Should The Left Back McCain?

The Exile seems to be warming to the idea:

"One of the giants of British socialism, the late Ian Mikardo, once said that you can't make a socialist omelet without cracking a fair few capitalist eggs. One of those eggs that is going to have to be cracked sooner of later is the NATO alliance, and there is more chance of that happening with a McCain presidency than with the version that Obama will offer. With Obama we are liable to receive a charm offensive that will aim at repairing the damage done to Anglo-American relations by the chimp, coupled with some solid Keynesian policies at home that could shore up the crumbling American economic system. If you look at things in that light, McCain might very well turn out to be the man for us."

But NATO, like the McCain candidacy, is doomed anyway, especially after the ruinous adventure in Afghanistan. And Obama embodies, as Hillary Clinton very pointedly does not, the key shift in the Democratic Party from the Make The World Anew trigger-happiness of Truman in Korea, Kennedy and Johnson in South East Asia, and Bill Clinton all over the place.

Long before, and then alongside, the shift away from the Boston Irish Catholicism of Kennedy or the Texan Baptist principles of Johnson on moral issues, this was the really bad thing about the Democrats, even without wishing in any way to detract from their staggering domestic achievements such as the New Deal and Civil Rights (Clinton, on the other hand, sent his voters' jobs to Mexico as well as their sons to Yugoslavia, Somalia and all the rest).

But the takeover of the Republican Party by warmongering old Trots has shifted the Democrats decisively and for generations to come. The nomination of Obama rather than his main rival manifests and secures that shift.

McCain, by contrast, wants Robert Kagan as Secretary of State and Randy Scheunemann as National Security Advisor.

It has to be Obama.