Opinion :: Guest Opinions
McCain is the right choice - Guest Opinion
by Matthew Tsien
Bay Windows Contributor
Thursday Oct 2, 2008
Energy policies, taxes are more important than GLBT issues
For some 25 years, The New York Times exit polls have revealed that at least one in four gay voters is a Republican. This means that at least 1 million or more gay voters will cast their votes for John McCain and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential election.
While John McCain is neither a zealot for or against gay related legislation, his inclination seems to be to try to do no harm. He is aligned with the centrist and libertarian wing of his party that does not want to use the U.S. Constitution either way. However, he did oppose gay marriage as part of Arizona’s (his home state) 2006 state ballot initiative to ban gay marriage, which, incidentally, failed. It would be fair to say that McCain probably supports some form of a "domestic partnership" law; however, most gay voters who like McCain find his stance on economic and national security issues to be paramount.
Indeed, John McCain’s appeal to voters has much to do with economic and national security issues. Specifically, gay Republican voters oppose Robin Hood-style economics in which liberals fantasize that the government can tax the rich without having any adverse effect upon the lives of ordinary working Americans.
As wonderful and narcotic as "tax the rich" rhetoric sounds and feels, such a tax is eventually passed on to ordinary American consumers in the form of lost wages and higher prices.
In other words, taxing the rich will not affect you as long as you do not buy gas, food, or clothes in any way, shape or form. Some may believe taxing the rich won’t affect their side of the bucket because Obama only wants to tax the other side of the bucket, but many gay voters will see through this dubious high tax scheme and vote for McCain-Palin.
Jobs can also be eliminated by ill-conceived taxes on the rich. In the early 1990s, the Democratic Congress passed into law a "luxury tax" on certain luxury items like jewelry, private planes, yachts and high-ticket cars. Congress gleefully waited for new revenues to roll in, but sadly, a different painful scenario took over.
Many of the rich decided not to buy boats, cars, planes and diamonds at all or to purchase them overseas at lower prices. Guess what happened to the jobs of the highly skilled blue-collar workers who made and repaired all those boats, Rolls Royces and private jets? Thousands lost their high-income jobs and had nowhere to turn for employment. And mom-and-pop jewelry stores also went out of business for good.
In less than a few years, the red-faced Democrats rescinded the "luxury tax."
John McCain is the premier leader in Washington when it comes to prosecuting the national scandal of government waste and abuse of some $400 billion dollars each year on projects that are not national priorities. He will expose the politicians who pack the federal budget with corporate welfare and grossly mismanaged or unneeded programs.
Furthermore, unlike Barack Obama who opts to dismantle "free trade acts" on our way to restoring prosperity and higher paying jobs, John McCain will seek more agreements with other nations to expand trade. And many gay voters will quietly agree that we cannot outlaw free trade acts, particularly when China, India and Russia are signing free trade acts with other nations as fast as they can.
Additionally, John McCain is for off-shore oil-drilling and developing cheaper sources of energy, like clean natural gas, clean coal, and nuclear which would make our transportation, heating and electricity needs cheaper; our country could become more like our friends in France by developing more nuclear plants. (There are over 50 nuclear plants operating in France producing over 75 percent of French electricity.) Yet Barack Obama reflexively opposes nuclear generation, meaningful offshore drilling or development of clean gas and coal.
John McCain has been vindicated for his unpopular call to send more troops to Iraq; according to recent Fox News polls, the majority of Americans now believe we are winning in Iraq, and a victorious troop pullout is in sight. Obviously, many gay veterans will certainly vote for McCain.
The prospect of a better world remains within reach if we face our threats and restore our prosperity.
And in a deeply divided electorate, where the 2004 victor won by only 1.5 million votes, one-million or more gay voters pulling the lever for McCain-Palin cannot be trivialized.
Matthew Tsien is a longtime Log Cabin Republican and the former director of President Ronald Reagan’s official grassroots lobbying organization Citizens for America.
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