The last few weeks of the McCain campaign were almost unbearable to witness. While those final weeks helped bring out a lot of truths about Obama, his connections to unrepentant terrorist William Ayres, his real plans for coal, his VP’s warning that their administration might not be a good one “gird your loans” and face testing because of its inexperienced new leader, it also brought out all the worst aspects of McCain and the elected Republicans.

As many have pointed out, Obama was sounding more like Ronald Reagan and less like the liberal Democrat he is in those final weeks. With promises of tax cuts for all (yay, we will see) and almost no talk of the social issues that deeply divide this nation, the President-Elect became so by simply ignoring most issues and raising the prospect of a return to the “Clinton economy.”

McCain on the other hand looked like a baffoon.

It wasn’t McCain’s insistence that he had to go to Washington, suspend his campaign and solve the financial crisis that did him in. Though the media pummeled him on the tactic it would have resonated well enough had the situation been resolved. Rather it was what McCain was traveling to Washington for. A pork-laden $700 spending bill that was a representation of everything that was wrong with the Republican Congress of the early 2000′s.

One of the most intriquing prospects of a McCain candidacy was his insistence he would use the power of the veto to strike down wasteful spending. By pushing that terrible piece of legislation and claiming credit in its craft he subverted every argument that he was a fiscal conservative and removed the possibility that he truly would be a veto ready executive.

Neither candidate had a real solution or a grasp of the issue but McCain’s solution to that dilemma was to embrace an administration that has no credibility and a philosophy that he was supposed to be running against. Not a good solution.

Many conservatives simply stayed home on election day. They were faced with a choice between two men they did not trust and a continuation of an administration that had failed their cause. Would McCain have simply been an extension of the Bush administration as Obama & the Democrats claimed? Until the bailout bill was proposed I did not think so. Maybe the same values but they were different men. McCain may have opened the administration up to accountability.

Watching the bailout drama unfold though I couldn’t help but see the similarity. Two men, willing to do or say anything, ready to give into advisors who yell that the sky is falling but have no evidence, no plan and no competence to carry it out. If McCain’s administration would have been anything like his campaign, we may have been better off without him.

Faced with the prospect of four more years of the failed Adams presidency or embracing his political and philosophical nemesis Thomas Jefferson in the presidency, Alexander Hamilton wrote the following:

“If we must have an enemy at the head of Government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measured.”

I cannot help but think similar thoughts about John McCain though I fear what four or eight years of Obama will do to this country.

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