McCain Campaign’s Bad Behavour Causes Esquire to Endorse Senator Obama

The McCain Campaign’s Bad Behavour Causes Esquire to Endorse a Presidential Candidate for the First Time in 75 Years – The following is an excerpt from a statement from Esquire Magazine:

… we did not recommend against John McCain lightly. Over the past two years, we’ve published four substantive pieces about Senator McCain, including one cover profile. He’s a man we have long respected and liked, but the man running for president is a very different man from the John McCain we wrote about two years ago, or 8 months ago, or just a few weeks ago.

The following are two reader comments posted to the above statement. First the humorous one:

yes, I’m waiting for Joe Biden to stand up and say, “Senator, I knew John McCain, I know John McCain, and Senator McCain, you’re no John McCain!!”

Second, the serious one:

This could have come from my own lips. As a retired AF Senior Master Sergeant, I am deeply disappointed in John McCain. He has let his campaign become not only dishonorable, but dangerously divisive. All those in the military (especially my fellow NCOs) must look at this man and decide whether his behavior, and the behavior of those he has surrounded himself with, is even close to the values you believe in and fight for. Is this what is taught in professional military education? Unless the world has gone totally upside-down since 1993, it is most definitely not! Please look at this man — he is not a gentleman; he may have been an officer, but he is no gentleman. And he is creating a very dangerous situation in an effort to “win” — not in an effort to serve. Were it in an effort to serve, he would be demonstrating “a service heart” in his campaign by sharing his heretofore secret methods for catching Bin Ladin, healing the economy, and solving the health care crisis.”

 

An excerpt from the Esquire endorsement article

Obscured by Obama’s dithering is the fact that his Republican counterpart is one of the first presidential candidates in history to run as a parody of himself. John McCain has decided on a cheap and dishonorable campaign. He has embraced the tactics with which he was slandered in 2000, and he has hired the people responsible for them. In so doing, he has become something of a mockery of everything he once purported to be. He has stated that he wouldn’t now vote for his own immigration bill. He has operated in violation of the very campaign-finance law that bears his name. And even though his own body bears the scars of torture, he has silenced himself on the issue of the torture sanctioned and designed by the government he seeks to lead, so as not to alienate “the base.” The most underutilized trope of the campaign is the notion that John McCain is running against John McCain.

Regards,

Jim
Will you listen to your hopes or your fears?