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October 2008
What is driving voters to the polls this year?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
I’m quite sure that in the true-believer Democrat bubble, hatred of President Bush is a huge motivator. But those people are not the average voter. No, those are people who honestly view Dick Cheney or Karl Rove as only slightly less evil than the devil incarnate; puppet masters who have malevolently pulled Bush’s strings to ruin a great nation. They are the equivalent of the Republican true-believers who, in the run-up to Y2K, persisted in spreading emails IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS insisting that Bill Clinton was imminently going to impose martial law. FROM WHICH WE WILL NEVER ESCAPE.
Please.
There has been one issue on voters minds recently - the same as James Carville’s quip in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Pew Research recently found 87 percent of people saying the economy “will be very important to their vote.” Rasmussen Poll compared the polls of 2008 and 2004 and found the big issues have been swapped. In 2004, 41 percent ranked national security as number one and only 26 percent said the economy was. This time, 43 percent ranked the economy the top issue and only 26 percent said national security.
The most telling results came from a Roper Center poll, which asks, “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” As recently as August 2008, only 32 percent said the economy. In October, it was 55 percent.
What a difference a month and a burst bubble makes. Gallup Poll had McCain leading 47 to 45 percent in mid September. Mid-October had Obama leading 51-42 percent.
In swing state Ohio, Dr. John Green of The University of Akron’s National Survey of Religion and Politics confirmed that in their recent poll, “80 percent of Ohioans picked the economy as the single most important issue.” They also saw the same shift to Obama. What Dr. Green did not find was anti-Bush sentiment. “We interviewed 1,200 people and no one offered antipathy toward Bush.”
Green emphasized that voters’ opinions on social issues have not changed, just their priorities. Too bad, since Democrat views on “redistribution of wealth” will hurt the economy further. As McCain put it a year ago, “Tough times can breed fear…and the Democrats are using those fears to push an agenda that is tired, dangerous, and will rob us of economic freedom.”
What must John McCain’s endgame strategy be?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
At this point, John McCain’s message must be entirely about buyer’s remorse. Barack Obama is the least-experienced presidential candidate in modern history, has never had to handle a crisis, and would take office in the middle of an economic crisis that he is unqualified to manage. If he wins, the markets will likely show serious pessimism, and the average American will likely suffer a serious case of buyer’s remorse.
The next time there is a national security issue, the buyer’s remorse will get even worse. And if election night delivers a Democratic filibuster-proof supermajority in Congress and the Senate, the markets and the economy - and the Supreme Court — will be in for some rough years ahead.
McCain’s endgame strategy must be to hammer that message in advance. As much as it infuriates me that the media has helped Obama by light investigating and friendly questions, that can’t be helped. And as much as it should raise red flags that Obama went back on his word about accepting public funding, and now has a massive cash advantage to spend as he likes, that can’t be helped either.
McCain must go back to the “celebrity” message that is the heart of the issue: yes, Obama is an amazing speaker, yes, I know you love him - but we’re in a crisis here and I’m the only one with experience.
In an interview, Dr. David Woodard, Thurmond Chair of Government at Clemson University and co-author of “Why We Whisper,” said he can’t remember a time when a candidate came back from this far behind, this close to the election. The closest parallel was 1976 when Gerald Ford came from far behind and almost won.
Woodard explained, “Ford began with disadvantages, much like McCain is. Ford had pardoned [Richard] Nixon, had a bad economy, but in the last week or 10 days, he really closed the gap and almost caught up by hammering [Jimmy] Carter’s inexperience. As the election draws near, if voters have questions about a candidate and the race is close, there are often drops in confidence. Raising those questions in voter’s minds could be effective here at the end.”
The polls, markets and pundits are all predicting an Obama win - but if McCain focuses on the “experience” message, he might still do what Ford could not.
Rebuttal
Wow. The Republican machine clearly finds John McCain utterly uninspiring; their hopes for a win seem to focus solely on tearing down his opponent. Extremists in the party tag Barack Obama as a Muslim, a terrorist and—this just in!—a socialist. Others are simply hoping you’ll see the Democrat as a slick pol with nothing to offer but the gift of gab.
It’s too bad McCain’s team has focused so relentlessly on this approach because it’s just not working. The terrorist/Muslim message is too easily dismantled, and the economy is proving to be an Obama strong suit. Moreover, the only buyer’s remorse so far concerns the pick of Sarah Palin over far more qualified VP candidates.
In effect, McCain has already made two presidential decisions— his choice of a running mate and his response during the recent bailout crisis. Neither action demonstrates sound judgment in the pressure-filled environment faced by presidents. A recent ABC poll shows that over half of all likely voters say the Palin pick makes them less confident in McCain’s judgment. Meanwhile, Obama’s impressive lead post-bailout indicates that an economic meltdown requires thoughtful examination, not a meaningless publicity stunt.
So what now? McCain could try leaping on the issue of checks and balances, to see if he can create fear around a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. Of course, to play that card he’ll have to throw his party under the bus, admitting they’re being trounced on all fronts. Yet what’s he got to lose? If McCain doesn’t win, the GOP bus is all revved up and ready to roll right over him.
A better endgame strategy? McCain could help us envision the diverse group of experts he would surround himself with for the next four years. Real-America Americans—that would be all of us, Gov. Palin— appreciate the bipartisan support Obama receives from Warren Buffet, Paul Volcker and Colin Powell. Conversely, we’ve yet to receive a unifying message from McCain’s increasingly erratic campaign. The man who once thought nothing of reaching across the aisle while slapping down his own party is long gone, losing the very centrists who will probably decide this election.
Are parents who don’t let their kids participate in Halloween misguided?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
Halloween has always been a favorite holiday of young children; it’s creative, adventurous and filled with exciting yet innocent fun. So when I learned that a sizable group of my fellow parents viewed it as the “devil’s holiday,” I set out to find out why. Unfortunately, the more I learned, the more confused I became.
A major argument against Halloween stems from its pagan origins. Yet there simply is no separating many holidays from such roots. Christmas trees dragged into a living room and decorated with lights are unquestionably a reenactment of a pagan offering to the gods that bring warmth and spring’s bounty. Even Easter probably got its name from Eastre, the Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility, and Halloween, or Samhain, as the holiday was originally called, was an attempt to keep bad spirits from returning and damaging crops. If anything, Halloween began as an anti-devil crusade, a way to keep a malevolent creature at bay before the long, hard winter closed in.
Another argument repeated on many conservative blogs and articles is that scary costumes and other ghoulish images will create nightmares and are the opposite of God’s will. Fine. Yet then how can some communities justify the creation of seasonal “hell houses”, filled with macabre images of women screaming over botched abortions and gay people languishing in the flames of eternal damnation? Is terrifying young people like this fine if it suits your purpose?
Now I understand that nobody looks at a child tearing down the dark street in a Spider-Man or fairy costume in search of chocolate as anything but adorable. Yet some folks see a slippery slope between permitting that harmless activity and devil-worshipping behavior down the line. A friend’s daughter was once told by a pal down the street, “If you dress up for Halloween, it means you don’t love Jesus.” I struggle to see the connection here.
Parenting is a decision-making landmine, and I fully support the choice of these parents to do what’s best for their family and to uphold their faith. It’s just that when I picture a night of raucous, carefree fun, of shiny costumes, too much candy and staying up past bedtime, I can’t help but wonder: Where’s the real harm?
Rebuttal
One of the biggest misconceptions about Halloween is that it is “nothing but innocent fun.” Now, children getting excited about trick-or-treating is innocent and fun, and a blast - which is why my husband and I allow our children to participate. But we are also very aware of a dark side to the holiday that is anything but innocent, and are very careful about steering clear of it. For us that includes no scary costumes and no haunted houses . But many parents prefer to avoid Halloween altogether.
Parents with Judeo-Christian beliefs have struggled with Halloween for centuries. Two thousand years ago, Nov. 1 was the Celtic new year, the beginning of winter, the time of death. The Celts believed that the night before was the most supernatural moment of the year, when evil spirits walked abroad. So they celebrated the festival of Samhain with animal sacrifices, dressing up like evil spirits to ward off the real ones. As time went on, these occultic beliefs became mixed with the spreading Roman culture, so the early church began to try, like many Jewish and Christian parents today, to change the holiday.
In the 800s, Pope Gregory IV designated Nov. 1 All Saints Day, to commemorate Christian legends of the faith, and the night before as All Saints Eve (translated as All Hallows Eve). Parties, bonfires and costumes became the norm of this more wholesome celebration.
But many continued to celebrate Halloween for dark purposes. Today, that has translated directly into very real, very evil Oct. 31 witchcraft and Satanic ceremonies, which I have heard something about from two friends who were raised by Satanist parents. As Steve Russo, author of “Halloween: What’s a Christian to Do?,” described in an interview: “There is a danger to being desensitized to evil. And Halloween is one of the eight high holy days for Satan worshippers and those that practice Wicca. So that means that there are all kind of things that go on unbeknownst to the average person. I am not anti-Halloween or pro-Halloween, but I do want to provide answers for parents.”
I appreciate parents who, like the early church, have consciously tried to change the tenor of the Halloween holiday. But I also respect those who feel it is safer to avoid it altogether.
Does press support for Obama give him an inappropriate advantage?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
“Inappropriate” does not begin to describe how freely the press has campaigned for Sen. Barack Obama. The statistics from Pew Research’s Project for Excellence in Journalism are damning — and infuriating.
Pew regularly tallies weekly media attention to each candidate, and also tries to determine the media’s subjective spin by surveying people to find out which candidate they think they heard more about in the news that week. This year, it wasn’t until the first week of August that the statistical media coverage was even similar. (The end of July stats were more typical, with 83 percent of campaign stories featuring Obama, to 51 percent featuring Sen. John McCain.) But even in August, the subjective perception wasn’t close: 76 percent of people said they had heard most about Obama compared with McCain’s 11 percent.
Without conservative ombudsmen to catch ideological bias, largely liberal reporters find their personal excitement about Obama creeping into their stories. NBC correspondent Lee Cowan was honest enough to admit that it is “almost hard to remain objective [about Obama] because it is infectious…” He later told the New York Times, “In the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid. It’s so rapturous, everything around him.”
According to a July Rasmussen report, nearly half of those polled think they have drunk the Kool-Aid: 49 percent believe reporters will try to help Obama win the election, just 24 percent think reporters attempt unbiased coverage, and a delusional 14 percent think the media is trying to help McCain win.
The main concern is reporters repeatedly ignoring Obama stories that raise important red flags. As just two examples, Obama’s relationship with unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers remains “underground” or is minimized as “they hardly knew each other” (when that is demonstrably not true) instead of triggering a journalistic investigation into ideological similarities. (Can you imagine the media ignoring a similar story about John McCain?) And Obama’s repulsive votes against the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act are not even on the mainstream media’s radar.
This media imbalance inevitably creates a massive advantage for Obama — or any Democrat. In such an environment, it is a testimony to the overwhelming conservativism of America that conservative presidents ever get elected.
Rebuttal
An interesting question was asked at the presidential debate in Nashville: “What don’t you know, and how will you learn it?”
If what you don’t know is why Barack Obama has received more press coverage than John McCain, perhaps I can lend a hand.
Obama came into the national scene as a virtual unknown; McCain has been around for decades. Obama was locked in the closest primary race in history against another historical candidate. McCain wrapped up his nomination months earlier, so there was no story to cover.
“I get it!” the formerly confused among you (very few folks, I imagine) are saying to themselves. “It’s why Sarah Palin has received so much more press coverage this fall than Joe Biden. They don’t like her better — she’s just more newsworthy!”
My colleague’s stats only tell us how easily one equates coverage with support when it involves the opposition. Forget the Summer of Love — remember the Summer of Wright? Obama’s connection with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright dominated the news for weeks on end. Oh, and tell Bill Clinton about the Democrats’ “massive advantage.” I’m sure he’d love to know that what felt like a nearly career-ending investigation of his dalliance with Gennifer Flowers was just a figment of his imagination.
Top-rated FOX News views Obama as a Baby Daddy prone to “terrorist fist jabs.” The New York Times recently analyzed its own record; they’ve published 20 “tough” articles on Obama, compared with 13 on McCain. So what’s really going on here? McCain is grabbing onto that tried-and-true lifeline, “Us vs. Them” politics. The economy is in freefall. Who cares? Obama worked on poverty and education issues with a former radical! Russia and Pakistan pose real threats to our safety. Who cares? Obama refused to support a redundant bill created to undermine Roe V. Wade!
If the two campaigns didn’t know how much Americans care about Obama and Bill Ayers or McCain and the Keating Five before, they sure learned in Nashville. There, not a single citizen reporter used his or her moment in the sun for character assassination, demanding instead answers and leadership. So, panicking blame-gamers— can we stop all this and get back to the issues now? Our future demands it.
Is the U.N. becoming irrelevant?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
During a week that featured the financial markets collapsing like a house of cards, it was easy to overlook the opening of the United Nations’ General Assembly last month. Truthfully, most Americans will only remember the event as Sarah Palin’s world-leader scavenger hunt.
Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience is understandable, if alarming. There was a hint of truth in a recent Saturday Night Live skit that had her comically “disheartened” to learn how many foreigners were at the U.N., promising to “get those jobs back in American hands.”
McCain-Palin and Co. are indeed leading the charge on a foreign policy that is American-centric to a fault. Their proposed “League of Democracies” would be an alliance of like-minded countries with the potential to render the struggling U.N. obsolete, offering a cloak of legitimacy to any military actions we deem necessary.
Yet diluting the power of the United Nations isn’t what most of us want. An international poll from Worldpublicopinon.org shows that 85 percent of all Americans believe that the U.N. should have the right to authorize military force in the case of human rights violations. We value an organization whose nearly 200 members span a vast geographical and ideological range, working together to aid displaced refugees and conduct peacekeeping missions in some of the most treacherous spots on the globe. In addition, a post-9/11 United Nations employed sanctions to halt nuclear proliferation and helped with locating the finances of terrorist organizations. Can a more narrowly defined organization accomplish these same goals? Hard to imagine.
There’s no excuse for the United Nations’ bungling mismanagement and appalling incidences of corruption. Yet we need to fix this troubled organization from the inside, not in spite of its non-democratic members, but because of the opportunities such inclusiveness offers.
Sen. Obama recently noted that “the way we are perceived in the world is going to make a difference in terms of our capacity to get cooperation and root out terrorism.” Putting all our financial and strategic resources into a coalition of “yes-men” countries will not put our country first. By reforming the United Nations— a complex conglomeration of friends, enemies and ever-changing alliances — we will truly make our country safer and stronger.
Rebuttal
The U.N. isn’t becoming irrelevant — it has already made itself irrelevant. While some divisions involve humanitarian work, its main reason for existence - to be a venue for multi-national diplomacy — has become so biased and broken that “fixing it from the inside” no longer seems possible.
Andy didn’t mention the significance of the new U.N. General Assembly president: none other than Nicaraguan Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann. Viscerally anti-American, he was foreign minister under Sandanista dictator Daniel Ortega. In 2004, D’Escoto referred to the United States as “the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples,” and Americans as “the most ignorant people around the world.”
Hmm. The fact that an ideologue with a deep, public hatred of America could rise to a position that is supposed to be neutral and diplomatic shows just how broken the U.N. is. As the Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer wryly put it in an interview, “It is not in the U.N.’s best interest for D’Escoto to be the face of the General Assembly.”
Each year, we give $5 billion dollars to the U.N. budget — a budget D’Escoto now essentially controls. The United States shells out more money than any other country and yet, according to the State Department, 95 percent of countries who receive aid from us voted against us most of the time. The way we are perceived in the world is indeed crucial — but the U.N. is helping ensure that perception is one of enmity. For all our aid, we are also being thanked with an investigation by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council into “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in America.
To say the United Nations is bungling and appalling does not do it justice. To spend time and money to investigate a country in which an African American may be the next president, while ignoring catastrophic human rights issues in Tibet and Darfur shows just how bizarre and senseless the U.N. has become. Or consider the appointment of Richard Falk as human rights investigator — a professor who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
It is the U.N. that has become the “yes-man” organization for corrupt and biased regimes. The world needs a credible multi-national diplomatic organization, and it is tragic that the U.N. has ensured that it can no longer play that role.
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Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
“We cannot spend the next four years as we have much of the last eight, hoping for our luck to change at home and abroad.”
Quick: Which presidential candidate has added this line to his speeches? Barack Obama, right? No, that would be Republican candidate John McCain, hoping to change his luck at home in the final stretch of Campaign ‘08. Ever since reminding Obama that “I’m not President Bush” in the third debate, McCain has tried harder to distance himself from our unpopular Commander in Chief. And who can blame him? For nothing is driving voters to the polls more than eradicating the Bush administration from our future.
“Bush is just radioactive at this point” explains Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” I caught up with Westen 10 days before the election, as the polls continued to widen. “The ironic thing for McCain was that he was beaten in 2000 by George Bush with Bush’s smear campaign and he’s being beaten again by him in 2008 by the absolute poverty of Bush’s policies both home and abroad.”
Caroline Adelman, spokesperson for the Obama campaign in Georgia, finds that money matters weigh heavily on the electorate. Yet she agreed when I suggested that the president isn’t far from voters’ minds on this issue or any other: “They realize now that they need to vote against everything that Bush and McCain stand for,” she told me.
Do Bush and McCain stand for the same things? One of the most frequently quoted statistics in this campaign would seem to indicate “yes.”
“If you voted with Bush over 90 percent of the time, you can’t proclaim you’re a maverick,” Westen explains, echoing an assertion that resonates strongly with those heading to the polls. Near the end of our conversation, Weston paused in his thoughts on voters to consider how this incriminating branding affects the candidate himself. “I think McCain’s an angry man anyway,” Westen declares, “but — provided there isn’t a terrorist attack that throws him the election — on Nov. 5, he’s going to end up enraged that Bush got him again.”