I understand your argument to mean that a vote for Obama won’t necessarily cement the message that he (Bricker) is voting for positivity rather than mudslinging; therefore, don’t throw away a vote for Obama in the expectation that D.C. will get the message.
But if Bricker can’t bring himself to vote for McCain — it sounds as if he doesn’t want to reward negativity — then there’s not much left but not to vote at all.
This may be the most tinfoil-hattish theory of all: McCain, in his zeal to become President of the United States, has been actively and capably concealing his true colors for the last 20 some-odd years on the remote chance that he would be nominated by his party for President of the United States and that he wouldn’t piss off so many people in doing so that he failed to obtain the nomination.
He could have saved himself a lot of trouble and simply been an asshole for the last two decades. That’s what the rest of them do. It’s not like Obama, Clinton, Bush, Reagan et al. have marched to the beat of a different drum. Look at their records and they go party every time. That McCain hasn’t toed the line over all that time should give you pause before you start calling him a pretender.
Rather than calling the man a poseur, why don’t you just recognize what he is doing for what it is: trying to win a general election and pandering to his base just like everybody else does.
Already? McCain has been negative for weeks.
Thanks for the clarification.
I didn’t get the impression from the OP that Bricker couldn’t bring himself to vote for McCain though, as he said: “Part of me keeps hoping that Obama will blow it, so I can end this internal conflict and vote for the guy that holds the correct view on all those positions.”
No, not just on the off chance that he would be nominated for President, but in order to be elected and reelected to the Senate. As you pointed out, all politicians do this to some extent - they pretty themselves up. But McCain, like many Senators, has been visible on a national level for some years, and I think very well may have had an eye on the White House for some years - it’s not that unreasonable a thing. He achieved nationwide fame at a young age, which gave him a good starting point. Here’s Obama, more than twenty years younger, running against him. Is it so ridiculous that McCain may have been trying for some twenty years himself? He’s certainly been trying for eight.
Emphasis on ‘vague.’
Given the McCain campaign’s response, one has to ask them, “Sensitive much?”
Not to mention, it reinforces the truth of what Obama was saying - that McCain wants to talk about almost anything besides the issues. Celebrity, race card, victory lap, wounded soldiers, whatever.
Turn it around, Bricker – what would McCain have to do to win your vote back? And is it something he could do, without losing even more votes?
But he STARTED OUT negative, trailing Clinton by huge numbers, and I don’t remember him attacking her.
I think you misread Billmon. His point is not that McCain’s been concealing his true colors, but rather that he doesn’t have any, besides the national-greatness stuff which seems to be genuine.
And indeed, he doesn’t seem to give a flip about domestic policy, which helps explain his dozens of flipflops. I’ll concede that he’s been consistent about Iraq for the past decade, having been ready to fight that war back when Bush was still advocating a more humble foreign policy than Bill Clinton’s. (The extent of his vacillation on Iraq has been between whether Bush was doing great, or whether we needed more troops, which is pretty small potatoes, flipflopwise.) But even now he can’t seem to figure out things like whether we should cooperate with Russia or kick them out of G-8 - or kick them out, and then ask them to cooperate with us on Iran, terror, etc.
McCain could, today, stop all the negative ads.
I don’t mind an ad that says, for example, “My opponent wants to forbid the expansion of domestic drilling for oil, and I favor it – here’s why…”
That’s a truthful characterization of the situation. But “Let’s blame Obama, a single-term senator, for the current lack of drilling?” No. You can’t slam the guy for his “inexperience” and then assign to him all the baggage of positions taken by his party in years before he took his seat. Obama has nothing to do with the current situation.
Make your case for why your ideas are best, Senator McCain, and not by bashing your opponent. The you’ll get my vote, because as a general principle, I think your ideas ARE better. We SHOULD be drilling domestically.
See, I get from that the opposite: “All things being equal and they were both running negative ads, I’d vote for McCain. But as long as he’s the only one being negative, I’m conflicted.”
Then again, how much are any of those issues going to matter in a McCain adminstration, if he gets elected with no mandate other than “Be Somebody Who’s Not Obama”?
Omigod! Do you mean he’s a…a celebrity??
The primary is a little different - going really negative against a fellow Democrat is going to kill you in the general.
But if Obama’s ‘Brand’ is that he’s a new kind of politician, he may not go negative at all - but watch the 527’s and other surrogates spring up to do the dirty work. And McCain’s side will do the same thing. And both candidates (perhaps correctly) will claim that they’re not responsible for the activities of other groups, and will issue mild condemnations to keep their reputations intact. But the damage will be done.
Campaigns get ugly not because the candidates are mean people - I don’t think either of them are. They get ugly because there are HUGE vested interests in each candidate. This election will have more than a billion dollars spent on it, and the results of the election will swing various aspects of the economy by more than that. That makes the stakes very high, and when the stakes are that high people do what they have to do to win. Not just the candidates, but the hundreds of staffers and advisors around them, the people who stand to land jobs in the administration of the new president, moneyed people whose industries would benefit from a win by one side, etc.
And as usual, if a 527 group or some other group goes negative, the opposing side will claim that the candidate himself was behind it, and if their own side’s 527’s do the same thing, they’ll stamp up and down and say it’s not fair to blame their guy for the actions of others. Both sides will do it.
It’s August already. What have you seen so far?
Bricker - no offense and if you knew him you’d agree - but you sound just like my father. 
Usually votes republican [retired military officer] engineer type, is pulling the lever for Obama this year and his rationale and thought process mimicks yours perfectly. He’s not going to vote McCain - though he supports most of what he believes is right for this country…He’ll vote Obama because he thinks paraphrase, this war wasn’t run properly, this economy has not been managed properly etc…etc… I can tell it’s a tough nut to swallow…but frankly, I can’t wait to see if Obama can pull off a change presidency. I know what McCain will do…I want to see what Obama can do.
My biggest fear is that we’ll be saying this about Obama eight years from now …
Perhaps Bricker would be kind enough to clarify this for us. 
We know McCain is no longer the person we thought he was 8 years ago, but people will vote for him anyway. That’s my biggest fear.
I expect conservative 527’s to do that but not liberal ones. That is not to say I think liberal 527’s are somehow above such antics, they aren’t. However, part of Obama’s appeal, as expressed by this OP among others, is its rejection of such tactics.
I believe Obama’s campaign would come down hard on any 527 that polluted this aspect of his campaign. The McCain campaign on the other hand is already showing a willingness to go there so some absurd 527 ad will likely merit nothing more than a, “We didn’t pay for it” response from the McCain camp.
Time will tell.