Anybody who knows me even a little can probably vouch for my status and an unabashed liberal. I will pretty much automatically vote for whoever the Democrat is in any statewide or national election, although if I had my way we might actually get stuck with a President Kucinich.
But I actually feel a little bit sorry for John McCain.
It's not that he's waited so long for his chance and now appears to be on his way to defeat (although, by the way, let's not count our chickens before they hatch here, we still have to go vote for Obama tomorrow for him to win). It's that even if he does win, he's given himself over so thoroughly to the demons of Rove-style right wing politics.
The lesson that McCain took from George W. Bush's victories was apparently that playing to the base (and/or the lowest common denominator) wins, especially if you do so in the lowest, crudest, most misleading, and plainly insulting manner possible. Bush sunk McCain in the 2000 primaries with the most shamelessly sleazy campaign ever seen, and McCain, having absorbed this information, has been applying it to his 2008 campaign against Obama, robo-calls and all.
What he didn't realize was that Bush's victories in the general elections were by fractional margins (the national margin in 2004 was 2.4%, and of course he famously didn't even win the popular vote in 2000), against Democratic opponents far less organized and less convincing than Obama, in times less turbulent than now. So while Rove politics did edge out Kerry in 2004 (the Swift Boat controversy comes to mind, although that was not strictly from the Bush campaign), in 2008 the entire economy damn near collapsed, and McCain's campaign is still flailing about hoping that people are going to care about Obama's "involvement" with William Ayers that happened 7 years ago. Obama has clear, agreeable messages about tax reform and the economy, and McCain has Joe Biden's words taken out of context against images of rallies and soldiers in Arabic countries. Obama speaks for crowds of tens of thousands of people, and McCain acts as if Obama's massive popularity and eminent likability is somehow a negative trait.
It would be just another dirty campaign run by a Republican, except for the fact that McCain is actually NOT just another Republican. McCain's nauseating repetition of the word "maverick" is actually justified by his actions in the Senate. He has consistently stood up to his party, worked for smart bipartisan compromises, and shows a willingness to listen and learn that Bush would probably find foolish (this is a compliment). He's stubbornly resisted the extreme right wing of his party, taking moderate (and, dare I say, liberal) stances in the past on abortion, campaign finance, and immigration, among others. He's the one who publicly called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance." He was still pretty solidly conservative, but he was the type of conservative I could actually respect, even if I'd never vote for him.
And now here he is, at the tail end of a campaign marked by misleading statements and outright lies, fearmongering, anti-intellectualism, subtle racism, hypocrisy, and, of course, Sarah fucking Palin, the ultimate physical manifestation of ignorance, and for what? If McCain loses, he can't flip a switch and go back to the McCain who was in the Senate in 2000, pretending that he hasn't done what he's done and said what he's said for the past year and a half. If he wins, he's bound to the far right wing of the Republican party that will have put him there, which means no pro-choice Supreme court justices, no immigration reform, and no courting the Democrat-controlled Congress with the reasonable compromises that are his specialty. Win or lose, John McCain has sold his soul.
All of which is to say...
Vote Obama.
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