Primary Endorsement: John McCain

Start out with the obvious: there are four candidates for the Republican nomination. They are John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul.

Now, the next: two of those candidates have a legitimate shot. Two are just sort of hanging around.

Out of the four, I like things about each candidate:

- I like Romney's management experience and his new "Washington outsider" message. He claims to be able to fix problems. I think that this is the message he should have worked the ENTIRE time. A lot of Republicans think the Bush administration was incompetent, too.
- I like John McCain's foreign policy expertise and his distaste for government spending.
- I like Ron Paul's understanding of the economy and his support for limited government.
- I think Mike Huckabee is funny (I'm grasping at straws, here). The national sales tax is intriguing.

Of course, there are things I dislike about all of them, as well:

- I hate that I don't know what I would get if I voted for Romney. His blatant pander to the Michigan automakers was enough for me; he's no free-marketeer if he wants that kind of a bailout.
- I hate that John McCain has a way of belitting things he disagrees with. He called the pharmaceutical companies "bad guys," and he criticized Romney off-handedly for being in a business where he "fired people." At his core, McCain is a little bit hostile to business. It upsets me.
- I hate that Ron Paul is an unrealistic idealist whose failure to compromise on ANYTHING has marginalized him thoroughly. I also hate that he opposes the Civil War and has no historical understanding of the period.
- I hate that Mike Huckabee openly pushes religion in everything, right down to his view of the constitution. Huckabee is why people fear the mix of church and state. Those (like me) who think that religion can have a place in public life should oppose Huckabee as strongly as we can, in unity with the ACLU. Lines have to be drawn.

For all of this, I find John McCain to be a strong candidate. He is not my ideal candidate, but he is a good one, and he is one that I could vote for with pride.

I am taken in by his hardline anti-torture position, in addition to his insistence that Washington "changed" the Gingrich Revolutionaries rather than the other way around. I also liked the way he told Michiganites that the auto manufacturing jobs weren't coming back. Although he's a skeptic about low taxes, I think, he has moved in that direction over the past eight years. His stated reasons for opposing the tax cuts, which were that there weren't corresponding spending cuts, I sympathize with.

I have moved away from McCain's position on campaign finance, but I understand the ideology from where it comes.

More practically, his "straight talk," as he calls it, will play well in an environment particularly hostile to Republicans. There is simply no right for the Republicans to win this year, not after the years of low approval ratings that Bush has gone through. But McCain matches up really well with Hillary, I think. He also could hammer Obama on inexperience. No other Republican would have either luxury.

I wouldn't predict a McCain win at this point, but I would certainly predict a Romney loss.

Again, McCain is not my ideal candidate. But then again, I have never seen my ideal candidate run for public office, and Romney, Paul, or Huckabee certainly don't qualify as better. In this world, McCain is more than sufficient.

I cast my absentee ballot in the NJ primary for John McCain.