A lot to like about McCain

By Craig Ziemba / guest columnist

February 17, 2008 12:22 am

— I’m taken aback at some of the harsh rhetoric leveled at Senator John McCain by fellow conservatives. It’s true that he was dead wrong about the Immigration amnesty bill (as was the President). It’s true that his McCain/Feingold bill ended up doing more harm than good to conservative causes and didn’t accomplish its objective at reducing the amount and influence of money in elected politics. And it’s true he’s been more of a hell-raiser than an evangelical.
But all that aside, there’s much more for ideological conservatives to like about the nomination of John McCain than there is to lament. As Senator Tom Coburn, (the most stalwart conservative in the entire Congress) stated during McCain’s introduction to CPAC, there are two issues that determine whether or not America will survive: global Islamic jihadism and runaway Congressional spending. McCain has been right on both even when the rest of the GOP lost its way.
McCain has been the strongest and most consistent voice in Congress urging our nation to wage and win the war against Islamic totalitarianism. He was right about the need for more troops to stabilize Iraq, right about the importance of defeating Al Queda in Afghanistan and Iraq, and right about the disastrous consequences that would follow should we withdraw from Iraq and allow the terrorists an unearned victory.
Rarely does a nation have an opportunity to elect a Commander-in-Chief who has demonstrated as much personal courage. After being shot down out of an A-4 over Vietnam, John McCain spent five years being starved, tortured, and abused as a Prisoner of War. But when the Vietcong offered him an early release because his father was a Navy Admiral, John McCain turned it down.
Party insiders don’t understand John McCain’s independent streak and cockiness because tassel-loafered lawyers and lobbyists live in an entirely different world than combat aviators. They’ve heightened nuance, compromise, and cloak room politics into an art form and are good at sounding important while saying nothing. By comparison, John McCain is a verbal bull in a china shop. But voters get it, and evidently we like it.
Many conservative pundits claim that John McCain isn’t a conservative. I’ve disagreed with John McCain on some important social issues like embryonic stem cell research and whether or not we need a Constitutional amendment protecting marriage. But his record has consistently been far more conservative than other senators who are still called conservative by the punditocracy. Senator McCain has been consistently pro-life, anti-tax, and pro-defense throughout his career and he voted for the nominations of Bork, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito.
But the real reason that many Republican Party insiders don’t like McCain is that he had the courage to stand up to the GOP on the issue of money. For years John McCain has waged a principled war against runaway government spending correctly arguing that it bankrupts us in the present and mortgages future generations into paying higher taxes.
Senator McCain was one of only 11 Republican senators to vote against the bridge to nowhere in Alaska. He has promised that, “I will not sign a bill-any bill-with earmarks in it.” Time and again he has stood on the Senate floor and pointed out one wasteful earmark after another. In an almost quixotic crusade against waste he has bucked his own party’s leadership and exposed them for the fiscal hypocrites they are. That takes both courage and the commitment to smaller government that we conservatives are supposed to share.
That’s why as a conservative, I was glad to cast my absentee ballot yesterday from overseas for John McCain.

Craig Ziemba is a pilot who lives in Meridian. His book, Give War a Chance is available at Meridian Bible Bookstores.