I’m a reluctant McCain supporter. He might do considerable damage to our nation, not least because of his view on immigration, but the damage of a McCain administration is nothing compared to the vast institutionalization of the radical Left that Obama would usher in. McCain’s attractions for me lie almost entirely in his being the only viable alternative to Obama. I do like Palin, and that makes it a little easier to support McCain. She connects the Republican ticket to something deep and genuine in the American experience.

My principle in weighing the candidates is this: I’d like to preserve as much of traditional American culture and values as possible in an era in which these are under terrific assault from the mass media, the schools, higher education, and the nation’s anointed elite. Obama is the near perfect embodiment of this assault: a leftist race agitator who is also a polished Harvard Law School elitist. The perfection extends to his personal qualities. Though he stands politically for policies that reduce people to swinishness and though he has wallowed in political corruption for many years, he comes across as disciplined or even ascetic in his habits. This seems to make his entanglement with radicals like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers incidental.

In the world of higher education, I am used to meeting Obama-like people who combine facile intellectualism, pride in high-minded utopian principles, and outright thuggery. They dream of ruling America the way they rule the campuses. Obama seems likely to make the dream come true.

McCain? An old man with tangled roots in America’s past. He trusts his intuition way too much and like the elder Bush is often a sucker for liberal bromides that he doesn’t recognize as such. I see him as a very flawed man and a flawed candidate, but he does genuinely love America. That’s something. And it is utterly absent from Obama. 

Peter W. Wood is executive director of the National Association of Scholars and author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now. The views expressed herein are his own.

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