Listen Up, John McCain!

Burt Prelutsky
Monday, October 06, 2008

As you may have guessed, I don’t personally know the Republican candidate for president. I’ve never met him and I expect I never will. I’m sure that if I’d been in a position to fork over $5,000 for dinner at a fund-raiser, it could have been easily arranged. However, I have one unbreakable rule: If I pay $5,000 to have dinner with someone, he’s then going to have to cough up $5,000 pretty darn quick to have dinner with me. And, frankly, he’d get a lot more for his money than I’d get for mine. That’s because he couldn’t help me become a better writer, but I could certainly help him get elected.

For openers, I’d tell him to quit treating Obama like an equal. When he keeps calling you “John,” you don’t keep calling him “Senator Obama.” When Ronald Reagan debated with Walter Mondale, he made light of his advanced age by saying that he hoped the voters wouldn’t hold his opponent’s relative youth and lack of experience against him. Of course, McCain lacks Reagan’s personality and ability to deliver an amusing line. Who doesn’t? But that’s no excuse for praising Obama’s background as a community organizer when everybody knows, or certainly should know, that’s code for a left-wing activist.

In Obama’s case, being a community organizer was just a way, like joining Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist church, to go about developing street creds so he could get the hell out of the community and into the Illinois legislature.

There was no reason for McCain to avoid tying Obama to Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, the current economic crisis and ACORN, just as there was no good reason to neglect pinning the earmark tail on this particular donkey; especially when Obama has rapidly become one of Washington’s leading pork merchants. Furthermore, when debating their opposing views on taxes, why didn’t McCain mention the fact that Obama has signed on in support of the U.N.’s multi-billion dollar plan to erase global poverty? This would have been particularly telling because, as even Democrats know, just about every bill the U.N. runs up is paid for by the American taxpayer. I say if Obama wants his cousin in Kenya to move out of that unheated shack we keep hearing about, he and Michelle should send him a few bucks and leave the rest of us out of it.

I am troubled by the thought that McCain’s reluctance to tell the unpleasant truth about Barack Obama is because the very junior senator is 50% blacker than he is. It’s bad enough that 90% of black voters decided on no other basis than race to vote for Obama, the allegedly post-racial messiah, when he was running against Hillary Clinton. It will be fatal for McCain if he continues to shy away from confronting his opponent, a radical Marxist and cheap political hack, simply because he lacks the guts to call a spade a spade.

Something else I don’t comprehend is why presidential candidates, who always insist they’re ready to govern on day one, don’t make a point of telling us who will be in their cabinet on that fateful day. I don’t see how it would hurt McCain to let us know that when he and Cindy move into the White House, some of the folks seated around the big table will include the likes of Defense Secretary Joe Lieberman, Treasury Secretary Mitt Romney, Chief of Homeland Security Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Newt Gingrich.

In much the same way, I’d love to know what positions Jesse Jackson, Charles Schumer, Richard Durbin, Barney Frank, Barbara Boxer, George Soros and Charles Rangel, would hold in an Obama administration. Of course, I’m assuming that Bill Clinton would be the official food taster.