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Friday, September 26, 2008
Mano a mano, hand to hand
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
McCain: “Surge,” “victory,” “Georgia,” “Commander in chief”
Obama: “Afghanistan,” “Bush,” “Bin Laden,” “Bush”
UPDATE: On the bailout, the two candidates take a very similar position. McCain makes a cross-partisan appeal with the shout-out to Kennedy, following it up with approval for the bipartisan effort to pass a rescue bill.
Obama won’t commit to supporting the bill until he sees its language. McCain echoes him.
UPDATE TWO: Nice accountability story from McCain citing Eisenhower, subtly calling attention to his military background along the way. Well done.
THREE: McCain bashes the Republicans, earmarks as the gateway drug to big spending addiction. He cites $3 million bear DNA project, but I think that may have lost some sting with a $700 billion bailout request. McCain cites Obama’s earmark requests, Obama responds by citing McCain tax cut. I think McCain’s getting the better of this exchange; it’s his territory.
FOUR: McCain getting the worst of the tax-cut exchange, largely because Obama’s right. The McCain tax cuts are targeted to the rich.
Not much if any foreign policy.
FIVE: Great question from Lehrer. With $700 billion expenditure, what do we cut to offset it? What proposals do we drop?
Obama talks about the things he’s going to keep spending on. Not exactly responsive. McCain says we have to cut spending. Cut ethanol subsidies. YEAH!! Fix defense contracting. YEAH!! (although McCain has attacked Obama for saying the same thing). Advantage McCain, for at least a little bit of specificity.
I think both are doing well. A good exchange.
IRAQ: I think McCain got the better of it — both made good points, but the surge question is trouble for Obama. I do wonder how it will go over with the public, though, because they agree with Obama’s larger point — we shouldn’t have been in Iraq in the first place.
AFGHANISTAN: Obama is exactly right here. We absolutely must take out top al Qaida personnel in Pakistan if the Pakistanis refuse to do so.
IRAN: Obama doing well here, citing the advocacy of Henry Kissinger to talk with Iran. Will McCain address the Spain issue? Because that was really strange when he said that he wouldn’t talk with Spain’s prime minister.
RUSSIA: McCain pushing the naivete angle. He also sidesteps the fact that Georgia started that war. Russia used the excuse to overreact, but the initial aggression was from Georgia. You can’t rewrite that history. It’s fact.
FINAL VERDICT: I’d give the nod to McCain. But I think Obama did as well as he needed to do on this topic.
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Bluff called, McCain set for debate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Wednesday, John McCain announced that little inconsequential things such as a presidential campaign and a long-scheduled debate would have to be set aside until Congress had an agreement on a Wall Street bailout.
Patriotism required it. Leadership required it. There would be no campaigning until the republic was saved.
By today, however, patriotism apparently no longer requires it. There’s still no deal — the agreement that congressional leaders and the administration thought they had cut Thursday morning has fallen apart. But McCain has nonetheless abandoned his operatic grandstanding and hustled down to Oxford, Miss. for tonight’s 9 p.m. debate.
The setback comes at a tough time for the Arizona senator. He’s declining in the polls; his vice presidential selection has been exposed as hopelessly, embarrassingly unprepared. But the subject of tonight’s discussion — foreign policy — plays to his strengths. On this topic, he has a credible story to tell, credentials to offer and experience to cite.
However, all Barack Obama has to do on this occasion is attain a draw, and I think he’ll accomplish that. He lacks McCain’s credentials and experience, but the foreign policy he advocates is more realistic and intelligent.
So feel free to post your expectations, the questions you hope get asked, the things you most want to hear — or not hear — from each candidate. I’ll post a fresh thread when the debate actually starts.
UPDATE: Oh, and let me say one more time: Lou Dobbs is unwatchable.
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Palin argues for bailout … I think
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Spray a little tax cut on it, it’ll be fine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Remember the father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”? Whatever the problem, Windex would cure it.
House Republicans have their own version of Windex: Tax cuts. Their solution to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Tax cuts. More specifically, tax cuts for dividends and capital gains. And apparently they intend to hold their breath until they get them.
Well, I got news for ‘em. If the market really starts to tank because of their little tantrum, the capital gains tax will be zero because there won’t be no steeenkin’ capital gains to tax for the next 10 or 20 years.
Democrats claim the Republican rank and file are balking at a deal just to give John McCain a problem to solve with his Dudley Do-Right act, riding back to Washington to rescue the country. I don’t think that’s accurate, and the Dems know it.
House Republicans — and not a few in the Senate, including Richard Shelby of Alabama — are rejecting the Wall Street bailout because it offends their tender Reaganite sensibilities. They want a whole different approach, including tax cuts and some sort of privately financed mortgage insurance mechanism.
I understand their distaste for the Bush plan. It sucks. Hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue Wall Street? It sucks, and nobody likes it. But we are truly in a crisis, and I happen to think an approach put together by people such as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has a better chance of succeeding than a plan created to satisfy the small minds of the ideologically frozen Republican core, a group whose entire economic understanding consists of cutting taxes and hating government.
But getting those folks to move will be difficult, and I doubt McCain has much leverage with them. They never liked him to begin with because in their eyes, he lacked ideological purity. Georgia’s seven Republican congressmen are no doubt right in the middle of the anti-bailout faction, and not a single one of them backed McCain in the primary. As Rep. Jack Kingston once memorably complained, McCain “lets Kennedy write the bills then puts his own name on it.”
So here we are, in one helluva standoff.
“We are working to try to get this bill ready, but if House Republicans continue to reject the president’s approach, then there’s no bill,” says Rep. Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee. “We told Paulson the whole thing is at risk if the president can’t get his own party to participate.”
“We’ve not seen any way to getting majority [Republican] support,” counters Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, one of the architects of the GOP alternative approach.
Meanwhile, there’s the debate tonight. I suspect that by now, McCain realizes that his rashness has put him in quite a predicament. He would love to find a face-saving way to show up in Mississippi tonight, but how?
If the debate does come off, we’ll be live-blogging it here. But the odds of that are 50-50 at best.
