McCain in 2008?

Via Praktike's del.icio.us aggregator, I see that the always thought provoking Sebastian Mallaby, author of the wonderful book The World's Banker wrote an op-ed piece in yesterday's WaPo that essentially argues that with the rising discontent over the Bush Administration's fiscal policies, the time is right for John McCain (R-AZ) to step up and claim the mantra of Mr. Good Government. This strikes a chord in me for a number of reasons. One being that I've been a long time admirer of McCain's and have always hoped that he would make another run for High Office in '08. But also, for the fact that while I don't share many of his social views, we are very aligned when it comes to foreign and fiscal policy.

I was a pretty committed fiscal conservative centrist up until very recently. While watching the insanity of Bush's Big Government Conservative (tax cut and raise federal spending an mind boggling 33% in just four years), the reality sunk in that while many Republican's claim to support smaller government, when they got control of the power of the purse, they decided they would spend more money than most Democrats could even dream of. So with that, I decided that fiscal conservativism was indeed dead and anyway in this day and age, given the necessary spending on prosecuting the GWOT and stengthening Homeland Defense, fiscal conservativism made no sense either. As Mallaby succintly points out that with "the small-government right and the big-government left are equally exhausted. The only appealing political platform is good government."

Perhaps in 2008 McCain will be finally able to become President and institute a good, smart program that government will run on. Although my big fear is that by time the primaries roll around, the country will be so sick of Republican rule that they knee-jerkily turn to the Democrats to run the show. That is unless McCain is able to seperate himself enough from the Republicans in the eyes of mainstream America while still maintaining a viable party connection to give him backing. Time will certainly tell.