At some point in this year's presidential campaign, the somewhat timid John McCain is going to be faced with a serious dilemma: He won't be able to disagree with Barack Obama (Or Hilary Clinton should the unexpected happen) at all, ever. As soon as he says anything the least bit confrontational, the mainstream media will immediately pounce on him for being racist. (Or sexist if it's Hilary.) So far, they have been biting their tongue in this regard during the primaries because they can hardly oppose either Obama or Hilary on any such frivolous grounds, but they won't hesitate to attack John McCain. Even though he thinks of himself as a media darling, he won't get any favors once the electoral battle ensues in earnest.
Barack's lack of experience, totally socialist policies, or left wing foreign policy won't likely ever even be brought up. McCain won't dare for fear of being branded racist. He will inevitably try to be the nice guy and that's frightening. The last "nice guy" to run for president on the Republican ticket was Bob Dole -- and he lost big time to a feckless, inexperienced Bill Clinton.
Unless McCain is able to get past this natural reticence to disagree with his opponents, he is doomed to follow Bob Dole and that will presage a bleak eight year for the GOP. John McCain has always gone out of his way to reach "across this aisle" to the Democrats. He has thrown his Republican colleagues under the bus to side with Democrat senators, sided with Tim Russert and George Stephanopolis, allied himself with Ted Kennedy. If he thinks he will get any mileage from any of these, he is most sadly mistaken.
Here's hoping his advisors will make him see that he needs to start disagreeing loudly and often with Obama and Hilary, and he needs to couch each and every point in the fact that their race or sex has nothing at all to do with his disagreement. He needs to disarm the race baiters of this world up front, take away their case that he is somehow racist for daring to disagree with his opponent's left-wing agenda. The future of our country depends on it.
