Obama endorsement by George Will?

[almaty 19]

by Frank James

George Will, the nation's best-known conservative columnist and Chicago Cubs fan, may not be cutting an ad for Sen. Barack Obama but in his column today, he sure does seem to be expressing more confidence in the Democratic presidential nominee than in the Republican one, fellow conservative Sen. John McCain.

In his column today, Will repeated the criticism he made on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" that McCain's attack last week on Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox was unpresidential and unbecoming.

Will attributes McCain's call to fire Cox, to McCain's personality which the columnist clearly doesn't believe is the most even-tempered, to say the least:

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending.

A "smear" as "harbinger of a McCain presidency?" With those words, Will certainly isn't giving the McCain campaign anything it can use in an ad. That's pretty caustic stuff.

Will ends his column with these words:

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

While the columnist doesn't answer that question, he makes it pretty clear what side he comes down on.

Meanwhile, he indicates that Obama's defect--his relative lack of experience in national and foreign policy--is remediable by time. Not a full-throated endorsement but still rather striking coming from one of the nation's leading conservative writers

[HAL 9000 96]

McCain is suited to be a fighter pilot. Split-second decision with consequences you live or die with. That 50-50 dichotomy is not appropriate in the world of Presidential politics.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Tell it like it is, George.