Compromising Positions
May 22nd, 2008In running for President, John McCain must feel like he is being pulled apart from all directions, and so must Barack Obama for that matter. Both candidates must seek and receive the support of people who they might find morally or politically wrong, and the campaign process often forces people to make claims they would not otherwise be willing to make. Now that McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, he has had to find the support of leaders from the Religious Right, which he has forcefully criticized in the past but has now come home to. Today was an embarrassing one for McCain, as he had to distance himself from the pastor John Hagee after he said Hitler was doing God’s will and the Catholic Church is a “whore.” The irony is that there’s no way he’d be seeking Hagee’s support if he weren’t running for President, but now he is being humiliated by the process. I guess it is impossible to have a full campaign of this length without trivial arguments or the involvement of embarrassing “friends,” but can’t we at least have a shorter one so that we don’t have to deal with so much nonsense?