John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Honor

I've said before that I would never sit out an election.

It's unthinkable. It's disgraceful for the likes of Rick Santorum and Tom DeLay to state that they would rather not vote at all than vote for John McCain.

Plenty of times I've had to choose the lesser of two or three evils. If that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. But under no circumstances would I opt out of an election.

If John McCain ends up being the Republican nominee, he'll get my vote. Plenty of conservatives have delineated his numerous faults. No need for me to reiterate.

In spite of McCain's inadequacies, I consider him to be dramatically better than any of the Democrat candidates.

I don't see a third party candidate being an option. If Michael Bloomberg has lied and he does run, I would have no interest whatsoever in supporting him.

Although I won't vote for McCain in Wisconsin's February 19 primary, it's possible that I will be voting for him in November.

If I have to, I will. I probably wouldn't feel good about it, but I'll do what I have to do to keep a high tax, socialized medicine, weak on terror liberal out of the White House.

Just when I think that I've come to terms with the notion of voting for McCain, then another problem surfaces.

This one isn't just a policy difference, like McCain-Feingold, his opposition to President Bush's tax cuts, or his position on amnesty for illegal immigrants.

This is one gets to the heart of his character.

Kathryn Jean Lopez writes about a "great American’s not-so-great political attack" in her column "Dishonor on the Campaign Trail."

On Saturday, the McCain campaign worked the news cycle well, but at the cost of straight talk.

On Saturday afternoon, the McCain campaign issued the following statement: “Mitt Romney’s position on the war in Iraq has been a study in flexibility. Like every other issue of importance in this race, Mitt Romney has changed his position. On April 3, 2007 he advocated secret timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. His exact words were ‘of course you have to work together to create timetables and milestones.’ In October 2007, Romney said that Hillary Clinton, who supports Iraq withdrawal, is ‘not going to be demanding a dramatically different course in Iraq than the Republican nominee will.’ These statements, along with Romney’s inability to stick with a consistent position, provide further evidence that he lacks the critical experience and judgment necessary to lead as commander in chief.”

It was a dishonest line of attack. During an April TV interview — as anyone who clicked on a link that was provided to me by the McCain campaign can see for themselves — Mitt Romney said that of course there have to be some agreed-upon benchmarks for progress (including, yes, timetables) between the U.S. and Iraq, at least privately. John McCain himself had been suggesting something even more official, but along the same lines, in January of the same year.

All Saturday, his accusation that Mitt Romney has been for a withdrawal timetable in Iraq was the Republican presidential news story, as everyone waited for South Carolina primary results for the Democrats. By the time folks from Mark Levin and myself on National Review Online’s “The Corner” to the New York Times and Time magazine’s political blog had concluded that McCain’s line of attack was baseless, the new story was Florida governor Charlie Crist’s endorsement of McCain. A winning Saturday for the McCain campaign, if they were aiming for Florida residents watching cable news on Saturday. The storyline continued into Sunday, as he repeated the charge on Meet the Press and the issue continued to be debated on NRO and elsewhere.

...McCain is fond of saying he’d rather lose a political campaign than a war; he now seems to be swimming close to using the war to win a political campaign in the most dishonest of ways. It’s conduct unbecoming a man we all respect.

I agree. Straight talker McCain is better than this.

The first question from Tim Russert on Meet the Press dealt with McCain's charges that Romney called for timetables.

McCain had a national audience and an opportunity to retract his misleading statements about Romney. Instead, he chose to continue the ruse that he and Romney differ on Iraq policy.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, when she suggested timetables, you said was waving the white flag of surrender. Is Governor Romney waving the white flag?

SEN. McCAIN: Well, actually, Tim, what Senator Clinton said was that you would set a timetable within 60 days of withdrawal, complete withdrawal from Iraq. To me that's surrender. And I think in most people's view that would be surrender if we told al-Qaeda that we are leaving Iraq within a certain period of time.

MR. RUSSERT: Is Governor Romney suggesting surrender?

SEN. McCAIN: I said that he has said--is wrong, and I think he has equivocated on it. In one of the debates, he said the serve-- surge is "apparently working." It was working. It wasn't apparently. Look, these were tough time in American history, and I think historians will look back at April of 2000 when Harry Reid, the majority leader of the United States Senate, declared the war lost; when Republicans, even, were saying that we had to have "timetables" because we needed to get out of there. That was a critical time. I'm proud of the role that I played at that time. And I don't believe that Governor Romney's statement indicated anything but that we were going to tell--we were going to have a timetable for withdrawal.

That's dishonorable.

As Lopez notes, "John McCain and Mitt Romney are on the same side of this war. To pretend otherwise is wrong and is no honorable way to win."