricane Katrina doesn’t hold up either. In fact, the past few weeks indicate that FEMA is far better off with the changes Bush made to it based on the lessons learned from Katrina.

And the war against terrorists, what to make of that? Like the Katrina event, if Bush could have looked into a crystal ball and seen the future, seen the attacks of 9/11, he, like any decent person, would have acted to prevent it. The government under Bush could have been better prepared to deal with the aftermath; both 9/11 and Katrina caught us all unprepared, and unpreparedness is a fair criticism to make of Bush regarding those two events. However, just as FEMA seems better prepared now, so too do we seem much better off regarding terrorist attacks. Bush put into practice a policy toward the Middle East that is far more effective that those of Carter, Reagan, his father, or Clinton. His is tougher to swallow because we have soldiers dying on foreign soil right now, but the country is safer because of their sacrifices. The cliché “we can fight them here or over there” gets overused, but it sure seems accurate. Bush’s policies and military actions have prevented radical Islamic terrorist attacks on American soil for seven years now. That is no small feat, and for me, that is the defining fact of his presidency. I think, therefore, that we all—from national campaign managers to bloggers on P4All need to seriously ask whether or not such sweeping, massive, all-encompassing change is really that desirable.

Well said.