What if you substituted another name in the New York Times Op-Ed below for John McCain?

What if you substituted another name in the New York Times Op-Ed below for John McCain? Say you substitute Ralph Nadir for John McCain. He begins to look like someone that Democrats can vote for. That is why the Democratic Party needs someone with real charisma at the top of the ticket and not someone who’s is running her election in the “charisma shadow” of Bill Clinton.

I could easily vote for Bill Clinton again, but he is not running, Hillary is. And In my humble opinion Hillary is a much harder sell than John Kerry. They both are honorable people who would technically make good presidents. The problem is that in public they are “cold fish”. Neither one can inspire a nation.

The problems that we face require a president that can do more than unite us we need a president like Franklin Roosevelt. Hilleary is light-years away from that, McCain’s failing is that he wants to fight an unneeded and un-affordable for ever and ever war in Iraq. We have a fighting chance with Barack Obama.
Jim Pitcherella




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March 26, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
John McCain Wants You
By MATT WELCH
Washington
BEHIND any successful politician lies a usable contradiction, and John McCain’s is this: We love him (and occasionally hate him) for his stubborn individualism, yet his politics are best understood as a decade-long attack on the individual.
The presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party has seduced the press and the public with frank confessions of his failings, from his hard-living flyboy days to his adulterous first marriage to the Keating Five scandal. But in both legislation and rhetoric, Mr. McCain has consistently sought to restrict the very freedoms he once exercised, in the common national enterprise of “serving a cause greater than self-interest.”
Such sentiment can sound stirring coming from a lone citizen freely choosing public service. But from a potential president, Mr. McCain’s exaltation of sacrifice over the private pursuit of happiness — “I did it out of patriotism, not for profit,” he snarled to Mitt Romney during the final Republican presidential debate — reflects a worryingly militaristic view of citizenship.
“We are fast becoming a nation of alienating individualists, unwilling to put the unifying values of patriotism ahead of our narrow self-interests,” Mr. McCain warned in a speech during his 2000 presidential campaign. He added that “cynicism threatens to become a ceiling on our greatness.”
Where there are threats to national greatness, there are activities that Mr. McCain insists the federal government should curtail. And the most maverick individuals among us are destined to bear the brunt.
Teenagers are cynical about professional sports because of steroids (a “transcendent issue,” Mr. McCain once thundered in the Senate), so he has proposed that the government be given the authority to demand that even Division II college athletes be subject to the personal intrusion of random drug testing and punishment. Likewise, because betting on college sports could make one cynical about games possibly being thrown, Mr. McCain wanted to make that a federal offense.
The senator’s ideas for “reform” — taxing cigarettes, banning ultimate fighting, giving the president a line-item veto — typically empower the executive branch at the expense of American citizens and their representatives. Even his efforts to prohibit torture and overhaul immigration proved hostile to individual rights. His ban on the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees was packaged with provisions that jeopardized habeas corpus. And his immigration bill would have required American workers to prove their citizenship.
Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in Mr. McCain’s signature issue: the corrupting influence of money in politics. His solution, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, placed onerous restrictions on citizens who have no affiliation with sitting politicians.
Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/opinion/26gabler.html?hp