Speaking of Sarah Palin… remember that guy at the top of the ticket? The maverick? Yes, him… Senator John McCain, Numero Uno on the “Original Mavericks” team.
The 73-year-old maverick recently told David Margolis of Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.”
He’s gone senile.
For more on this story I recommend this Newsweek video montage and this segment from Tuesday’s The Daily Show.
According to the latest Pew Research poll they are:
The good news for Republicans: You are happier than Democrats. You always have been, and you probably always will be.
Never mind that your presidential candidate is sinking in the polls while your president plumbs historic depths of popular scorn and your free market squeals for intervention while your Wall Street investments evaporate. You are not just happier than the other guys, but more of you are very happy, according to new survey results published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The pollsters were in the field asking about happiness this month, when economic news was gloomy for everybody and presidential campaign news seemed especially baleful for Republicans. Yet they found 37 percent of Republicans are “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats; 51 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats are “pretty happy”; and 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent of Democrats.
The partisan happiness gap — unbroken for nearly 40 years — is impervious to electoral ups and downs. It has something to do with worldview.
“I’m very happy,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and a Republican. “When I was 12, I realized the world was not organized around my desires and wishes. The problem with guys on the left is they never figured that out at age 12. And they’re just irritated the world is not organized around their vision. This makes them grumpy.”
Chris Lehane doesn’t sound grumpy. The Democratic consultant is on the phone from San Francisco: “My guess is if [Pew] checked the cross tabs out in California, we’re all pretty happy out here. The wine is still good, the food is fresh, the people are beautiful.”
But seriously, Lehane said, if Republicans are more happy, it’s because they care less.
“The typical Republican is happy coming home to a 62-inch television, pulling out a fine bottle of cognac or scotch, putting his feet on the table and enjoying the fruits of his labor, but not caring what’s going on in the world outside their living room … and their gated community.”
Hard-core liberals are the happiest liberals, and hard-core conservatives are the happiest people on Earth. Self-certainty is like a happy pill. The bumper sticker may declare, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” but the guy behind the wheel is overjoyed.
Check out this video of hardcore Republicans lined up for a McCain rally. Watch this ignorant, racist, lying throng of Republicans wallow in their happiness as they accuse Obama of being a Muslim terrorist baby killer:
“The Old Viking” forwarded me a viral email today. I did a quick Google search and found that it’s up on quite a few sites. I get a lot of these from both sides and I don’t usually post them, but I really like this one, so here it is:
What if the resumes of Obama/Biden and McCAin/Palin were switched around? Think about it. Would the country’s collective point of view be different? Could racism be the culprit?
Ponder the following:
What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?
What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
What if Obama couldn’t read from a Teleprompter?
What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?
What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money from beer distribution?
What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?
You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?
This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND:
Barack Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in
International Relations.
Harvard – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum LaudeJoseph Biden:
University of Delaware – B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law – Juris Doctor (J.D.)John McCain:
United States Naval Academy – Class rank: 894 of 899Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University – 1 semester
North Idaho College – 2 semesters – general study
University of Idaho – 2 semesters – journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College – 1 semester
Washington is a blue state, so we don’t get anywhere near the number of presidential campaign ads as those who live in the tightly contested states like Missouri, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. We do, however, have a tightly contested gubernatorial race, and Biden did visit our state on Sunday to campaign for Obama and our incumbent Democratic governor, Christine Gregoire.
During the week leading up to this rally, Obama started running what I think is his best campaign ad that I’ve seen so far. It’s referred to as the “90% Ad” and it’s directed at McCain’s overwhelming support of Bush’s failed polices.
The Obama campaign’s equating of McCain with Bush, a very unpopular president and perhaps the worst president ever, is nothing new. What makes the ad really great is how it took McCain’s best line from the last debate and turned it against him. You all remember it: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
McCain had to say that because the Obama campaign has successfully portrayed a McCain presidency as four more years of Bush, and nobody wants that. The successful framing of an issue by a Democratic candidate is something we have not seen in a very long time, and as Roger D. Hodge put it in his November ”Notebook” entry for Harper’s Magazine:
Public opinion, the will of the people, is therefore not the cause but a byproduct of political struggle. It is largely the political fighters (…) who frame and determine the subject matter and scope of political debate, the pressing matters of national interest – the menace of homosexual marriage or the grave and rising threat of Saddam Hussein – which the people dutifully discuss in their homes and offices, on the athletic field and at the bar after work. Whichever party to the political struggle best controls the terms of discussion thereby defines the boundaries of public opinion and generally ends up running the country.
This ad takes John McCain’s own words, turns them around and uses them against him. The ad is so excellent and so effective, one has to wonder if the Obama campaign has hired former Republican advertisement producers to create their new TV ads.
Watch and Learn.
During the drive in to work this morning I listened to a story on NPR about how polls in rural Lincoln County Missouri show that the presidential race there is a toss-up. NPR reported that the outcome of the Lincoln County vote has mirrored the national vote in the past twelve presidential elections.
The reporter interviewed several voters for the story, but the two that really got my attention were Thomas Burkemper, a lawyer in the Lincoln County seat of Troy and chairman of the county’s Democratic Central Committee; and Carol Wessel, a real estate agent who serves as chairwoman of the Lincoln County Republican Central Committee.
“Locally, people were afraid to run as a Republican. But nationally they would vote Republican,” says Carol Wessel. … “They would come up to me and say, ‘Carol, I’m really a Republican. But … because I want this position, I’ve got to run as a Democrat.’”
Wessel says local Democrats and Republicans share strong conservative beliefs opposing abortion, gay marriage and gun control. They also share values based on religion. They’re Catholics and Baptists, and they go to church.
And the newcomers “increased substantially the church attendance,” according to Burkemper, who asks and answers this question:
“How hard will the churches come out and swear that we either vote for McCain or go to hell? I don’t think that the churches are going to cut the same swath in this election as they did in 2004 and 2000. Because the people are hurting. … The people are angry about the economy.”
…
Wessel has confronted conservatives who cite the economy when they tell her they won’t vote for Republican John McCain.
“I tell them ‘I’m a Christian first,’” Wessel recalls. ” ‘And if you vote your true Christian values and vote for the candidate that you think is ethically right and has the [right] values, that will take care of the economy.”
Aren’t these conservative Christians the same people that voted for George W. Bush because he professes to be a born-again Christian and supposedly shares their values? Hasn’t the Bush Administration been in charge for the past eight years? Aren’t we now facing the worst financial crisis since The Great Depression? Does Carol Wessel even hear herself when she speaks?
Howard Berkes, the NPR correspondent, didn’t bother to ask her these questions or if she shared some of the same values of Barack Obama, also a Christian.
I’ve never met President Bush and I hope I never do, so I can’t judge if he is sincere about his religious beliefs. All I can go by is what he says and how he governs, and he governs like a man with the morals of a laughing hyena.
He pushed through tax cuts for his extremely wealthy base. He started an unnecessary war and lied about why he started it. He hasn’t raised one tax to pay for the trillion dollars it has cost so far. He authorized the use of torture. He suspended habeus corpus for anyone he used his unitary executive power to label an “enemy combatant,” and he authorized secret renditions of innocent people to foreign countries where they were secretly tortured.
This is a man who shares the values of conservative Christians in Lincoln County? I don’t really think so, so I hope they vote their economic interests this time, because their morality based votes haven’t worked out so well for them.
Oh, and shortly after hearing that story, I read today’s Progress Report that was centered on the story of Joe the Plumber. The article reports on how the Right jumped on the story to promote the myth that average people do better under Republican economic policies than Democratic policies. The article then points out:
President Bill Clinton decided early in his term in office that expanding the middle class — not tax cuts for the rich — would be the engine of economic growth, while his successor, President George W. Bush, argued the opposite. But the as the results have shown, a progressive tax policy enacted by President Clinton achieved far superior results for the economy. By the end of Clinton’s second term, unemployment stood at very low 3.9 percent while today it has risen over 6 percent. The poverty rate was lower in 2000 than it is today. The median household income (adjusted for inflation) was over $3,000 higher eight years ago. Bush inherited a $237 billion federal budget surplus, which he has turned into a $482 billion deficit (and growing fast).
From The Caucus blog on The New York Times site:
Turns out that “Joe the Plumber,” as he became nationally known when Senator John McCain made him a theme at Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate, may run a plumbing business but he is not a licensed plumber. His full name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher. And he owes a bit in back taxes.
The premise of his question to Mr. Obama about taxes may also be flawed, according to tax analysts.
An official at Local 50 of the plumber’s union, based in Toledo, said Mr. Wurzelbacher does not hold a license. He also has never served an apprenticeship and does not belong to the union. (The national plumber’s union, the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters, and Service Mechanics, endorsed Mr. Obama, it should be noted.)
“He’s basically playing games with the world,” Thomas Joseph, the local’s business manager, said in a telephone interview Thursday morning.
Just five days ago, Mr. Wurzelbacher, 34, lived in anonymity, a single father who worked all day at his plumbing business and came home to fix dinner and help his son with his homework, as he said on national television.
But he became the hero of conservatives and Republicans when he stopped Mr. Obama, who was campaigning on Shrewsbury Street on Sunday, and asked whether he believed in the American dream. Mr. Wurzelbacher said he was concerned about having to pay taxes as he reached a point where he could afford to buy his own plumbing business, one he said would draw income of $250,000 a year.
…
Unlike some other states, Ohio does not have a formal statewide licensing system for plumbers. But the city of Toledo and other municipalities do, Mr. Joseph said, and Mr. Wurzelbacher has not met those requirements.
“All contractors are licensed, and he does not have a license, either as a contractor or a plumber,” the union official said, citing a search of government records. “I can’t find that he’s ever even applied for any kind of apprenticeship, and he has never belonged to local 189 in Columbus, which is what he claims on his Facebook page.”
The third presidential debate was best. John McCain was sometimes spunky and sometimes fiery, and Barack Obama was cool, thoughtful and right as usual.
Their passion is a refreshing change from what we’re getting from the Current Occupant. Bush now appears before the TV cameras to address the nation about the financial crisis and delivers his prepared statements in a stunted manner with all the enthusiasm of a disinterested first-grader just learning to read. He doesn’t sound as though he believes a word he’s saying. He doesn’t care. When the mic goes off, you have to wonder if he looks over to Cheney and says something like: “Are we done yet? Can’t we just leave now?”
I thought the first two debates clearly showed the differences in the policies of the two candidates, and they both passionately conveyed their positions, but this one seemed even more spirited.
Maybe it was because of the talk-show like format. I’ve always thought that McCain could best conduct his campaign from the guest chair of The Daily Show, but that can’t happen, so there he was seated as a guest alongside Obama with Bob Schieffer as host. He’s not nearly as funny as Jon Stewart, but I think he did a great job as moderator.
On Negative Campaigning: One of the most contentious parts of the debate was about their negative campaign ads. McCain was shameful in his assertion that he always corrects the ignorant misinformed masses when they go too far. What about his own running mate when she goes to far? Terrorists? One is misleading enough, but more than one? Who as he met besides William Ayers? For more on this topic, watch this Daily Show segment.
And when the Ayers issue was brought up in the debate, McCain asked the question that he and his pit-bull running mate have been asking their supporters for the past few weeks:
MCCAIN: Yes, real quick. Mr. Ayers, I don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist. But as Senator Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship.
Obama was ready with his response:
OBAMA: So let’s get the record straight. Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago.
Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan’s former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.
Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican- leaning newspaper.
Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House. So that’s Mr. Ayers.
McCain insisted that there must be more to the story. I think if there was, we would have heard about it by now. So, can we move on?
On Health Care: Obama clearly won this part again even though McCain explained his position way better than he has in the past. His plan is just wrong for America, so he loses. And Obama successfully addressed the lie that McCain keeps telling about Obama’s plan imposing a fine on small businesses that don’t provide health insurance for their employees.
On Taxes: McCain told the same tired old lies about Obama’s tax plan, only this time he used Joe the Plumber to make his point. The point was that it’s wrong for the government to “spread the wealth around.” Oh really? So it’s right for the government to cut taxes on rich corporations and the wealthiest five percent of our population while we’re in a never-ending war on a noun? It’s right to not to collect taxes from those most able to afford them to pay for the war and the five trillion dollar debt run up during the Bush term? McCain’s tax plan doesn’t add up. He can’t further cut taxes on the rich and expect to make any headway on balancing the budget and paying down our debt. It simply doesn’t make sense. Anyone with any basic math skills can figure that out, so I think McCain knows it; therefore he’s just pandering to his wealthy base and to all the fools that think the rich are going trickle their enormous wealth onto the middle class. It didn’t happen under Reagan, Bush I, or Bush II, so it’s not going to happen under McCain.
On Roe v.Wade: Let’s go right to the transcript:
SCHIEFFER: …Senator McCain, you believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Senator Obama, you believe it shouldn’t. Could either of you ever nominate someone to the Supreme Court who disagrees with you on this issue? Senator McCain?
MCCAIN: I thought it was a bad decision. I think there were a lot of decisions that were bad. I think that decisions should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist. And I believe strongly that we should have nominees to the United States Supreme Court based on their qualifications rather than any litmus test. Now, let me say that there was a time a few years ago when the United States Senate was about to blow up. Republicans wanted to have just a majority vote to confirm a judge and the Democrats were blocking in an unprecedented fashion.
We got together seven Republicans, seven Democrats. You were offered a chance to join. You chose not to because you were afraid of the appointment of, quote, “conservative judges.”
I voted for Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg. Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences when presidents are nominated. This is a very important issue we’re talking about.
Senator Obama voted against Justice Breyer and Justice Roberts on the grounds that they didn’t meet his ideological standards. That’s not the way we should judge these nominees. Elections have consequences. They should be judged on their qualifications. And so that’s what I will do.
I will find the best people in the world — in the United States of America who have a history of strict adherence to the Constitution. And not legislating from the bench.
SCHIEFFER: But even if it was someone — even someone who had a history of being for abortion rights, you would consider them?
MCCAIN: I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.
WTF? He says the Supreme Court nominees “should be judged on their qualifications” and that he will do that, but he concludes with saying that they aren’t qualified if they have supported Roe v. Wade. That’s not a litmus test? Are you kidding me?
There’s plenty more to discuss about this debate, but I’ve got to close now. I’ll conclude by saying that independent polls showed the debate was closer than the first two, but Obama won again. He’s 3-0.
Watch and/or read the whole debate here.
Fact check here.
Barack Obama and John McCain squared off in a “town hall” style debate at Belmont University last night. The debate didn’t seem very town-hall like to me, because there was not much audience participation. I tend to think of town-hall forums to be pretty loosely controlled so that everyone there can participate. This one was very structured. All of the questions were screened ahead of time and the audience could not ask follow-up questions, although the moderator, Tom Brokaw, was able to ask a few. The candidates did walk around and address the audience, but they weren’t allowed to respond, so if you weren’t watching on TV, you wouldn’t really notice the difference between this one and the last one, except for the occasional question asked by someone in the audience.
Another problem with this debate was the amount of time that was allotted to follow-ups and rebuttals. Tom had to remind both candidates several times that they had agreed to limit their time to one minute. One minute? In a presidential debate? That’s ridiculous, and both candidates went over the limit almost every time. They should have been more realistic and doubled that time.
So what of the substance of the debate?
Obama and McCain outlined their own health-care plans and criticized their opponents. I think McCain’s attack was a little over the top, but then it probably had to be because his plan is clearly inferior to Obama’s. (Not that Obama’s is the best plan. Personally I would love to see us go to a single-payer plan like the one France has. But we must progress in baby steps…) McCain kept saying that Obama would fine employers if they did not participate. As far as I can tell, that’s an outright lie, but you can check here if you’d like.
Obama clearly has a much better understanding of economics that McCain. McCain seemed to rattle on about taxes, taxes and more taxes as if that was the only major factor. Yes, he did talk a bit about spending, and he did throw out a wild card about he would like to spend another 300 billion dollars to buy up bad mortgages. My interpretation was that it would be in addition to the 700 billion we just threw in. This we get from a guy who says he wants to reduce spending? The Center for American Progress has been pushing this idea since December 2007, and the post on their website today tells how perplexing McCain’s announcement was because “he had previously rejected similar mortgage relief.”
Obama’s discussions about the economy and his tax plans were fare more comprehensive that McCain’s. Obama was able to draw a big picture that did not focus on just one or two economic variables. He spoke of a need for fairness in tax rates, of rebuilding our infrastructure, of effective tax cuts, and surgical spending cuts. He spoke of his grand ambition of weaning our country from foreign oil in ten years. He spoke of expanding our economy by investing in the development alternative energy sources and then exporting that technology to China.
Yes, McCain did touch on some of these same topics but his presentation seemed fractured while Obama’s seemed more coherent and easier to understand.
I am convinced that everyone’s opinion of who does better in the foreign policy section of the debates ultimately gets down to whether or not one thinks it was right or wrong to invade Iraq. I think it was a horrible mistake, so I side with Obama. Those who think we should have gone in and that we can win the war will side with McCain. That said, I think Obama presented his side much more eloquently than McCain, but eloquence doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to this issue.
A few other observations:
Bottom line: Obama won the debate. Again. Most every survey that I saw on news channels and websites also showed Obama as the winner. The only exception was FOX News.
If you missed it, you can watch and/or read the whole thing here.
Paul Krugman explains the differences between McCain’s and Obama’s health-care plans in today’s column.
This [the current] system does a fairly effective job of protecting those it reaches, but it leaves many Americans out in the cold. Workers whose employers don’t offer coverage are forced to seek individual health insurance, often in vain. For one thing, insurance companies offering “nongroup” coverage generally refuse to cover anyone with a pre-existing medical condition. And individual insurance is very expensive, because insurers spend large sums weeding out “high-risk” applicants — that is, anyone who seems likely to actually need the insurance.
So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured.
Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.
Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.
As compensation, the McCain plan would give people a tax credit — $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family — that could be used to buy health insurance in the individual market. At the same time, Mr. McCain would deregulate insurance, leaving insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with health problems — and his proposal for a “high-risk pool” for hard cases would provide little help.
So what would happen?
The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.
But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).
Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.
And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.
That’s exactly the kind of explanation that I’ve been looking for: Short and to the point. I hope Obama reads this column before Tuesday night’s debate. In fact, he ought to just add Krugman to his staff.