THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN FOR PRESIDENT

In many ways he was and is a typical Sunbelt conservative, an Arizonan with a lifetime voting record of 82 percent on positions favored by the American Conservative Union. What makes Mr. McCain different is that devotion to 'being constant to something greater than yourself.'" -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Excerpts From "John McCain: A Sense Of Duty"
EditorialSt. Louis Post-DispatchJanuary 26, 2008
Glory is not a conceit. It is not a prize for being the most clever, the strongest or the boldest. Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely and who rely on you in return. No misfortune, no injury, no humiliation can destroy it.
So wrote John Sidney McCain III in "Faith of My Fathers," his autobiography, in explaining what he took away from his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. That experience defines him, as it would define anyone. He went away to war as a hell-raising 30-year-old hotshot pilot ("Being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck," one of his Annapolis classmates recalled in Robert Timberg's "The Nightingale's Song"). He came home, his body broken but his spirit formed, a genuine American hero.
His biography helped get him elected to Congress in 1982 and to the U.S. Senate four years later. In many ways he was and is a typical Sunbelt conservative, an Arizonan with a lifetime voting record of 82 percent on positions favored by the American Conservative Union. What makes Mr. McCain different is that devotion to "being constant to something greater than yourself." ...
This editorial board has serious disagreements with Mr. McCain on economic policies and his support of the war in Iraq; a President McCain would require a heavy hand of congressional oversight and, if necessary, restraint. He was a neo-conservative believer in muscular diplomacy, nation-building and the projection of American force long before the neo-cons ginned up a war against Saddam Hussein. Had John McCain and not George W. Bush been in the White House in 2003, U.S. troops still might have invaded Iraq. But they would have done so in force, and much of the misguided chaos of the last five years might have been avoided. ...
But unlike any other candidate in the Republican field, Mr. McCain offers a chance to change the national discourse. He is a Republican in the mold of Barry Goldwater, a principled conservative, not a kleptocratic opportunist. We find former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's ideals to be far too malleable. We find former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to be cravenly narrow and mean. And as to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, America doesn't need a theocrat with a bizarre tax plan in the White House, even an affable, guitar-playing, populist one.
Republican voters can be proud of a vote for John McCain.
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