ThrowawyAcctLOL

Seriously? Obama's ego really does give appear to be at the upper, Blair/Sarkozy end of the big-politician scale. I could consider an argument that appearances are deceiving here; but no-one with two eyes could look at Obama's personal background and career to date and fail to see how it might, at least, leave someone else with the impression that Obama's unusually prone to feel the world as revolving around him.

> (p.s. I think you may have misread the GP, who meant that McCain would not have gotten their vote instead of Obama.)

Yes, I did misread it, thank you.

Sure. As I think I made clear, I would have little confidence in McCain's willingness to reliably do the right thing in any given situation. (Taking it as read for the moment that agreeing to bring Guantanamo detainees to the US would be the right thing at this point.) But with the combination of stronger external pressure, (maybe) more cooperative Congressional Republicans, and whatever McCain might have felt like doing once President, it seems possible (very far from assured) that he might have made more progress down the military-tribunals route than Obama has made down either that or the US-trials route. (It would be harder to see McCain reversing his consistent opposition to US trials for the detainees.) The strongest reason to think otherwise would seem to be scepticism that anyone could really make the military-tribunal option work efficiently.

> not that McCain would have ever gotten it instead!

How are you so sure of that? McCain's neither a saint nor a philosopher-king: his personal narcissism seems to rival Obama's, and he often seems to be successfully flattered and managed by those around him. But he erratically takes stands on principle, and he also has personal experience of both torture and prolonged imprisonment. And in fact he took an anti-torture position which, while it wasn't absolute, was well out ahead of other Congressmen and presidential candidates and was hardly calculated to win votes.

There's also the fact that whatever about McCain's personal inclinations, he or any other Republican president would have been under much sharper pressure from others on the issue. The people and institutions who were shouting so much about detention and torture and drone strikes under Bush and then became silent or muted under Obama (or indeed rushed to bestow on him a Nobel Peace Prize) would have continued shouting under McCain.