Today, a little after two o'clock, I walked a few blocks to the Lakeview school and voted in the Republican primary.  The choice was easy; there is only one viable candidate left — assuming no miracle — and so I voted for John McCain.

But I would have voted for him anyway, even if there had been other candidates with a serious chance of winning.  At the beginning of the campaign, I was leaning, slightly, toward Mitt Romney, because I admire his remarkable executive talents.  (And I hope that a President McCain can find a way to use those talents.)  I didn't reject any of the candidates, except, of course, for the Republican candidate who must not be named*.

But each of the candidates, except for McCain, took himself out of the running during the campaign.   Rudy Giuliani ran one of the strangest campaigns I've ever seen, making me think that he had no clue about how to run for president.  Fred Thompson managed to convince more than one person that he didn't really want to be president.  (That's not a terrible defect, in a president, but it is in a presidential candidate.)  Mike Huckabee showed me that he is a gifted politician, one of the best I have seen in my life time, but he also showed me that he had a weak grasp of some important issues, especially in foreign policy.  And Mitt Romney chose not to run as himself, not to run as a brilliant, pragmatic executive, with a wonderful family, and a great record of achievement.  He would have had a better chance, I think, if he had done so, and if he had skipped some of the negative campaigning, and some of the pandering.

That left McCain, but I am not, unlike some others here at Sound Politics, disappointed in my choice.  He was, by a small margin, my second choice at the beginning of the campaign, and he was my first choice by the middle.

That isn't because I don't have policy differences with McCain, or that I think he is the perfect person to be president.  (But then I have policy differences with every politician I know much about, and have never met a perfect man — or even a perfect woman.)

McCain has one great virtue.  He is right on the greatest issue of our time, winning the war against terror, as it is usually called, or the war against Islamic extremists, as it might be called, if we were not so mired in political correctness.  I have no doubt that we will win that war, though it will take years.  (McCain has sometimes said one hundred years, which is the rough estimate that I have been using myself, for years.)  We will win that war, but how much it will cost to win that war will vary greatly, depending on how intelligent our strategy is.

McCain may not have finished at the top of his Annapolis class, but he does understand something fundamental about our strategy in this war.  Pulling back, from, for instance, Iraq, will, almost certainly, inspire our enemies and lead some on the fence to join them.  Which will make the war far longer and bloodier.  That ghastly prospect should lead every decent person to back the man who wants to win this war, and understands that it will not be won by ceding entire nations to our enemies.

Sylvester Stallone said it right, when he endorsed McCain.

I like McCain a lot.  A lot.  And you know, things may change along the way, but there's something about matching the character with the script.  And right now, the script that's being written and reality is pretty brutal and pretty hard-edged like a rough action film, and you need somebody who's been in that to deal with it.

Or, if you don't care for that Hollywood metaphor, think of it this way.  We are in a war.   Who better than a warrior to ensure that we win that war, and at as low a cost as possible?

McCain is the right person for this time for another reason.  One of the reasons — there were many — that the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 is that many of them had become too greedy for pork.  McCain has a great record on controlling spending, a record that he will be able to use effectively against either of those two big spenders, Clinton or Obama.

And McCain can win.  For those who value ideological purity above all, that will not matter; for those who care about what will happen to our nation in the next four years, and in the next hundred years, that will matter.  Patriots will rally to McCain; ideologues may not, even if he is, by their narrow yardsticks, a far better candidate than his Democratic opponent.

This afternoon I voted for John McCain, without regrets, and this November I will vote for him again — and I don't expect to regret that vote either.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.

(*Because putting his name in a post draws his supporters, and far too many of them do not behave well on other people's web sites.  It is a curious fact that one of the strongest arguments against the CWMNBN is the behavior, and in some cases, the ideas, of his strongest supporters.

And the Democratic candidates?  If I had to vote in the Democratic primary, I would have voted for Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama.  Although neither has been a model of clarity on the war on terror, I think it somewhat less likely that she would surrender to our terrorist enemies.   There are other reasons I would prefer Clinton to Obama, but that one is sufficient, at least for me.)