If McCain Had Won

Long story short, Fred Branfman takes the side that the US would have enbe better off under McCain because the Democratic Party would have stayed closer to its democratic (as in real democracy) alleged underpinning, owned Congress and owned the Senate.

He also maintains that a GOP President in 2012 would be disastrous.

ZNET: If McCain Had Won

But McCain’s election would have produced a major political difference: It would have increased Democratic clout in the House and Senate. First off, there would have been no tea party, no “don’t raise the debt limit unless we gut the poor,” no “death panel” myth, no “Obama Youth” nonsense. Although there would have been plenty of criticism from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, the fact would have remained that McCain, a Republican, Caucasian war hero would never have excited the tea party animus as did the “Secret-Muslim Kenyan-Born Big-Government Fascist White-Hating Antichrist” Obama. Glenn Beck would have remained a crazed nonentity and been dropped far sooner by Fox News than he was. And Vice President Sarah Palin, despised by both McCain and his tough White House staff, would have been deprived of any real power and likely tightly muzzled against criticizing McCain’s relatively centrist (compared to her positions) policies.


Voters would almost certainly have increased Democratic control of the House and Senate in 2010, since the Republicans would have been seen as responsible for the weak U.S. economy. Democrats might even have achieved the long-desired 60 percent majority needed to kill the filibuster in one or both houses.


Democratic control of the House and Senate fostered by disastrous Republican policies would have severely limited McCain’s ability (as occurred with George W. Bush) to weaken Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other programs that aid those most in need. (Yes, domestic spending might have been cut less if McCain had won.)