McCain Lacks Presidential Temperament

[Herb Schaffler]

Reid: McCain Lacks Presidential Temperament


Wednesday, August 27, 2008 8:00 PM


LAS VEGAS -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that Republican John McCain "doesn't have the temperament to be president."
The Nevada Democrat said his opinion of the Arizona senator is based serving with him for 26 years in Congress and claimed his view was privately shared by some Senate Republicans.
"I just think he doesn't have the temperament to be president," Reid told Las Vegas Sun columnist Jon Ralston during the taping of "Face to Face," in Denver on Wednesday. The show airs on a Las Vegas, Nev., cable channel.
"I've served with the man 26 years," Reid said. "Do I have the ability to speak with experience about someone who has abused everyone he's dealt with? Someone who does not have the temperament to be president, who's wrong on the war, wrong on the economy, wrong on nuclear waste. What am I supposed to do? Walk around talking about what a great guy he is? I don't believe that. .... "
"There isn't a Republican serving in the Senate that's happy he's the nominee. Now, they're all supporting him, but I'll tell you they have told me. I've had Republican senators tell me they don't think they'll vote for him," Reid said.
When Ralston asked if Reid thought it would be "dangerous" to let McCain be president, Reid answered: "Well, if you said it, I wouldn't correct you."
"Is that right?" Ralston asked. "You really think that?"
"That's right," said Reid, who predicted that Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama would carry the battleground state of Nevada by 5 percentage points.
Bill Riggs, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said, "Barack Obama's own running mate knows he's not qualified to be commander in chief."

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As Reid said, it's Republicans who also say that McCain doesn't have the temperament to be president.

Matt Welch in "McCain: the Myth of a Maverick": "McCain has always held a grudge; he's famous for holding grudges," longtime GOP activist Don Hesselbrock told me. Hesselbrock, the type of seasoned, behind-the-scenes GOP organizer who has long followed Reagan's 11th Commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"), had never really gone public before with his decades-long concerns over John McCain's fitness for higher office. "That temper is not a small thing," he said. "Ive been in his presence when he's said other things...where that's just not the demeanor of somebody who should be in the oval office."

Republican Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi as quoted in the Boston Globe, January 27, 2008: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Cochran said about McCain by phone, "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

[nohil-billy]

Harry Reid lacks the honesty and the integrity to be a United States Senator, yet he's there.