Tag: Barack Obama

No help for their candidate

Maybe I’m reading to much into this. But if congressional Republicans wanted to help John McCain, wouldn’t they have slowed things down and tried to make it look like McCain’s parachute drop onto Capitol Hill was — well, if not exactly crucial, then at least helpful?

Instead, Republicans and Democrats have reportedly just about wrapped up the bailout legislation, leaving McCain looking foolish, and with nothing better to do Friday evening than to head to Mississippi for the first presidential debate.

Here’s a hilarious tidbit from the Politico:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said that “nobody mentioned McCain” during the several-hour-long meeting on the $700 billion market rescue plan, other than Frank. “They winced when I did,” said Frank. He went on to compare Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to “Andy Kaufman and his Mighty Mouse: Here I am to save the day.”

I am amazed at how unsteady McCain’s behavior is compared to eight years ago — or, for that matter, eight months ago.

An offer Obama has to refuse

Let’s assume, for a moment, that there might actually be some substantive value to the presidential campaign being suspended so that John McCain and Barack Obama can lock themselves in a room until the financial crisis has been solved. How might it have been handled if McCain weren’t being entirely political?

Here’s an answer: McCain could have approached Obama quietly. If Obama agreed, they could make a joint announcement. If not, then McCain could go public and grab whatever political advantage was to be had.

So what actually happened? As best as we can tell, McCain announced publicly and unilaterally that he was going to suspend his campaign, blindsiding Obama — after spurning agreeing to Obama’s private request to issue a joint statement earlier today. Obama can’t go along, because he’d look weak and subservient. McCain knows that, which is why he made Obama an offer he has to refuse.

It’s a big gamble. McCain might end up looking ridiculous. His hope is that Obama will look crassly political instead.

On the merits, the whole thing strikes me as absurd. The White House and Congress are working on a bailout package that everyone involved seems to think will get done within days.

Friday’s scheduled presidential debate is not a sporting event that should be canceled on the grounds of misplaced priorities. It’s serious business, the business of democracy. Let’s get on with it.

George Will thrashes McCain

Conservative columnist George Will absolutely goes off on John McCain:

For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people….

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

The proximate cause of Will’s dismay is what he calls McCain’s “fact-free slander” of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox.

These are very tough words coming from perhaps our best-known conservative pundit.

Those greedy low-income seniors

Some mighty odd rhetoric this morning from the McCain campaign, which falsely claims that Barack Obama wants to raise taxes on everyone earning more than $42,000 a year. Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish writes:

Democrat Barack Obama has proposed eliminating the federal income tax for senior citizens on income below $50,000, which his campaign says would mean that 7 million seniors would not pay the tax, with an average tax cut of $1,400….

McCain, meanwhile, has not proposed a tax cut specifically for seniors. “We haven’t tried to target every demographic, the way Obama does with a handout, so we don’t have that,” McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said.

A “handout”? What is Holtz-Eakin saying? That tax cuts are just fine as long as they’re not targeted to low-income senior citizens?

Ditching the Straight Talk Express

Longtime John McCain admirer Richard Cohen has written a stunning column in the Washington Post about his disillusionment with the erstwhile conductor of the Straight Talk Express. (Via Talking Points Memo.) After excoriating McCain for his profligate lying, Cohen says:

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

This is remarkable stuff. I’m not sure we’ll see a tougher indictment of McCain for the rest of the campaign.

Tone-deaf Obama

How could Barack Obama be so tone-deaf as to talk about “lipstick on a pig,” given all the lipstick references surrounding Sarah Palin?

The McCain campaign, naturally and shamelessly, is claiming that Obama called Palin a pig, which he didn’t. But, really, Obama is almost inviting the Republicans to misinterpret him. (Via Mickey Kaus.)

Now if Obama wants to call Palin a cheap, grasping hack, that would be entirely accurate.

Obama, Palin and experience

For several days now, I’ve been thinking about the notion that Sarah Palin is just as experienced as Barack Obama — or, for that matter, more experienced, since she’s got executive experience and he doesn’t. I find it ludicrous, so it took me a while to wrap my arms around it.

Though “experience” and “qualifications” are being treated in this campaign as though they are the same thing, they are not. Experience is one of the things you look at — an important thing — in deciding whether someone is qualified. But there are other factors, too.

Let’s stipulate that Obama is less experienced than would be ideal, though I would argue that his years in the legislature of a large industrial state is vastly more relevant than Palin’s time running a tiny town, followed by her cup of coffee as governor. Despite Obama’s lack of experience at the national level, few people in public life today have done more serious reading, thinking and speaking about the wide array of national and international issues that will face the next president.

Thus the question with Obama is whether his deep knowledge of the issues, much of it theoretical and academic, will hold up once he gets slapped in the face by reality. It’s a legitimate concern. Ideally Obama would have run in 2012 or 2016. But politics is never ideal, and he took the risk — a smart risk, in my view — that it was better to run before he was as experienced as he ought to be than become just one of the Washington crowd.

Obama’s qualifications are his experience, his knowledge and his judgment. Voters have been probing those three elements for many months now and have gotten to know quite a lot about him.

Then there is Palin, who was thrust upon the nation less than a week ago. Most of Palin’s experience is virtually identical to chairing the board of selectmen in a small New England town. Sorry, but Obama’s years as a community organizer and as a state legislator, and his short time in the U.S. Senate, are vastly more relevant than Palin’s years as mayor and her brief stint as the governor of state with the population of Boston — a state awash in so much oil money that the only question is how to spend it.

So what about the rest of her qualifications? Her knowledge and her judgment? That’s what we’re all trying to find out now. I’ve made it clear that I think she comes up short on both fronts. There is no evidence that she’s ever given more than superficial thought to any national or international issue other than energy, and I’m not sure how her ideas differ from Obama’s except that she wants to drill, drill, drill. And why not? She thinks the views of the vast majority of the world’s atmospheric scientists — that humans are contributing to global warming — are mere opinions with which she is free to agree or disagree. And she disagrees.

Jon Keller, in his commentary on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) this morning, argued that experience is overrated, and that both Palin and Obama have enough. I don’t quite agree, but I agree with him that that’s not how voters will ultimately make up their minds.

People will vote for the Obama-Biden team or the McCain-Palin team on the basis of issues, values and party identification. In the end, experience is just something to talk about.

A good night for the Republicans

A pretty good night for McCain. He really caught a break with President Bush, who I thought came across far better as a chief executive on the job than he would have if he’d actually been in the hall. Bush was at his charming best and stayed on message, making it about McCain instead of himself. Discordant note: his out-of-context reference to “the angry left.”

What got into Fred Thompson? If he’d been this energetic and folksy during his presidential campaign, he might have gotten someone outside his immediate family to vote for him. I agree with David Gergen, who said on CNN that Thompson was unusually effective in talking about McCain’s experience as a POW, but no doubt angered Democrats with his distortions* (my word, not Gergen’s) of Obama’s stands.

It was pretty funny to follow Thompson’s hyperpartisan attacks with Joe Lieberman’s call for bipartisanship. Lieberman was a considerable upgrade over Zell Miller, the then-Democratic senator who made a fool of himself at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Lieberman took a couple of shots at Obama, but you had to laugh with some appreciation at his success in getting Republicans to clap for the Clintons.

I also enjoyed the smirk firmly planted on Lieberman’s face as he praised Sarah Palin.

*And, as Josh Marshall points out, a damn vicious distortion in at least one case.