McCain vs. Obama

We all got a pretty good look last night at the two candidates who, it now appears, will be facing off over the next few months. McCain's speech was great - on paper - but pretty awful as public campaign speeches go. Obama, on the other hand, gave a very good speech. He had something like 17,000 people in that auditorium, with another mile-and-a-half-long line of folks waiting to get in. The guy can give a speech, and unfortunately, for a lot of Americans, that ability trumps anything else. People are so tired of hearing Bush trip over himself trying to say the word "newkyaler", that they're willing to take anyone who can articulate himself clearly.

Many in GOP circles are writing this off as irrelevant, but I'm not so sure. In my last post, I made the case that Americans will eventually want to hear about what these men will do once elected - sure, it helps that they can say it with passion - but they'll want more than empty, generic promises. Well, I'm not so sure anymore. Obamania seems to be more pervasive than an airborne virus. And what exactly did Obama do to get elevated to this position, other than give great speeches?

Let's see, he's been a state senator in Illinois and a U.S. Senator for less than half a term. He has, literally, no other experience in anything that would even come close to qualifying him for this office, and yet folks started jumping on this bandwagon before they even knew anything about him. People have been fainting in his presence...does he have a problem with bad breath? He's not particularly handsome, so I'm really at a loss to explain this phenomenon. This man should be any political candidate's dream opponent! And yet, as a conservative with serious concerns over the future of this nation as it will exist for my daughter and her children, I'm not optimistic.

I'm not a huge fan of John McCain, but we've got to do everything we can to get him elected. He'll make a lot of bad decisions - he's already shown a propensity for abandoning conservatism - but the alternative is unthinkable. On the one hand we have a moderate, but still conservative, man who will be a strong, experienced leader against an increasingly hostile world. On the other, we have an elitist socialist, who promises to make Jimmy Carter's coddling of anti-American dictators look like child's play. Imagine a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, and a president with an agenda that would make a Marxist blush. Higher taxes, increased spending, socialized healthcare, surrender to Al-Qaeda, and more nanny-state government would only be the beginning...