Phil Gramm — remember him? — steps momentarily out of silent retirement to say, in today’s Wall Street Journal, why he supports John McCain for president. An excerpt:
Today’s mortal need is for a leader who trusts our people enough to tell them the truth about the festering domestic problems that have been swept under the rug for a
quarter-century. We need a president who can face up to these problems even as he leads an increasingly reluctant country in a war against a dangerous enemy that will follow us home from any battlefield on which we are defeated….
I believe the man we need to meet the mortal need today is here. He is experienced, but has not lost his common sense or his ability to be outraged. His conservatism is not the result of a studied philosophy, but of common sense and personal observation. His name is John McCain. He might not be the right president for all times, but he is the right president for these times.
Of course, he goes on to give his specific reasons. One, of course, is that he sees the man from Arizona as being serious about addressing deficit spending.
This seems a good moment to make a point: Readers of this blog know I like McCain. That is not to say this newspaper will endorse him in 2008. I was just as strongly for him in 2000, and we ended up backing Bush at that particularly critical moment in the GOP nominating process. I don’t always win these debates, you know.
I liked him then and I like him now. As we go through this process, I’ll get plenty of opportunities to find out who else, if anyone, I like. My colleagues will do the same. How that will come out, I don’t know.
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Mr. Doubletalk express will probably win in South Carolina but his war-mongering, domestic-issue flip flopping and age will undo any chance of his becoming president.
John McCain has never proposed a balanced budget, never voted for one, and never proposed any major reductions in spending that would have ended deficits these last 6 years of greatly increased revenue from the booming economy.
Brad, I just don’t know about McCain this time. I was a big supporter of his 8 years ago. I help build and placed the large highway signs and everything. Boy, his SC organization really stunk. I think 50% of the paid people were really Bush supporters. I lost all faith in the political system with that campaign. I really wonder what the world would be like today if McCain had won that primary. However, this year all the SC Republican establishment AH’s that hated him 8 years ago are supporting him. I can’t stand the stench of those former Bush supporters around him now. More reason for me to be completely disillusioned with politics. I will vote for him in the Primary but, for me, the bottom line now is he is too old. We’ll see. Oh and Steve, in 4th grade English they taught me that it is “a fool” not “an fool”, an comes before vowels if you know what those are. Calling McCain a traitor after he spent 7 years in a prison camp, that take a real man to do that. You probably were not even born when he was being beaten and tortured on a daily basis.