Keep the change

If John McCain wants to win this election, there is one thing he must do immediately: hire me to run his campaign.

His campaign has gained some ground in the past week, striking at some of his opponent’s weaknesses, questioning his ability to lead, and calling Obama on playing the race card. We all know that Obama is all sizzle and no steak, but McCain needs to do better. Show some energy and some passion for the principles you want to advance as President.

Instead we get ads like this: "Washington's broken. John McCain knows it. We're worse off than we were four years ago. Only McCain has taken on Big Tobacco, drug companies, fought corruption in both parties. He'll reform Wall Street, battle Big Oil, make America prosper again." This is an ad I would expect from Barry. Fighting corruption is certainly a good thing, but the government can't make America prosper by fighting the companies which do all the hiring, innovating, and producing which propels our economy.

Here are the issues I would be shouting from the rooftops if I was McCain’s campaign director:

1. The economy. Barack Obama’s policies mean more taxes, more government regulations, higher gas prices, a government-run healthcare disaster, and massively increased transfer of wealth, all in the name of “economic justice” and environmental extremism. But there is nothing “just” about appropriating money from someone who earned it and giving it to someone who did not. If I did that, they would throw me in jail, and rightfully so. Barack Obama would decimate our nation’s economy. John McCain would not raise taxes or increase government intrusion into our lives. He would fight earmarks, expand the drilling for oil, and use free-market principles to grow the economy.

2. The War on Islamofascism. Barack Obama’s ignorance and naivety on foreign policy has been repeatedly displayed by his own statements. Barack would surrender Iraq to the terrorists and meet without preconditions with the thugs and tin-horn dictators from countries which hate America and want to obliterate Israel. Obama would be a pathetically weak President without the spine or the wherewithal to stand up for America’s interests. We need a President with the intestinal fortitude as well as the knowledge and experience to unapologetically lead the greatest nation on earth, not outsource our foreign policy decision making to the UN. With Obama, all you get is namby-pamby feel-good platitudes. I don’t want a “Citizen of the World” as our President. I want someone who is American and proud of it, with the good sense to not spend twenty years attending a Church which spews racist, anti-American hatred. John McCain has loads of experience and knowledge of foreign policy. Comparing McCain to Obama in terms of who I would trust with our national security, McCain wins hands down. They are not even in the same league.

3. Energy independence. This is directly related to both items above. Using our own energy will greatly reduce prices and stop the funding of governments hostile to America. Obama’s plan is to tell people to inflate their tires. The real solution is a lot more complicated than that. We need a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy. In the short term, we need to drill for oil wherever it can be found: off the coast, in ANWR, and any other place where it is economically viable to extract it. The government should not stand in the way of using our resources. In addition, we need to build refineries and nuclear power plants. In the long term, we need to develop viable alternative sources of energy, perhaps hydrogen-fueled cars or fusion power plants. John McCain is right to encourage free market capitalism to be the driving force in that effort. If a certain technology is not economically viable, government should not be subsidizing it or mandating it as Obama supported doing with ethanol. When the market demands it, there will be no stopping the ingenuity of our entrepreneurial engine of productivity.

Ronald Reagan upset the hapless Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential election by focusing on three key issues. He promised that if he was elected President, he would lower taxes, scale back government, and strengthen the military. In 2008 the issues have changed, but by energetically espousing his positions and the principles on which they are built and demonstrating the superiority of his leadership in these specific areas, John McCain could win the election and go to the White House with a clear mandate.