Conservatives on McCain

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Interesting that his own party is turning on him for his disgusting campaign tactics -- but that's what happens when the Rovians are in control of things.

George Will on McCain - "Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts — telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seem surreal — or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, 'like being savaged by a dead sheep.'"

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“Who Is John McCain?” - "He is not the McCain I endorsed. He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question, ‘Who is John McCain?’ … 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."

~ Former Michigan Republican Governor William Milliken

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CNN contributor David Gergen (and presidential advisor during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton) said that the negative tone of these rallies is "incendiary" and could lead to violence.

"There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we're not far from that," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday. "I really worry when we get people -- when you get the kind of rhetoric that you're getting at these rallies now. I think it's really imperative that the candidates try to calm people down."

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Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, endorses Obama - "John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust."

I'm sure there are more -- Kathleen Parker, also of the National Review, has said Palin is simply not qualified for the job, and so has David Brooks, although he called her “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

Tags: Conservatives, John McCain, Palin, racism, anger, GOP, Politics, criticism, losing support