McCain v Obama: Leadership

The third area of contrast I would present between McCain and Obama is in what we know about their leadership ability. I think it’s fair to say that the summation of all Obama’s resume of high-level leadership experience is this: he has run some effective political campaigns and been elected to office. He has served as a leader in the Illinois state legislature, and is just into his second term in the U.S. Senate. That to me is a fairly thin portfolio for the person who would be leader of the free world. (I will avoid here the temptation I feel to regret the fact that we lost out on the candidate with the strongest and most compelling leadership experience resume: Mitt Romney…[sigh]…)

However, I will give him this aspect of leadership ability: he is inspiring and can capture an audience. This is one very important element of leadership, but of course not the only important element.

John McCain, in contrast, has been a leader of men in the military, has also led many successful political campaigns, and has been a political leader of a number of political causes. And although there are a number of those political causes which I personally disagreed with him on, there’s no question he has a lot more political courage than most, as he has shown a willingness to take on both political friends and political enemies for those causes. If you want a President with political backbone, who is willing to stand on principle rather than polls and popularity, then John McCain is clearly your man.

Barack Obama has not shown a similar inclination to act on principle rather than party, in that he has been perhaps the most consistent party-line and liberal vote in the Senate, as evidenced by his ranking as 2007's "most liberal senator" based on a liberal think tank ranking. If it really has been his principles rather than party affiliation that have led to this record, then he certainly is not in the American mainstream in his beliefs and policies. As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer noted in a Jan 13^th 2008 article: “The freest of all passes to Obama [from the media] is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy—the bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn, on every policy, an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat. He doesn’t even offer a modest deviation from orthodoxy.”