Navy

It’s clear that President-elect McCain will run with this major theme: Barack Obama is not qualified to be president because he didn’t serve in the military. For example, when Obama praised McCain’s service and wondered why he refused to support the new GI Bill, McCain shot back, "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his
responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my
regard for those who did."

The "religious test" prohibited by the Constitution has been seriously eroded by modern politics. But what McCain implies is more dangerous still to the future of the nation: that only soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are really qualified to lead the nation, particularly in wartime.

So many contradictions and hypocrisies here. Neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin Roosevelt were veterans, yet they led the nation in the two world wars. And where was McCain’s outrage over the neo-con chicken-hawks who took draft deferments during Vietnam, notably Dick Cheney (five deferments). Obama was a child during Vietnam. And what of the swift-boated John Kerry?

But the biggest concerns cut to the core of the American republic. They could reveal McCain not merely as a misinformed and misguided candidate, but a potentially dangerous one.