McCain's Platform Doesn't Reflect McCain's Policies
Should John McCain just let Sarah go ahead and run for president? Perhaps the answer, using the McCain campaign's own reasoning is that she ought to. In fact, Stephen Colbert argued last week that based on McCain's "executive experience" argument, Palin ought to lead the ticket.
At Crooks and Liars, Jon Perr argues that McCain's detachment/exclusion from the process of selecting the planks that make up his own platform ought to mark him out to anyone paying attention that we have no business putting him charge of the federal government.
"As McCain himself admits, he just doesn’t care about details of policy; his campaign is about putting winning, and not country, first." (C&L) But is anyone even interested in McCain anymore? So polarizing is Palin (no pun intended, honestly) that even those of us who know it's time to change the subject to McCain and his policies (or rather, his lack thereof) can't stop talking about her.
It's no surprise, therefore, that on the abortion issue, Palin has simply taken his raw lumber and toolkit off him and constructed her own directly on the spot where his---after all, and this is the fact I just can't get over, he was presumably picked by Republican moderates--- was supposed to be. .
As Perr says, McCain's current position on abortion seems to have surprised Cindy McCain.
By rejecting John McCain’s limited proposed exemptions for cases involving rape, incest and the life of the mother, the GOP’s hard-line abortion banning plank echoes not its presidential nominee, but his running mate Sarah Palin.....
Unlike Barack Obama, who personally intervened to help create a new abortion plank in the Democratic platform, John McCain left the GOP committee to its own devices in producing a document that is far more radical than even McCain’s own draconian anti-abortion stand.
In reaching out to his party’s religious right, John McCain famously reversed course on overturning Roe v. Wade. But as the Washington Post noted Monday, McCain in a May interview still claimed to support exemptions for abortions in cases involving rape, incest or the life of the mother: (C&L)
It's my impression that Palin recognized an exemption if the life of the mother is at stake, but I don't know where I saw it, and I could be wrong. I'm too tired to look it up and it doesn't matter to me anyway, since I think both she and he are wrong from beginning to end on this issue.
They can believe what they like, but the evidence on which they base their objections to allowing others to decide for themselves is much too tenuous to justify them in cramming those beliefs down the throats of those who believe, say, what John McCain used to believe.
Anyway, that's not the end of his detachment/exclusion from the process of preparing the party platform. As Perr says, " On same-sex marriage, immigration and stem cell research as well, the GOP bucked McCain each and every time."
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