Economic Events and the McCain Campaign

A meme developing among the mainstream media and Republicans is that McCain is losing because of the economy and there's nothing he or his campaign could have done about it. Republican advisor Mark McKinnon:

If not for a major economic event that interceded a few weeks ago (for which a strong majority of voters blame Republicans), this race might still be competitive. It isn’t Steve Schmidt’s fault. It’s the economy, stupid.

Branch Rickey, the executive that signed Jackie Robinson, is credited with saying that "luck is the residue of design."

I understand why Republicans want to blame the market collapse for McCain's problems, but I just don't think the idea that it is what killed him holds water.

First, I think it misses the fact that other important things were happening independently in the second half of September. McCain's convention bounce was wearing off, the public was getting to know Palin, and those who had just started to pay attention discovered that Obama wasn't the guy the Republicans had made him out to be (in part because Obama was cleaning McCain's clock in the debates).

Second, and this is related to Palin and the debate performances, McCain himself increased the damage to his campaign from the economic crisis. He entered the general election campaign proposing more Bush-style tax cuts for the rich, inexplicably leaving Obama a wide opening to propose more tax cuts for the middle class. He also failed to become more knowledgeable about economic issues and failed to select a running mate that could help him on those issues, even though it was becoming clear in the summer that the economy would be a major concern. Worse, he continued claiming that the "fundamentals of the economy are strong". Finally, his reaction to the crisis - transparent political posturing - was not reassuring. He took credit for the bailout before it passed even though he contributed nothing to the process, then took credit for slowing it down when it failed. These are self-inflicted wounds.

This was an inhospitable climate for any Republican, but if any Republican could win, the McCain of 2000 had a fighting chance. However, he failed to separate himself from Bush. He should have shifted after the primaries to running as a Democrat with more military and foreign policy credentials. Perhaps, instead of Bush's compassionate conservatism, a tough liberalism. He blew it. Maybe he should have learned something from his idol, Teddy Roosevelt, who went in a new direction following McKinley.

Voting for Bush's Third Term

I was a strong supporter of McCain in 2000, but I steadily lost respect for him in recent years. His campaign this year has been extremely dishonorable. However, it wasn't until this week that I started to think the previously unimaginable.

Bush has been a disaster, including failing to act on the mortgage crisis for way too long. Nevertheless, when I contrast Bush's leadership in the past week with McCain's empty grandstanding, I would have to consider voting for a third term of Bush over McCain if those were my only two options.

Democrats have tried to paint McCain as a third term of Bush. I'm not sure he wouldn't be worse. McCain wants to give even more tax cuts to the wealthy. Whereas Bush has discovered the art of diplomacy in his second term, McCain wants to pursue an even more neoconservative foreign policy than Bush's first term. Bush is a juvenile frat boy who always seems to think he operates with divine inspiration. McCain is an erratic drama queen who thinks himself more moral than anyone around him. At least Bush seems to have learned from his mistakes.

McCain could accomplish quite a feat by winning this election. He could make me nostalgic for Bush.

Banking is McCain's Model for Health Care

Priceless (McCain in the Sept/Oct 2008 issue of Contingencies):

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

In his defense, he was referring to allowing consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines, which would presumably provide more nationwide competition and replace much of the state regulation with federal regulation. But I don't think that more choices of innovative products in mortgages (ARMs, 100% loans, interest-only loans, balloon payments) turned out to be a good thing for the banking industry or its customers, necessarily. And McCain here seems to be strongly advocating deregulation. He doesn't mention adding more sensible federal regulation, just eliminating state regulation.

Sarah Palin?

She seems like a generally decent person, but she's not experienced and perhaps not the reformer she has been made out to be. My main thoughts are below. For more on Palin from up close, see this blog. There's also the potential issue of the suspicious pregnancy. And she's not gonna be as strong with women as McCain probably thinks.

Foreign Policy Experience

For months, McCain has been saying that, not only is Obama less experienced than he is, Obama is dangerously inexperienced in a time of terrorism and global conflict. Of course, McCain people will argue that Obama is inexperienced, too. Anybody that says that Obama is no more qualified to be president than Sarah Palin is just being dense.

First, Obama just has more experience. Palin was a city council member and mayor in a town of 5000 for a decade before becoming Governor of Alaska. She has been Governor for less than 2 years. In contrast, Obama represented part of the third largest city in the nation in the Illinois state legislature for eight years before being elected to the U.S. Senate. Republicans like to end Obama's experience in January of 2007, the moment he began his presidential campaign. But the fact remains that Obama had already been in the Senate for 2 years when Palin took office as Governor. Since that time, Obama has been serving in the Senate and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

More importantly, Obama has spent the past year and a half explaining to a skeptical public why he should be commander-in-chief. During that time, he has studied foreign policy issues thoroughly, traveled abroad, taken questions from reporters and voters, and participated in more than 20 debates against candidates including Biden, Clinton, and Richardson. He earned the confidence of the Democratic party during the course of that campaign. There is no evidence that Palin has even thought about foreign policy.

Some will point out that Palin's experience as Governor is executive experience. Hilzoy explains why any doubts about Obama's executive skills have been put to rest by his stunningly well-run campaign. Meanwhile, Palin has managed a tiny population flush with oil revenues.

Government Reform

McCain is touting Palin as a fighter for honesty and accountability in government. However, there is currently an investigation into the firing of a public safety official as part of a personal vendetta against a state trooper. Even if the investigation reveals no wrongdoing, some of her denials have been proven false. Here is a rundown of the story and Palin's trouble with the truth:



Previously, as mayor, she fired a police chief for what appeared to be purely political reasons. That action nearly led to a recall.

McCain likes to claim that she killed the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, she was a very strong supporter of the project until it became unpopular.

McCain

The bottom line is that Palin is not a known quantity to McCain or anybody else. McCain has selected a person with no foreign policy credentials to be one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency. The decision was made impulsively and recklessly with, by all accounts, essentially no vetting. He claims to always put his country first, but this decision seems to put his political campaign ahead of the national interest. Either he does not believe what he says about the dangers of Obama's inexperience, or he is willing to jeopardize national security for political purposes. I'd rather have the judgment of Obama, who rejected attractive options in battleground states to select a VP ready to step in "on day one". Obama looks to be the careful, steady hand while McCain looks to be the unpredictable gambler. I'll take the former.

Finally, some claim that this is McCain showing his maverick tendencies. I think it is just the opposite. McCain's maverick image was created by taking on the right-wing of the GOP. Calling the religious right "agents of intolerance", opposing Bush's tax cuts, thwarting Bush's efforts on judges, and proposing amnesty-based immigration reform. Sure, there were government reform issues like campaign finance reform, earmarks, etc., where he took on both parties, but those were minor concerns. What really made McCain a maverick was his willingness to take on his own party on partisan issues. Insiders report that McCain wanted a more experienced person like Lieberman or Ridge. Even Romney, who McCain doesn't seem to get along with, would be more ready for VP. Unfortunately for McCain, the base would have vetoed a pro-choice candidate like Lieberman or Ridge, and the evangelicals would have been turned off by Romney. So he dodged and went with Palin, who is beloved by the base for her very conservative positions. This was not the maverick McCain I liked in 2000. It was more of the base pandering McCain that has cozied up to the right wing since 2000.

UPDATE: It looks like rumors that Sarah Palin's pregnancy was faked to pass of her 17-year-old daughter Bristol's child as her own have been put to rest with news that Bristol is actually now carrying a child conceived around the same time as the birth of Sarah Palin's son. I don't really care what Sarah Palin's daughter does, but was inviting this controversy into his campaign a wise decision by McCain?

McCain's Houses

It's good to see Obama hitting him on this.





This is the kind of bullshit issue Americans really care about.


Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Is McCain's cross story true?

Here is an excerpt from the transcript of the forum with Pastor Rick Warren:

The Vietnamese kept us in prison in conditions of solitary confinement, or two or three to a cell. They did that because they knew they could break down our resistance. One of the techniques that they used to get information was to take ropes and tie them around your biceps, loop the rope around your head and pull it down beneath your knees and leave you in that position. You can imagine it's very uncomfortable.

One night, I was being punished in that fashion. All of sudden the door of the cell opened and the guard came in. The guy who was just -- what we call the gun guard -- just walked around the camp with the gun on his shoulder. He went like this and loosened the ropes. He came back about four hours later and tightened them up again and left.

The following Christmas, because it was Christmas day, we were allowed to stand outside of our cell for a few minutes. In those days we were not allowed to see or communicate with each other, although we certainly did. And I was standing outside, for my few minutes outside at my cell. He came walking up. He stood there for a minute, and with his sandal on the dirt in the courtyard, he drew a cross and he stood there. And a minute later, he rubbed it out, and walked away.

For a minute there, there was just two Christians worshipping together. I'll never forget that moment.

Here, he uses it in an ad:



A DailyKos contributor calls bullshit. Apparently, it matches a story from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of whom McCain is a big fan. Sullivan points out that it is absent from McCain's 1973 account of his imprisonment.

Troop Donations Favor Obama

OpenSecrets:

According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain's haul.

I don't think this is particularly important, but I'm quite confident that Republicans would find it important if the ratio were reversed.

Hot Chicks Dig Obama

Some are accusing McCain of exploiting fears of miscegenation with his new ad:



I'm thinking Obama really shouldn't have said this:

Obama as the Antichrist

As ridiculous as it sounds, there is real fear of this among some, and McCain's "The One" ad may be deliberately exploiting that fear:

As the ad begins, the words "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One" flash across the screen. The Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia who founds the One World religion (slogan: "We Are God") and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of several Obama clips in the ad features the Senator saying, "A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for."

The visual images in the ad, which Davis says has been viewed even more than McCain's "Celeb" ad linking Obama to the likes of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, also seem to evoke the cover art of several Left Behind books. But they're not the cartoonish images of clouds parting and shining light upon Obama that might be expected in an ad spoofing him as a messiah. Instead, the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.

Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign's red-white-and-blue "O" logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.

The Ad:

ExxonMcCain

It's silly, but no sillier than a lot of the useless garbage coming fron the Republicans (e.g., tire gauges).

McCain Goes Nuclear

McCain toured a nuclear power plant today:

Senator John McCain toured a nuclear power plant in Michigan on Tuesday to highlight his support for the construction of 45 new nuclear power generators by 2030, a position that he said distinguished him from his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, portrayed his support of nuclear energy as part of an “all-of-the-above approach” to addressing the nation’s energy needs at a time of $4-a-gallon gasoline. He called it “safe, efficient, inexpensive and obviously a vital ingredient in the future of the economy of our nation and in our mission to eliminate over time our dependence on foreign oil."

It's important to point out that Obama agrees that nuclear power should be considered.

I've said before that I think talking about nuclear power as a solution to dependence on oil is simply an excuse to blame the left. The implication is that we wouldn't be in this mess if we could get rid of those darn environmentalists who prevent nuclear power plants.

I am not opposed to nuclear power, but it will not reduce oil prices. Oil is primarily used to make goods and fuels that would not be replaced by nuclear power. Yes, if everyone drove electric cars nuclear power may be part of the electricity supply to charge those cars. But the combination of off-peak charging and coal power could allow us to charge those cars without nuclear power.

I think a big reason for nuclear power's popularity is that many people don't understand off-peak electricity generation capacity. Electric companies must constantly be able to provide power to you so that when you flip the switch, the light comes on immediately. During the day, we use electricity to run our offices and factories. During the evening, while everyone has the lights on and is running the TV, DVD player, cable box, dishwasher, clothes dryer, computer, etc., the power companies have to be able to meet the demand during those peak hours. The problem is you can't store electricity during off-peak hours to meet peak demand. The companies have to buy enough electricity generation capacity to meet maximum energy usage, but during the night this electricity generation capacity is essentially wasted while we sleep. The fact that plug-in electric cars would normally be charging at night allows us to finally use this off-peak capacity. We could replace most gas-powered cars with electric cars without increasing our electricity infrastructure at all. And while nuclear power is better than other power plants in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, our current electricity grid is better than the internal combustion engine on that front. Replacing the internal combustion engine with a battery charged by electricity currently reduces grenhouse gas emissions by 40%.

In the article, McCain describes his energy policy as "all of the above." But offshore oil drilling shouldn't even be considered part of a multi-pronged effort to deal with the energy crisis because it is actually counterproductive for several reasons: (1) billions of dollars invested in offshore drilling is money that could be invested in alternative energy; (2) by increasing the profit margins of oil, we encourage continued investment in oil by energy companies; and (3) to the extent that it reduces prices, and I don't think that it will, it disincentivizes the use of alternative energy. Remember, the purported benefits of offshore drilling won't be seen for a decade. This isn't a temporary solution to ease the burden on consumers. It is a long-term commitment to oil.

UPDATE:

More from McCain's Respectful Campaign

This is just silly.



The "symbol" quote is a gross misrepresentation, and the McCain campaign has to know it.

I'm sure this is doing a lot to contribute to the debate over energy policy, economic growth, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, education, global warming, deficit spending, entitlements, etc.

Next thing you know, Obama will be promising world peace:



Boy, what a jackass that guy was!

Who Benefits from a Consensus for Withdrawal?

Michael Crowley says McCain because it allows him to shift the debate from his unpopular advocacy of a long-term stay to who will be better at wrapping up.

Polling shows that McCain is basically even with Obama on Iraq. On other foreign policy issues, McCain leads by a wide margin. On practically every other issue, such as economic policy, Obama leads. Therefore, Iraq is a drag on McCain's only strength. If McCain can get Iraq out of the way, he has a cleaner shot at Obama on foreign policy.

The McCains - Just Regular Folks II

McCain has $520 loafers that he wears everywhere. I'm sure an elitist like Obama has several pairs of $520 loafers.

Matthew Yglesias makes an interesting point that the super-wealthy McCains probably stand to gain millions from his tax cuts for the wealthy. I wouldn't accuse McCain of self-dealing, but I think it's legitimate to ask whether McCain really understands the financial circumstances of many in Middle America.

Media Cowardice

The headline - Analysis: Obama, McCain both have lobbyist ties - and tone of this CNN article imply that McCain and Obama are equally influenced by lobbyists. But I'd say this is a real difference:

During this campaign, lobbyists and trade groups donated $181,000 to McCain, while Obama received $6,000, according to the New York Times.

The article goes on to explain that those numbers "only include registered lobbyists and trade groups -- not big companies that could have lobbyist ties." Well yes, but there's an important difference between a collection of individuals who happen to work for a large company and a person who is explicitly paid to represent companies, industries, or other groups on their behalf with regard to legislation and other government policy.

The right has worked the refs so well that the media is completely afraid to call 'em like they see 'em. Instead, they lead the public to believe the Nader line that both parties are exactly the same when there is an objective difference.

Politicizing Wounded Soldiers

Obama canceled a visit to wounded troops for fear of politicizing the troops, and then his cancellation of the visit was politicized by McCain in a dishonest ad. FactCheck:

The Obama campaign canceled the visit with wounded troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, Obama says, when he learned that the Pentagon would not allow him to bring along a retired Air Force major general who is serving as a foreign policy adviser to the campaign. Obama says that "triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political."

Screw McCain.

Opposite of a Sound Counterinsurgency

Daniel Larison's takeaway from a post at The American Prospect:

Lost in the frequent back-and-forth over whether John McCain understands what the “surge” was or whether he knows when the Anbar Awakening happened (answers: apparently not and no) is the more basic point, made here by Matthew Duss, that the Anbar model has succeeded for the time being by pursuing the opposite of a sound counterinsurgency...

Another False Attack Ad from McCain

I had hoped for an honest and honorable campaign from McCain. I guess knowing he's going to lose is making him desperate. FactCheck.org:

The McCain campaign is running a TV ad attacking Obama with statements that are literally true but paint an incomplete picture.

It says he "voted against funding our troops." He did – exactly once. Obama cast at least 10 votes for war-funding bills before voting against one last year, after Bush vetoed a version that contained a date for withdrawal from Iraq.

It says he "hasn't been to Iraq for years." He was headed there at the time the ad was released, however, and had been there in 2006.

It says he "never held a single hearing on Afghanistan." It was the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee, not Obama's subcommittee, that had the hearings on this global hot spot, and Obama attended one of those. Over the same time period, McCain himself attended none of the Afghanistan hearings held by the Armed Services Committee on which he serves.

CBS Covers-Up McCain Error

Your liberal media at work:

The Irrelevance of Gaffes

If Obama made these gaffes, the right would claim that they are evidence of inexperience.

However, nobody suggests that these gaffes are evidence of McCain's lack of experience because we don't question his experience. They also are not evidence of McCain's age.

McCain's gaffes are evidence of the fact that such gaffes are completely irrelevant to evaluating a candidate's preparedness for office.