Obvious spinoff from this thread. If McCain/Palin had won the WH, how would McCain have handled America’s financial crisis, industrial crisis, etc? How would he have handled Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran and the GWOT? How would his approaches have been different from Obama’s, and how similar?
The fringe conspiracy du jour would be Recounters instead of Birthers.
We’d have had the maverickiest administration in recent history.
Health care would either not be an issue, or more an issue of cost reduction than expansion.
The stimulus probably would have been smaller.
We’d be talking about Iraq rather than Afghanistan.
Torture and other such issues of civil liberties would probably have been solved decisively, being ended and foresworn.
Or, in my estimation, better, better, same, better. Not majorly better, it’s worth pointing out, but a wee smidgen better.
SNL would have continued to be worth watching again.
His handling of the Iraq, Afghanistan, torture, civil liberties, and Guantanamo Bay would be a continuation of Bush, which hasn’t so far been much different than Obama.
I bet his big project for his first year would be immigration reform instead of health insurance. He’s always been a big proponent of amnesty for illegal immigrants and setting up a guest worker program. It almost cost him the GOP nomination, but he’d bet that a strong Democratic Congress and his first year momentum would make it a viable program in 2009. The bill would never make it out of Congress in this economy.
I don’t think Iraq and Afghanistan would be all that much different. There would be nothing at all happening on healthcare, of course. The major impact is that Chrysler and GM would be dead, with factories closing and even more massive layoffs, the states would be even in worse shape than now, unemployment would be heading even higher than now, and the Dow would be bumping around 7,000 or so.
Oh, and even atheists would be saying prayers for his health, to keep Her Mooseness far from the Oval Office.
There was no way McCain was going to win the election unless the country was in a much different situation than the one that developed during the campaign. The only plausible difference is imagining the financial crisis had exploded in November or December instead of September. I know what candidate McCain proposed to do in response to the Lehman bankruptcy, the housing crisis and other issues, but I am not sure what a President McCain would have done.
McCain wouldn’t have let GM and Chrysler fail. After the election, even Cheney warned the GOP that they’d be finished if they stood in the way of saving the hundreds of thousands of people who’d be out of the work if the auto makers failed. After the government had saved the large banks, McCain couldn’t say no to GM and Chrysler. It would have been too big an issue for McCain not to step in.
The difference between McCain and Obama’s bailout would have been that instead of allowing the unions yo have ownership of the post-bankruptcy GM and Chrysler as Obama did, McCain would have used the crisis as an opportunity to destroy the auto unions once and for all, and maybe done more for bondholders and other creditors.
There were a lot of Republicans against the bailout, and I’m not sure the Dems would spend political capital to make McCain look good. However, I think you got the union thing nailed.
McCain would have died soon after taking office giving us the last president in the US’s history, President Palin. Soon after, the aliens who created humans decided that their experiment has finally gone to the point of no return, and destroyed the planet with their anti-proton beams