I read a pretty good handful of progressive political blogs, and lately I'm seeing the same question pop up over and over again:

"Why would ANYone vote for John McCain?"

I can practically hear the anguish in the asker's tone, and see them wringing their hands together.

I've been there.  I myself asked this question many many times in the 2000 and 2004 election seasons, except I couldn't understand how anyone could vote for the posturing fraudulent failure that was George W. Bush. 

It's a valid question for Bush, because I suspect a great many of the people who pulled the lever in his column did, indeed, cast a positive vote FOR George W. Bush.  They honestly liked him and supported him.   I can't understand that, but, well, for all that his appeal was entirely emotional and non-intellectual, still, it was real. 

McCain doesn't have that.  Very few people are genuinely going to vote FOR him, very few people who do cast a ballot with his name on it are going to genuinely like him, or want him to be President. 

Still, it's a genuinely dangerous form of blindness to allow ourselves not to understand that John McCain is going to get millions of votes in November -- and why.

It's rare that people have a candidate they can genuinely, honestly, and wholeheartedly vote FOR.  I've only really, genuinely voted FOR a particular candidate once, and it was a disaster, as that vote was for Ralph Nader in 2000, when I was living in Tampa, Florida.  And it taught me a very hard lesson, and I honestly never expected that I would ever in my life have another candidate I could genuinely vote FOR, again. 

But the lack of a candidate to vote FOR has never kept people from showing up at the polls to vote anyway.  Heinlein once rather cynically advised (through the larynx of his eternally crusty-but-loveable old man character Lazarus Long) that if your society allows you to vote, you should always do so.  You may not always have a candidate you want to vote FOR, but you will nearly always have one you wish to vote AGAINST, and you will rarely go wrong doing so. 

McCain is going to get millions of votes in November.  They may not be votes from genuine McCain supporters, but they will still propel him towards the Oval Office, because  millions of Americans cannot tolerate the thought of any person of color, or any woman (but, especially, the Eeeeeeeevil Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most universally loathed by conservatives female in the history of the conservative movement) being their President. 

We keep forgetting this.  We look at McCain, and, yeah, he's pretty much a joke -- he's old, he's bald, he's not very charismatic, he vacillates and dodders and maunders; his greatest essential appeal is largely fraudulent, his own base can't stand him, and every time he tries to pander to one focus group, he shoots himself in the foot with two others.  It's like Grampa Simpson is running for President.  I don't deny any of that.

But it's dangerous to underestimate McCain, because the simple fact is, while all the factors I've listed above matter greatly to progressives, they don't really mean a thing to the people who are going to vote for McCain by the teeming millions.

Here's what matters to them -- McCain is a white guy, and he isn't named Clinton.

Stacked up against that, none of McCain's undeniable shortfalls, inadequacies, and  perceived disadvantages matter.

I believe Senator Obama has the charisma, the savvy, and the pure raw capital G Game to rise above all that, to convince even many of those who hate him for his skin color that he is the best President we could have, and the President we need, for the next four years of non-stop crisis and calamity.   And I just as certainly and fundamentally believe that Senator Clinton doesn't, and if The Woman Conservatives Loathe The Most went up against any white male Republican in any national election at any point in the early 21st Century, she was going to lose. 

Nonetheless, it is foolish to think that simply because McCain flashes very little substance to vote FOR, that no one is going to vote for him.  Millions of people are going to vote against either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in November 2008.  What we must hope for, and work for diligently, is that millions MORE will vote FOR one of them.