Is John McCain Bob Dole 2.0?
The similarities are kind of eerie. The GOP candidate is a veteran, a war hero. He is a man of substance, whether you agree with him or not. A foreign policy expert. A long-time US Senator and a man who has tried before to be the nominee and finally gets his turn. A pretty poor prepared speaker, an older figure who fails to appeal to younger voters.
On the other side is the latest Bill Clinton, a hip candidate with minimal qualifications (a first term senator today, governor of Arkansas then) He appeals to crowds with energizing, but empty speeches. He is long on feigned empathy, short on specifics. Young people like him because he is not like those stodgy old candidates. He appears on all of the cool TV shows, and looks and sounds great in front of a teleprompter. (As a side note both have strong willed wives with a but of a temper, but that is a different topic)
Makes me nervous. McCain is hardly an ideal candidate, and was pretty far down my list of candidates, but he is a world better than Obama. But the GOP base is not energized, the liberals are energized and in times of economic woes the leftist message of blame someone else, soak them with taxes and give it to me resonates. This may be yet another example of the far better qualified candidate getting beat by a TV friendly candidate, and that would be a disaster for America.
2 comments:
The biggest difference between Dole and McCain is that Dole was/is a true conservative (or, at least, closer to the standard definition of a true conservative than McCain).
Well that and McCain doesn't speak about himself in the third person.
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