George Will Says McCain Unfit for Presidency

George F. Will is one of the most respected deans of American journalism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and commentator's credentials go all the way back to the National Review in 1972. He has written an erudite and thoughtfully conservative column twice a week in the Washington Post for nearly thirty years, and also appears weekly on television as a panelist on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopolous. His conservatism stresses civic virtue, moral responsibility and the preservation of American institutions. For a fuller biography see this.

Given Will's prominence and his long conservative record, his extremely harsh criticism of John McCain this week-essentially stating that the man's personality and character ought to disqualify him from the presidency-thus struck the Arizona Senator's campaign a surprising and painful blow.

Will had apparently been doing some serious thinking about McCain's responses to the financial crisis. First McCain denied the problem, saying, "The fundamentals of the economy are strong." He then tried to correct by laughably explaining that by "fundamentals" he meant American workers. His next tack was to tout his credentials as a "fundamental deregulator." When it became apparent that most people ascribed the crisis to a lack of effective regulation, McCain immediately flip-flopped and called for strict oversight. When his contradictions, sometimes coming in the same day, began to draw ridicule McCain then lashed out at corporate greed and called for the firing of Chris Cox, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It was this barely coherent sequence that so troubled Will. On Stephanopolous he mused,

"I suppose the McCain campaign's hope is that when there's a big crisis, people will go for age and experience. The question is, who in this crisis looked more presidential, calm and un-flustered? It wasn't John McCain, who, as usual substituting vehemence for coherence, said 'let's fire somebody.' And he picked one of the most experienced people in the administration, Chris Cox, for no apparent reason...It was un-presidential behavior by a presidential candidate."

After some discussion by the other panel members, Will summed up with this: "John McCain showed his personality this week, and made some of us fearful."

Having broken the ice verbally, Will then set his thoughts down in print in his Post column the next day, Monday the 23rd. He began with a quote from Alice in Wonderland. "The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around." If you have ever read much from Will, the scathing nature of the rest of the essay will come as nothing less than a shock.

He describes McCain's behavior and thought processes as "untethered-disconnected from knowledge and principle," "childish" and "unpresidential." His tactics are characterized as "fact-free slander" that relies on "smear."

Will senses in these outbursts "a harbinger of a McCain presidency," one in which McCain's politics consist of "always pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public trust, two categories that seem to be exhaustive--there are no other people," and are the products of his "Manichean worldview."

Will posits that conservatives increasingly have little to say in McCain's defense other than that he "will make excellent judicial selections." Then he continues, "But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either."

Will concludes by dropping a rather amazing hint that may be seriously considering voting for Barack Obama. He states it thus:

"It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?"