The margin of victory in the 2008 presidential race was so wide — and the election of Barack Obama so historic — that we rarely stop to imagine what it would have been like were we now well into the third year of John McCain’s presidency.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, we’d be better off on a wide variety of fronts. McCain, a consistent fiscal hawk, not only wouldn’t have indulged in a record-setting debt binge like Barack Obama, he may well have made a serious run at entitlement reform. And as a stalwart advocate for a strong national defense, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that McCain would have taken a harder line with Iran than the “diplomacy at all costs” approach embraced by the Obama Administration.<\/p>\n
In other areas, however, McCain would have been an utter nightmare. Can anyone imagine how one of the namesakes of the McCain-Feingold political speech law would have reacted to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United <\/em>decision? Based on this report from the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, it may have been even worse than Obama:<\/p>\n In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama roundly criticized the Supreme Court\u2019s Citizens <\/em>United <\/em>decision, arguing that it had \u201creversed a century of law.\u201d That practically sounds like a hymn of praise compared to what Senator John McCain had to say on \u201cMeet the Press\u201d this weekend. He called Citizens United: \u201carrogant, uninformed, na\u00efve.\u201d …<\/p>\n \u201cI think there will be scandals associated with the worst decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st<\/sup> century,\u201d he said. Referring to the justices on the Court, he added, \u201cI just wish one of them had run for county sheriff.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n