mycatharsis.com

He actually gave, from the looks of the text, quite a good speech, and started to contrast his differences with Clinton and Obama in a way I think could be very effective come a general election.  Still, for all his talk about wanting smaller government,  the standard I hold these Republicans to is higher than simply effective words.  For all the talk about small government, they’ve expanded it at every turn the last few years, and it almost seems they’re blind to how they’re doing it.  It’s going to take awhile before I’m convinced that I can trust a Republican with stewardship of our constitutional freedoms.   Take this section, for example:

Whomever the Democrats nominate, they would govern this country in a way that will, in my opinion, take this country backward to the days when government felt empowered to take from us our freedom to decide for ourselves the course and quality of our lives; to substitute the muddled judgment of large and expanding federal bureaucracies for the common sense and values of the American people; to the timidity and wishful thinking of a time when we averted our eyes from terrible threats to our security that were so plainly gathering strength abroad. It is shameful and dangerous that Senate Democrats are blocking an extension of surveillance powers that enable our intelligence and law enforcement to defend our country against radical Islamic extremists. 

In one sentence he deplores the expansive growth of a government that allowed it to feel free to interfere in the lives of it’s law-abiding citizens.  Very prosaic, I love that sentence and it hits me right where I’m concerned.  But with very little transition, in the very next sentence he also criticizes how the Democrats are delaying passage of a bill that allows the government to spy on it’s own citizens, while at the same time giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies that willfully turned over all their customer records to the government on request.  It makes you wonder if they ‘get it’.

I liked McCain a lot in 2000.  But 2000 was also the era of a ‘humble foreign policy’, ‘not being the policemen of the world’, and smaller, nonintrusive government, all ideas that have been pushed off to the fringe by today’s GOP.  And I like where McCain breaks with the Republicans today, on issues of torture, immigration, etc, I am more in agreement with him than not.  He’s no Ron Paul, though, and he’s going to have to do some major convincing with me that he really is dedicated to expanded personal freedom,  and protecting the Constitution before I vote for him over Hillary Clinton.  And I’m not sure he’d have any chance of convincing me to vote for him over Barack Obama.   But at least he has a chance to convince us now that he can start crafting a general election message.  We’ll see …