THE GAINESVILLE SUN ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN FOR PRESIDENT

Excerpts From "Back McCain And Obama"EditorialThe Gainesville SunJanuary 20, 2008
Come November this is the best choice Americans could make in deciding who will lead the nation: John McCain or Barack Obama.

As the presidential nominees of their respective parties they would give us the substantive debate about the war, foreign policy, the economy, health care and education and immigration reform that Americans sorely crave and deserve.

A Republican maverick who has never marched in lockstep with his party ... The Sun endorses John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination because he would return a principled, ethical leadership that has for too long been missing from the White House.

Republican John McCain

McCain, the U.S. senator from Arizona, is his own man and has been ever since he returned home after spending more than five years enduring brutal treatment in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam.

An ardent supporter of the war in Iraq, he has nonetheless criticized the Bush administration's poor conduct of that war. Himself a torture survivor, McCain refuses to condone Americans turning to that means of persuasion.

We did not agree with McCain's support for the war. But it's clear that if he rather than Bush had been in the White House, the war and occupation would have been waged with more support, better decision making and more regard for consequences.

On the economic front, McCain initially opposed the Bush Administration's indiscriminate tax cuts as fiscally unsound. He is a ferocious critic of deficit spending and congressional earmarks.
An environmentalist, McCain advocates a carbon cap-and-trade system, declaring that history "will not treat this (Bush) administration kindly on climate change." He wants incentives to alter wasteful health care spending while offering new tax credits and expanded health savings accounts to help families buy coverage.

We most admire McCain for his principled stand on immigration reform. He champions a comprehensive rewrite of immigration policies, including a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, while most politicians are reduced by fear to mouthing empty slogans like "no amnesty."

McCain's approach to foreign policy would be both tougher and smarter than Bush's. He would pursue terrorists but not alienate allies. Neither would he trample on the Bill of Rights nor would he frighten Americans into believing that they must give up some of their freedoms to be safe.
The oldest candidate in the field, he may also be the wisest.

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