Why McCain gets a Horse Puckey Alert

I have met John McCain many times and have known and worked with many of his campaign staffers and volunteers. He is an example of everything I learned to hate about the political campaign.

I learned quickly that there were two types of campaign people. The first was a dedicated and principled person who chose to work for or volunteer for the candidate that they truly believed was the best man or woman for the job. The second were the sycophants who were ambitious, unprincipled and generally scumbags and they volunteered for purely selfish reasons or took employment for the candidate based on calculations of personal gain.

McCain was constantly surrounded by sycophants. Every candidate and politician I met had at the least a few of the second group. Often these are the consultant types, either professionally employed as such or hoping to become such. Pollsters fit in this category generally. But McCain had few of the first group and an obvious overabundance of the second group.

Several of the volunteers for John Kyl that I met had been former volunteers for McCain. This was somewhat logical as it was McCains former district that Kyl represented before winning his Senate seat in 1994. But to a person they all said that they would never help John McCain again. He treated his volunteers and many employed staffers with disdain, ridicule, and fiery bursts of temper when any thing went wrong.

I do not miss being in the back office of a campaign. I do not miss the endless rounds of fund raising events. And I especially do not miss the sycophants and the politicians who fuel them. John McCain is not warm. He is not kind. And for these reasons alone I cannot support him.

Finally, he is not what I consider truly conservative as has been widely discussed at length at many places on the Right of Center blogosphere (See Captains Quarters, Hugh Hewitt, Powerline, and Mark Levin.)

[Begrudging Note: I will vote for McCain if he is the Republican Nominee. He is not the lesser of two evils in such a scenario; just a bad republican politician.]