Soccer Dad

Krauthammer for mccain - ii

Charles Krauthammer picks up where he left off last week, and presents part II (or here) of his endorsement of John McCain.

On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved -- the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing. ad_icon

Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment -- a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.

An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.

Like Daniel Henninger yesterday, the alternative is a more Europe like government.

Krauthammer doesn't argue this as passionately as he did last week - the case for differentiation is not as stark. But the important new point is his rebuke - see above - of those supposed centrists who support Sen. Obama because McCain has, somehow, left them.

The domestic case for McCain is more difficult than the foreign policy one, but that's what Krautammer did today.