My wife's uncle (a Republican) speaks some truth

[SheilaT]

65. It is always nice to read something that is actually quite thoughtful.

I likewise disagree with the assessment that McCain would have won had he chosen Snowe or a woman other than Sarah Palin as his running mate. I have two thoughts here. First is that McCain was simply a disaster as a candidate. He preferred grandstanding to real campaigning, as noted when he so ostentatiously suspended his campaign when the financial crap hit the revolving blades. Also, I think the people helping run his campaign were focused utterly on image, and not substance.

I recently watched the movie "Game Change" about Sarah Palin's candidacy in 2008. What I found truly disturbing was that the people around McCain, in the lead-up to choosing her, and for some time afterward, first said they needed something to change the game (the campaign they meant), something like, say a female v-p choice. Second, they were blissfully unaware that Democrats had already done that two decades earlier with Geraldine Ferraro, and third they honestly seemed to think that the simple presence of a woman on the ticket, any woman, didn't matter who, was enough to change the game. They so much fell in love with the idea of "Game Change" that they made no effort to find out anything about the woman and were completely blindsided by her profound ignorance and shallowness.

Your wife's uncle seems similarly caught up in not looking beyond a very small picture of politics. McCain was well-respected. Not by everyone, not by a long shot. It was more than obvious to this casual observer that he was too old, too set in his ways, too mean and volatile to be anything other than dangerous as President. He is also an ambitious hypocrite. I was living in Phoenix when he moved from his House district to a better part of the city, well before he declared he was running for the Senate. Oh, well, the good people of Arizona have seen fit to keep him in the Senate all these years.

If you get a chance, ask your wife's uncle why he things so many Republicans don't think people are entitled to health care. I would be genuinely interested in his response.