McCain is Just Too Predicable

With the sudden aggressive action of Russia against the sovereign country of Georgia, I predicted that John McCain would over-react and use this conflict to show his mastery of foreign policy and understanding of the region. Although I knew he'd do something dramatic, I was really negatively impressed by what he came up with yesterday.

Unlike Obama, who presented a proportioned response appropriate for a presidential candidate who at this point has no particular power nor should overstep the office of the sitting president, McCain came out for a full-blown press conference at a podium in front of a backdrop of American flags. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/07/09/mccain_campaign_restricts_pres.html

As the article points out, this press conference is a gimmick, a stunt, a show. McCain's attempt to look and sound presidential is impressive at first blush, but his bluster is just that, bluster. He used very strong and somewhat aggressive sounding words, but his words are hollow. He at this point has no more power to do anything in the region than Obama, and yet he perseveres, condemning Russia, rattling off names of leaders, landmarks, pipelines as if he wrote the speech himself. As is his usual practice, he demonstrated that he didn't know that name of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYjb7EfhLls

John McCain pulled a fast one yesterday. His new campaign team really has put him in a similar path to the way the Bush-Cheney regime has been run. With his usual group of pool reporters that travel with the McCain campaign sitting on a tarmac many miles away without any knowledge that McCain was about to make a speech, McCain delivered his speech to a much smaller group of local and regional reporters, who did get to ask a few questions, but McCain was spared the more detailed and difficult questions that undoubtedly would have been put to him by the more experienced and seasoned national reporting pool. McCain's speech yesterday brings to mind Bush's speech to an empty square in New Orleans with lights flooding the church while the rest of New Orleans had no power.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, also demonstrated rudimentary knowledge of the region, but without the bluster that McCain presented. This is not the time to grandstand, to attempt to show that you're ready to lead. Being a credible leader means showing restraint, recognizing proportion and reality, and not calling for troops to be sent to Georgia, like McCain did, when our own president is not speaking in the same vein, and which every other military and political leader in this country is not calling for. McCain knows damn well that we don't have the troops available nor are we going to be interfering in a skirmish between two former Soviet states.

As I have said before, I am not impressed with a potential commander-in-chief that gives powerful speeches that carry no actual weight. We have lived with a president for the past eight years that says one thing and does another. My man is Barack Obama, who just doesn't feel the need to fabricate a venue filled with a staged audience, a deception perpetrated on the press, and speech filled with platitudes and sabre rattling and demonstrating that what he's talking about is way over his head. He simply speaks from his heart and uses his head. Go figure.