Age and Ideas

8 Reasons to Oppose John McCain #1

John McCain is a very old man. He needs an afternoon nap. He loses energy as the day wears on. If he has to put in too many long days in a row, he's not sharp. He's admitted as much. Clearly, he is much too old to be President. Perhaps worse, he's as old in ideas as he is in age.

For John McCain, politically anyway, the world began and ended with Barry Goldwater in 1964. It was the birth of the modern conservative movement. Our political landscape has been crafted by the conservatives since the ascension of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980. People of all political stripes have even come to accept much of conservative ideology as the truth. (Government? Bad. Taxes? Bad.)

Much of this is the fault of the left though. We watched as Reagan ascended and decided that we had to steal some of his ideas to survive. We adopted much of the same language thinking we could blunt their criticism of ourselves, but we failed. (For more on this, see Bill Scher's Wait! Don't Move to Canada.) We played the game on their turf and we had our asses handed to us. In the battle of ideas, we conceded without a real fight. The result? 28 years of conservative rule by conservative ideas.

The state that we find our Nation in right now is a direct, and inevitable result of the implementation of conservative ideas. The very idea of laissez-faire capitalism has, for the second time in our history, blown up in our faces. How will we deal with this crisis?

John McCain proposes that we haven't been conservative enough. We need a New Deal, and he wants a return to the Age of Reagan. If there's anyone out there who doesn't think things can get worse, then vote for John McCain.