Yes, McCain would obviously face similar budgeting challenges. I think he would revert back to McCain Version 2000 and hike taxes to help balance the budget. He would not favor the redistributive tax rebates, though, for people who pay no federal income tax. He also would favor less new spending than Obama, to the extent there is any money for new spending. And, his tax increases would be across the board rather than targeted exclusively at the top.

McCain, like Obama, is likely to spend substantial sums on continuing middle east wars. Although McCain, like DeGaulle in Algeria, could probably pull a surprise extraction from one or more theaters with more political cover than Obama. Obama risks being an LBJ. He is also more likely to be *tested,* as Biden says; e.g., with Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine or a nascent NATO country like Lithuania. There is no good argument for Obama on foreign affairs.

Both would pass a new Sarbennes bill to regulate the financial markets. One thing Obama definitely wants to spend money on, although it would not be much in the larger budget, is abortion. He has promised to repeal the Hyde Amendment and make abortion a government benefit. McCain is opposed to that.

McCain also suffers from the artificial nature of conservative ideology of today. All of the supposed hallmarks of conservative thought are largely symbolic, and unrelated to the facts on the ground. Congress engages in posturing, pandering and influence peddling. That happens regardless of which party is in power. The neocon influence throws the old style isolationism from the pre-WWII era overboard to embrace a Wilsonian style of military adventurism. The GOP and conservatism are in flux, and what you see bobbing to the surface are nativism and anti-intellectualism. McCain can hardly be expected to combat this situation alone.

I think that this closely approximates a quote by Primo Levi from "If this is a man"

"You can take everything away from a man but it is the gravest of crimes to take away his dignity"

Reading Gary kamiya's magnificent piece on the death of the rabid form of conservatism that has overtaken the US over the last 30 years or so, I'm struck by essentially one thing. Just how much dignity has been squandered in the public political discourse.

I've always thought that it's quite easy to take seriously someone with opposing views if that person had a basic decency about them, were thoughtful and did not trivialise your position. You could accomodate someone like that. Newt Gingrich's baiting of Bill Clinton is not what comes to mind when I think of such a man. Nor Boehner's crocodile tears for the pain of the military.

Instead in the US, the right wing republican machine has become a horribly shrill echo chamber inhabited by men and women who seem to love nothing more than the lure of easy certainty, and the emotional evacuative thrill of projecting all their inner demons onto 'liberals' in the kind of theological frenzy that one imagines witch trials were carried out with.

I've always suspected that many moderate republicans turned a blind eye to the grand coalition that Rove had constructed for them (the permanent majority - with echoes of a 1000 year Reich) only because it was a demonstrable electoral winning strategy. Until now.

Maybe a thoughtful person drawn to right wing talk radio would find that they weren't quite 'cutting' it, rising above all the noise and thus would harm their own career prospects. But thinking of Lumbaugh and Hannity, a vicious circle is created. Did they become victims of an entertainment culture that required them to jettison intellectual honesty, fairness and politeness or was their meteoric rise a product of their own flawed characters? either way, they were either corrupted or they themselves corrupted national discourse.

These two alone, not to mention (Ann Coulter, O'reilly et al) were responsible for enormous outbreak of demaguogery that has so damaged the genuine interests of the republic.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that another person sees Obama as a threat and finds comfort in the conservative figure of 'war hero/public servant' McCain (we don't want a democratic Reich after all), these are mirror image realities and people are entitled to express their deeply held political alliegances. What I find hard to swallow on either side, is the unthinking support for one's party no matter what the background political context at the time, and the massive desire to abuse anyone who disagrees.

I hope that whatever happens that a new age of dignity and sobriety re-enters American public discourse.

Thanks GK for a great article, you're back on form.

I've long said that the GOP's deadliest weakness is that if it runs hard on its ideological agenda (this includes the various social issues it uses as window dressing for its economic core mission), it loses out because the majority of Americans have moved beyond the cultural conception of the GOP -- most of America is not as racist, homogeneous, militaristic, insular, and ignorant as the GOP would like us to be. If we were, there would only be the GOP, Karl Rove's wet dream of the one-party state would have been in place a long time ago. The GOP alienates most Americans when it runs hardest on its ideological agenda.

The problem the GOP has run into is that it remains mired in a mythical 1950s (or perhaps the 1850s, with regard to some of its economic and social issues, or even 1750s, if you take their Unitary Executive Theory as an un-American, pre-democratic conception of unaccountable, concentrated executive power), being a tightly-disciplined ideological engine that does not tolerate dissent within its ranks -- this lets it trumpet loudly and with focus, but increasingly the national conversation has moved beyond it. Much in the way the rest of the First World (and even some parts of the Third World) are moving ahead, leaving the USA behind -- from unilateralism to multilateralism. The conversations will go on, and the GOP's standard bromides of condemnation, accusation, hysteria, paranoia, purging, and witch-hunting -- well, those leave them largely out of step with most Americans, who increasingly see the need for dialogue instead of diatribes, democracy over demagoguery, diplomacy in place of defensiveness.

In a more tolerant America, a more diverse America, a more democratic America, the Republicans are doomed -- their Brimstone Base gulped down the Kool-Aid, believed their party's own lies, and insisted that the GOP follow the agenda their leadership was only cynically invoking to snooker those benighted people into voting against their class interests to begin with. The smart Republicans are abandoning ship, while the majority of them are still clogging drunkenly down in steerage, marveling at their unsinkable ship's intelligent design, ignoring the icy waters pouring in from all corners, confident that God will save them.