Erratic McCain, With His Flipflop Thinking and Pinball Decision Making, is Too Reckless to Trust

Here we are with our nation in shambles because of Republican mistakes. There has been a terrible lack of leadership and oversight from the Bush-Cheney White House. McCain-Palin, stocked with Bush aides and ideas. promises to be just more of the same. Four more years of the last eight years.

An economic Katrina has been shattering the confidence of hardworking, middle-class Americans. The war that should never have been in Iraq is dragging on way too long, draining our economy of $10 billion a month that could be used at home for things that matter, like education, better health care, and much needed repaired roads and bridges. We need a change of direction with new drivers at the wheel, not the same folks under a different name at the top.

At a time of huge challenge, the candidate with the intelligence, temperament and judgment to lead our nation to a better place is Sen. Barack Obama. Obama should be the next president of the United States because he is the most qualified change agent.

Obama is a young visionary, not as long in the tooth as McCain, but Obama is also brilliant. If he sometimes seems brainy and professorial, that is actually a good thing. We need a president who is the smartest person in the room, not a hot-tempered flyboy or a blank slate beauty pageant runner-up. We need the leader of the free world to think things through, carefully. We have seen the sorry results of shooting from the hip.

As Clive Crook writes in the Financial Times about Obama’s performance in the current financial crisis: “I do think Mr Obama is handling the crisis much better than Mr McCain - not because he is suggesting better remedies (he continues to say little), but because his instinct to reflect before opening his mouth and his impeccable taste in advisers are both working to his advantage. These factors, I think, are much more important than the supposed popularity of standard Democratic positions on economic management.

“Unlike Mr McCain, Mr Obama offers no instant bold responses needing to be qualified or withdrawn or forgotten soon after. As ever, he looks calm, methodical and unruffled - and has his picture taken in conference with Paul Volcker, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, who command wide respect. His response may be thin, so far, on content, but it is an altogether more reassuring posture than his rival's tendency to hasty and exaggerated certainty. This difference of intellectual temperament has often been seen as one of Obama's biggest drawbacks, including by many of his own supporters. But the complexities of the crisis are putting those traits in a much better light.”

McCain’s mercurial temperament and pinball machine style of decision-making has been on full display in recent weeks, as he lurches from one side to another, sometimes having different positions on the same issue within a few hours. And McCain and his Bush-Rove henchmen proudly proclaim him and Palin as “the original mavericks”, as if that is a wonderful thing. Actually, it just speaks to their instability.

As Matthew Dominowski points out in the Staten Island Notebook, The classic definition of the word maverick is said to derive from an Old West rancher named Sam Maverick, who didn't bother to brand his cattle. “That can't be what McCain's referring to,” Dominowski remarks, “The Republican brand on him is pretty clear and visible."

Dominowski tells us that the term maverick eventually came to refer to an unbranded range calf that, through carelessness or willful recklessness has become separated from its mother. Any cowboy will tell you that mavericks are quickly rounded up and returned to the herd, lest they get picked off by wolves or a mountain lion, or rustled by some of the bad guys out there.

That is McCain in a snapshot – a renegade range calf, willfully reckless – we know he fancies himself as being unpredictable, trying to posit that as some kind of strength. But he has shown himself to be just what the dictionary definition of unpredictable is: capricious, changeable, erratic, fickle, inconsistent, inconstant, mercurial, temperamental, uncertain, unstable, unsteady, variable, volatile…there are more synonyms, but the point is made.

I ask you America, are these the qualities you want in the President of the United States, the man (or woman) with a finger on the nuclear button?