After another year of domestic turmoil and political shenanigans, a year of watching President Obama in office rather than out on the campaign trail, I find myself frequently having the thought “if only McCain had been elected President instead.”
The thought came again today but unlike previous times I feel like sharing what would likely have happened in a McCain administration to this point.
If McCain had been president he would not have received the Nobel Peace Prize and Justice Souter would not have retired so he would not likely have named any justices to the Supreme Court by this point in his presidency. As far as issues that he would have dealt with that Obama has been dealing with I would like to address health care legislation, auto bailouts, stimulus, and Iran.
Obama took over a year to get any health care legislation to his desk. McCain would have dealt with the issue much more quickly. There are three possible outcomes that we might have seen. One is that Congress sent another piece of sausage like a scaled down version of what Obama got and McCain would have signed in a less expensive bill that, like the current bill, would have done little if anything to alleviate the problems we see. Another possibility is that Congress would send him a bill that was “too socialist” and McCain would then veto it. The final possibility is that Congress would conclude that they could not pass a bill that McCain would sign and they would abandon the issue and focus on other priorities. In any of the cases we would have less debt and as large of problems as we now have but the issue would have been over no later than Thanksgiving.
On the auto bailouts McCain would have grumbled more than Obama did about how undesireable it was for government to take over these large institutions. Then he would have “grudgingly” done almost exactly the same thing as Obama.
When the issue of a stimulus package was on the table McCain would have acted as quickly as Obama but the package might have been marginally smaller and there would have been a lot less verbiage about “green jobs.”
The biggest difference between the Obama presidency and a McCain presidency (besides the Nobel Peace Prize of course) would be on the issue of Iran. Obama is now talking about international sanctions whereas McCain would have done that before most of the rest of us had even become aware of the outcome of their elections last year. By now he would have us at war (more than offsetting any pittance we might have saved on smaller health care and stimulus legislation) unless, simply by the fact of his election, the anti-war wing of liberals had remained fired up. Instead, now that Obama is talking sanctions, it is the right move rather than being a code for ramping up for war (as it would have been viewed had McCain done the talking).
My point, of course, is that who we elect as President has surprisingly little bearing on what challenges we face or how badly our mangled political culture mishandles them. It’s definitely time for a change and I hope that the American people will soon be able to recognize the difference between real change and a change of posture.
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