ThirdSouth draws attention, via a Scout Finch post at Kos, to this story from Michigan.
He endorsed John McCain in the presidential primary, but now former Republican Gov. William Milliken is expressing doubts about his party’s nominee.
“He is not the McCain I endorsed,” said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. “He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question, ‘Who is John McCain?’ because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.
“I’m disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.”
Milliken, a lifelong Republican, is among some past leaders from the party’s moderate wing voicing reservations and, in some cases, opposition to McCain’s candidacy. …
Among others quoted in the story, Rhode Island’s former senator Lincoln Chafee says he’s concerned that McCain’s swing to the right is a divisive strategy that would make governing difficult for him.
“That’s not my kind of Republicanism,” said Chafee, who now calls himself an independent. “I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what’s happened now. In eight short years they’ve taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they’ve torn it into tatters.”
As for McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for his running mate, “there’s no question she’s totally unqualified,” Chafee said.
He had similar reservations about Obama’s lack of experience, but said the Democrat’s handling of the campaign convinced him he’s ready to lead.
Chafee said he has spoken with several other moderate Republican leaders, and “there are a whole lot of us deserting.”
I should think so. And ThirdSouth sees a fresh supply of younger deserters operating from perhaps less “pure-minded” motivation. These, he expects, will be
distancing themselves from McCain for one reason: they don’t want to go down with the ship (and they would like to get elected again someday).
What amazes me is that McCain doesn’t “get it” that a small but real MAJORITY of the Amercian public may have fallen for Karl Rove’s shit once (well, actually twice), but that it ain’t gonna happen again.
Even those who have voted Republican many times see these attack ads and think: Rove. They think Rove and think: W. And a good many of them know that McCain was a champion of the bank-cozy deregulation that cut their 401(k)’s in half (and in the case of small business owners cut their orders in half, and in the case of bartenders and servers cut their tips in half, and so on and so on).
Quite a valid theory right there, I’m thinking as I join ThirdSouth in watching the exits . . .
