Sen. John McCain in DBQ -14 Apr 2007

Sen. John McCain had a townhall meeting at the Grand River Center on Sat, 14 April 2007 at 9:00 am. It went for about an hour. He spoke for a while & then answered questions from the audience.

Sen. McCain was very outgoing & relaxed & used plenty of humor in his speech. He did have notes that he was refering to.

As for his content in the talk & in the Q & A session:

For the most part he did have a ready answer, sort of. There was 1 question about a specific problem with social security numbers assigned to adopted children from other countries he was unable to answer. He did get the woman's name & promised to look into it. On the subject of social security he called for bipartisianship in dealing with the problem.

My biggest problem with what I heard was that it sounded too much like he was trying to please all sides of the question on many of the things he said.

The prime example of this is in the area of global warming & new sources of energy. He claims that the problem with global warming is real (global warming is occuring) & that it is definitely caused by man (despite what some claim, the jury is still out). He called for a development of a sytem of credits for companies that polute. He also said (& I was glad to here this) that we can't exclude India & China ( a major flaw of the Kyoto Prtotocols). He also called for the development of nuclear energy, making a good point that all those anti-nuclear franco-philes ignore, 80% of France's electricity is generated by nuclear power plants & that they even sell it to other European countries. He also said that he has changed his views on ethanol, with the increase in oil prices,it is now a viable alternative, but it doesn't need govenment subsidies.

He also talked about Darfur. He said that the US shouldn't step in, it was the responsibility of the neighboring African Countries, but he did say that the US could & should help provide the equipment needed to do so.

What I felt was the biggest problem with what he had to say was the fact that even though he talked a lot about the problems & did answers most of the questions, he didn't offer any plans or solutions. Here is where the sort of I said earlier comes in. & a friend of mine who was there felt the same way. All it sounded like was that he felt that governemnt should be the 1 solving all the problems.

While I like Sen. McCain & deeply respect him for what he went through as a POW, I am not to comfortable with a lot of his positions. As I said, it strikes me that he is often more trying to please all sides rather than taking a solid stand. That make work for a while, but eventually, people will take a serious look & see the same thing I am seeing. When they do, I think that he will loose a lot of support.

(This is the latest in my reports on the visits of the various candidates to the area. Not many have been in the area yet. Many of them were in Des Moines last Sat for the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. I was unable to make it. But as they do come to the area & as I can make them, I will continue to report on them.)