Reality Check: Is McCain Really the Same as Bush? Where Does Obama Fit Into This?

“Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

This was the quip that John McCain made during the third and final presidential debate between the two major party candidates in response to the charges that he is the same as the current President. There’s something interesting to be noted in all this, though. We hear a lot about McCain supporting Bush’s policies ninety percent of the time. But is he really the same? Yes and no. McCain isn’t quite the maverick that he’s been trumped up to be. He has been known to cross party lines on issues like abortion and on spending, at least in the past. He had developed a reputation for being one of the more thrifty politicians that, and while supporting rather exorbitant defense budgets, had attempted to provide the American people with the best defense they could get for their money. He's a maverick in the sense that he has opposed the neocon movement of the Republican Party to irresponsibly increase spending. However, it is true that he has voted with his party most of the time. Lately, he’s gone with his party a lot more, and has done a lot of pandering to the right-wing base, which has been disappointing. Whether he would return to the old McCain after elected is unknown.

But this is not the observation that needs to be made. There’s something that’s been troubling me about this whole thing. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, back to the year 2000 and the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and George W. Bush. Most people remember the ballot problem in Florida that year as the highlight of the election process, and the part that will live in infamy for generations. Few people seem to remember the campaigns that were run before the actual election. Particularly, look at Bush’s election campaign from that year. He ran on a platform of supporting bipartisanship, reaching across the aisle, getting rid of divisive exchanges and hyper partisanship, and reforming the way Washington does business. He also promised to get Americans back to work and encourage companies to stop shipping jobs overseas (remember that at this time, we had what could be considered a mini-recession, being led in large part by the tech bubble bursting). Is all of this starting to sound familiar? It should. We’ve been hearing the same talking points in the election campaign this year…from Obama! The similarities between the two campaigns are actually quite disconcerting, especially when you realize how the Bush presidency has turned out. It also reminds me a lot of the Clinton campaign in ’92, when a very tight leash was kept on Clinton and Gore, and a permanent campaign was instigated, focusing on keeping up in the polls on a daily basis through attacks, constant polling, and observing “who won the day” on the news, a system which was carried forward by the Bush presidency and creating an emphasis on short-term victories over long-term goals.

So, is McCain the same as Bush and will continue his policies? At this point in time, I would have to say “yes,” but interestingly enough, I would have to say the same thing about Obama. Giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he really wants to change things, I don’t think that he’ll be able to undo the policies and the damage that the Bush presidency has wrought. But both the McCain and Obama campaigns are showing very disturbing similarities to past campaigns that continued into the presidencies of their respective candidates that led to more divisiveness and hyper partisanship than before, and this trend is likely not going to end any time soon.