Obama

My friends, I am voting for Obama, you betcha. I first voted for a President in 1960 and to me the choice of a President has never been clearer.

The starting place is George W. Bush. His administration is a disaster – a war in Iraq that was unnecessary; a war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban that was ended prematurely; a tax cut that skewed income toward the rich and along with a passion to deregulate contributed significantly to our present financial crisis; the disdain for scientific advice that has crippled the environment; a massive debt owed to foreign countries; the deterioration of the United States as a respected world leader; a management style that relies on gut reaction rather than on logic and reason; a weakening and disregard of government that has led to Katrina, collapsing infrastructure, and an unsupported, ineffective workforce; and as a final gift to the American public, the plan to change regulations during his last two months in office that will ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms, and would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards, and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

Try as he will to separate himself from Bush, McCain cannot do so. His efforts to define himself make John Kerry’s flip-flops laughable. After the Bush/Rove campaign savaged McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary, he opposed certain of Bush’s policies during the first administration. But needing to become the GOP nominee, he effortlessly tossed aside these supposedly deeply held maverick beliefs to adopt Bush policies wholesale, including the extension of the tax cuts, which McCain had previously voted against as unfair. He proudly talked during the Republican primaries how he had voted for Bush legislation over 90% of the time.

Now that he is trailing in the election campaign, he has shifted course again and is claiming to be diametrically opposed to Bush. Of course the trick is to figure out which is the real John McCain. But in a way it doesn’t matter as his willingness to shift course shows only a desire to be elected and his disastrously run campaign shows a thought process unsuitable for a US President.

His attempt to blame Bush for our current ills stops, however, at the refusal to oppose Bush’s tax cut, which in the guise of Joe the Plumber has become one of his newest themes. Lowering taxes is his solution to almost all problems, as it has been in every Republican campaign that I can remember. The fact that Joe is making far less than the $250 thousand a year he would need as the owner of a plumbing small business in order to be subject to Obama’s tax policy and would actually receive a tax decrease at his current salary is just Bush- like ignoring of reality when it gets in the way of persuading the public to believe your repeated claims.

Every McCain/Palin campaign stop is replete with false threats and implications that everyone in attendance, the Joe the Plumbers and Wendy the Waitresses, are going to be taxed by Obama. I have always believed that this country has never done enough to stimulate the many small waitress businesses making more than $250K a year, but maybe they need to sacrifice some of that profit to the greater good in these precarious times. The Republicans have moved far away from the progressive foundation of US taxation to a country that now has the greatest inequality of income in decades.

Approximately half of the $364 billion Bush tax cut over its ten year period is going to the top one percent of Americans: those with incomes of $350,000 a year or more. The bottom 80 percent of the population, in income terms, gets less than 10 percent of the tax break. Somehow in the McCain/Bush logic, this is not a redistribution of wealth. Eliminating that tax break for CEOs, hedge fund managers, and Wall Street leaders and ‘redistributing’ it to the middle class is hardly socialism. It is righting a wrong that should never have been enacted.

McCain’s average man turns out to be the small business entrepreneur making a sizable profit ($250K after deducting expenses from income). But instead of honestly defending his and Bush’s proposal, he chooses to lie about Obama’s plans. In fact the proposal is the old standby Republican trickle-down theory of economics. Give the rich and businesses money and they will invest in new opportunities and soon there will be jobs for all. Trickle-down is an arguable theory but we never hear it defined as such by McCain. The alternative to trickle-down is making sure there are jobs for Americans (even if that means having government stimulate the economy) so that employees will have salaries to spend leading to profits for business, sometimes known as the trickle-up theory. It is time to give that approach a chance to succeed as the trickle-down application of the Bush years has led to the elimination of 780,000 jobs so far this year and the destruction of immense stock market value.

The reality of the situation we are in today is that the US faces enormous domestic and international problems. The Bush administration, on top of its massive debt (much higher than the published amount if you don’t add the Social Security surplus into the government’s income) has just committed $700 billion dollars into rescuing the economy and most observers don’t think that will be sufficient. As we continue to pay for two international wars and a war on terror, we let our infrastructure age, we allow 45 million citizens to go without health insurance, and our environment is increasingly at risk. These problems can’t be solved without giving the government more money. Obama has not fully addressed this problem, but he is willing to reverse the Bush tax policy and make a start. All McCain can fall back on is a pledge to lower taxes and the scare tactic to assert that everyone will pay more if Obama is elected.

McCain presents himself as eminently experienced especially in comparison to Obama, although he doesn’t think Palin suffers from this defect. John McCain does have knowledge of world affairs gained over decades of involvement. The question though is whether this will make him an effective President.

No one really has experience that mirrors the job of President or prepares one to assume the position, except for a sitting President running to be re-elected. The job is the most unique and complex in the world. What matters is the intelligence a candidate possesses and how it is used to make judgments. A President is inundated with conflicting proposals from many competent and thoughtful quarters and has to make the choices that will most benefit the country. You don’t learn to do this because you have traveled widely and met many people. McCain infamously visited a dangerous market in Baghdad when daily life there was lethal and returned asserting how peaceful it was, neglecting to mention, or just being unaware, that he was surrounded by 100 US soldiers and that access to the market was severely curtailed. VIP tours only reveal what the tour guides want you to see.

Assume for the moment that McCain’s experience does have resonance for being President. Although not credited during an election campaign by the general public or the press, the President does not inhabit every position in the cabinet, let alone all the Assistant and Under Secretary jobs in the administration. Just who will fill those key posts in a McCain administration? Be warned – they will be Bush Republicans. All those young staffers who were sent to the Embassy in Iraq immediately following the invasion, who did such a fine job administering that country and then returned to jobs as lobbyists and Assistant Under Secretaries are primed to take over more responsible positions in a McCain administration. Talk about rewarding the unaccomplished.

What is significant in the selection of a President is temperament. Of the two candidates that characteristic is diametrically opposed. Obama is a candidate who organized a brilliant campaign that defeated the Clinton juggernaut through cool analysis of what it takes to win primaries, a person who seeks out wise counsel before making decisions and will actually change his mind if the evidence indicates he should, and when faced with his first major public decision, chose a Vice Presidential candidate who can offer counsel based on his deep knowledge of foreign affairs. Obama is cool and poised in the midst of crisis as he demonstrated prior to the passage of the financial bailout and has the academic achievements and the debate performances that testify to his intelligence.

McCain on the other hand has shown shifting, impulsive, and erratic behavior throughout the Presidential campaign, choosing and discarding themes frequently as he searched for one that might deter Obama; stopping his campaign to return to Congress for the bailout deliberations, which helped derail the first compromise, lapsing into silence at the meeting with Bush, and then doing little to assure passage other than voting for the legislation. With the opportunity to make a vice presidential choice that would have resulted in a running mate who could be seen as a worthy successor and who might have locked up one of the currently contested states, he instead chose the disastrously unqualified Sarah Palin as a sop to the extremes of the Republican party. Palin has turned off the disaffected Hilary voters and many independents who just might have voted for what they thought was the old McCain and is now a significant drag on the ticket. Palin doesn’t seem to care as it is evident that she is running her own campaign to become the 2012 nominee.

As unimpressed as I am with how McCain has approached this campaign, a part of me would hope if he were elected that the old John McCain would reappear. But that hope has been thwarted by the character of the campaign he has chosen to run. If McCain wins it will be due to reasons that diminish what should be among the strongest values of the United States: equality, fairness, decency.

Certainly there are intelligent and reasonable supporters of John McCain who prefer him to Obama. But with the majority of people having lost faith in George Bush and his policies, McCain is facing an unfavorable election environment that is trending Democratic. His and Palin’s response has been to attack Obama in ways that appeal to the worst elements of the American public and if he is successful, it is they who will make the difference in this election.

Examples of this rhetoric that encourage division abound. Palin’s paean to small towns as the source of pro-America and patriotic attitudes and by implication writing off 80% of the country; the McCain spokesperson who contrasted the “real” Virginia with DC people who have moved in and taken over Northern Virginia; McCain’s brother who referred to the Virginia counties Arlington and Alexandria as “communist areas”; the Republican functionaries who use Obama’s middle name to imply that he is an Arab; the campaign event attendees who scream that socialism is imminent, that Obama will turn the government into a communist state, and that Obama is a Moslem who won’t salute the flag; the openly racist voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for an African-American; and the continued linking of Obama to Bill Ayers despite the facts that Obama was eight years old when Ayers was setting off bombs, that Obama met him after he had changed his life (remember the American ideal of giving people a second chance) and served on an educational board with him along with a group of well-known and respected Republicans.

These extremists were categorized succinctly by a comment on the FiveThirtyEight.com blog:

They consist of deep south states, prairie gunslingers, anti-tax fetishists, end times Rapturists, militiamen and Millenarians, jingoists and misanthropes, survivalists and skinheads, racists, and the odd Alaskan secessionist including the First Dude.

This problem is deeper than the extremists. There are too many unthinking people who just believe what they do without any reasonable basis and cannot accept ideas different from the few they have.

Today’s Washington Post had an article about a small Missouri town that is almost 100% for McCain/Palin.

“Obama has got enough things different, you know, his name, his color, his religion that people don't know what to make of him”. The Post quoted members of a group having breakfast who said they trust gossip and e-mails from friends over missives from politicians, which is why they spent breakfast trading misinformation about Obama. They think Obama will raise their taxes and legalize same-sex marriage, even though he has said explicitly that he will do neither. Obama is a practicing Christian who routinely talks about his "love of country." But, at their table, Obama is better known as a man of African heritage and Muslim roots whose patriotism to the United States remains suspect.

"He needs to be 100 percent American, like we are".

"Yeah, and the truth is he's just not. I can't trust him”.

“At least with McCain, you've got somebody who served the country, was a prisoner of war and understands what people like us stand for. Obama scares me”.

The division of the American public into two warring camps who can only see one side of an issue and want to crush their opponents into oblivion is what disturbs me most about the Bush administration as exemplified by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, and that approach has now been adopted by McCain and most eagerly by Palin.

Following 9/11, the country was united behind George Bush. I even told Republican friends that if an election were held at that time that I would vote for Bush. But instead of building on that unanimity, Bush/Rove concluded they could parlay the success immediately following Afghanistan into a narrow victory in 2004. They were not interested in a landslide win, but wanted to obtain 50% plus one of the voting public. Getting consensus meant having to compromise; winning narrowly meant their agenda would carry the day because all they needed was the Republican base. In doing so they wrote off the interests of half the country, instead of uniting it, and have continued that philosophy through today.

Abortion is the clearest manifestation of this mindset. If you are opposed to abortion there is no other side and any proponent of abortion is in favor of murder. But according to polls more than half of the country is not in favor of eliminating abortion. Giving women a choice about their bodies or concluding that abortion is less of an evil than bringing an unwanted child into the world are positions derided by anti-abortionists. There is no willingness to compromise.

The reality is that there are deeply held beliefs on both sides of this issue. I realize it is easier to be for abortion and to assert that your belief does not preclude abortion proponents from following their beliefs but that if you are opposed to abortion it is impossible to see it continuing to exist. McCain rails that he will do everything he can to defeat Row v. Wade and appoint judges like Samuel Alito. If he were successful, if he could create nine like-minded justices, and if every state banned abortion, abortion would not cease to exist. Rich people would fly to Canada or Europe and do what they want. Poor people would revert to illegal and dirty back alley accommodations and be fortunate to escape with their lives.

Obama recognizes the passion on both sides of this issue and seeks to find some common ground that both sides can accept. Education about sex, rather than abstinence only schooling, more effective adoption laws, and a willingness on both sides of this issue to figure out how to reduce the divisive nature we find ourselves in. There is a profound difference in the candidate's approaches with only Obama showing the intention to find workable compromises. The same philosophy is needed across the range of difficult issues facing the US and if we don't come together we are in danger of a stalemate that will impact the ability of this country to succeed..

If McCain wins this election, his negative campaign almost guarantees that there will be a continuation of the poisonous environment that exists today. A Democratic Congress will be opposed to the programs that McCain proposes, rightly or wrongly. Sarah Palin will probably be ignored by McCain and will be free to roam the countryside building up support for her far right beliefs and her hoped for accession to the throne. The rest of the world will conclude that we have not changed and that our racist history still is a significant factor in our lives. McCain will fail to stir the population to support his programs and fractured government will reign.

Obama’s strongest suit is that he is a pragmatist who will seek to change our approach to politics. He will be seen as a transforming politician by people throughout the world. His calm demeanor and articulateness (the eloquence that McCain and Palin denounce) will provide the best opportunity to convince people that the difficult steps the country needs to take to escape its current morass will be understandable and supported. While racism will not disappear, it will be dealt a significant blow.

Obama offers hope for the future and an excitement not seen since John Kennedy. What a refreshing change from the past. Of course harsh reality may impinge, but McCain cannot touch this ability to change the mood of the country, saddled as he will be with his age, with his tendency toward impulsive behavior, and with the specter of Palin in the wings.

Powell Endorsement

Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama clearly summed up the argument in favor of Obama/ Biden and the case against McCain/Palin. It ends the main McCain assertion that Obama is unprepared to become President by recognizing that temperament and intelligence are what matters when choosing a President. None of the four candidates is prepared to assume that position based on their prior experience. The Presidency is the most powerful and most complex job in the world. The only person who can claim pertinent experience is an elected President running for a second term in office and that person would be judged on performance.

McCain’s temperament and judgment can be judged by the way he has reversed prior beliefs in order to be nominated, by a campaign striking in its continual change of strategy to find something/anything that will resonate with the voting public, his empty gestures around the financial crisis, and with his egregious choice of Sarah Palin.

Obama, in contrast, has shown a steady hand during crisis, a brilliantly organized campaign, the responsible selection of a Vice President who can provide counsel to the President and step in if required, and the ability to both articulate and inspire the public. Being eloquent in explaining your views and vision is not a disadvantage coming on the heels of President Bush and little hope that McCain will be better.

Here are Powell’s comments on Meet the Press:

I know both of these individuals very well now. I've known John for 25 years as your setup said. And I've gotten to know Mr. Obama quite well over the past two years. Both of them are distinguished Americans who are patriotic, who are dedicated to the welfare of our country. Either one of them, I think, would be a good president. I have said to Mr. McCain that I admire all he has done. I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years. It has moved more to the right than I would like to see it, but that's a choice the party makes. And I've said to Mr. Obama, "You have to pass a test of do you have enough experience, and do you bring the judgment to the table that would give us confidence that you would be a good president."

And I've watched him over the past two years, frankly, and I've had this conversation with him. I have especially watched over the last six of seven weeks as both of them have really taken a final exam with respect to this economic crisis that we are in and coming out of the conventions. And I must say that I've gotten a good measure of both. In the case of Mr. McCain, I found that he was a little unsure as to deal with the economic problems that we were having and almost every day there was a different approach to the problem. And that concerned me, sensing that he didn't have a complete grasp of the economic problems that we had.

And I was also concerned at the selection of Governor Palin. She's a very distinguished woman, and she's to be admired; but at the same time, now that we have had a chance to watch her for some seven weeks, I don't believe she's ready to be president of the United States, which is the job of the vice president. And so that raised some question in my mind as to the judgment that Senator McCain made.

On the Obama side, I watched Mr. Obama and I watched him during this seven-week period. And he displayed a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge and an approach to looking at problems like this and picking a vice president that, I think, is ready to be president on day one. And also, in not just jumping in and changing every day, but showing intellectual vigor. I think that he has a, a definitive way of doing business that would serve us well. I also believe that on the Republican side over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party and Mr. McCain has become narrower and narrower. Mr. Obama, at the same time, has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He's crossing lines--ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines. He's thinking about all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.

And I've also been disappointed, frankly, by some of the approaches that Senator McCain has taken recently, or his campaign ads, on issues that are not really central to the problems that the American people are worried about. This Bill Ayers situation that's been going on for weeks became something of a central point of the campaign. But Mr. McCain says that he's a washed-out terrorist. Well, then, why do we keep talking about him? And why do we have these robocalls going on around the country trying to suggest that, because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow, Mr. Obama is tainted. What they're trying to connect him to is some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that's inappropriate.

Now, I understand what politics is all about. I know how you can go after one another, and that's good. But I think this goes too far. And I think it has made the McCain campaign look a little narrow. It's not what the American people are looking for. And I look at these kinds of approaches to the campaign and they trouble me. And the party has moved even further to the right, and Governor Palin has indicated a further rightward shift. I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that's what we'd be looking at in a McCain administration.

I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

So, when I look at all of this and I think back to my Army career, we've got two individuals, either one of them could be a good president. But which is the president that we need now? Which is the individual that serves the needs of the nation for the next period of time? And I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities--and we have to take that into account--as well as his substance--he has both style and substance--he has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president. I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world--onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.

And I have watched him over the last two years as he has educated himself, as he has become very familiar with these issues. He speaks authoritatively. He speaks with great insight into the challenges we're facing of a military and political and economic nature. And he is surrounding himself, I'm confident, with people who'll be able to give him the expertise that he, at the moment, does not have. And so I have watched an individual who has intellectual vigor and who dives deeply into issues and approaches issues with a very, very steady hand. And so I'm confident that he will be ready to take on these challenges on January 21st.

Let me make one point, Tom, both Senator McCain and Senator Obama will be good presidents. It isn't easy for me to disappoint Senator McCain in the way that I have this morning, and I regret that. But I strongly believe that at this point in America's history, we need a president that will not just continue, even with a new face and with some changes and with some maverick aspects, who will not just continue, basically, the policies that we have been following in recent years. I think we need a transformational figure. I need--think we need a president who is a generational change. And that's why I'm supporting Barack Obama. Not out of any lack of respect or admiration for Senator John McCain.

Small Towns

We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

It is important to have a ticket that supports our core values -- hunting and fishing.

As a proud resident of Oakton, Va., I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia. And that's really what you see there. But the rest of the state, real Virginia, if you will, I think will be very responsive to Sen. McCain's message.

The first quote above was made by Sarah Palin at a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, the second by Todd Palin yesterday, and the third on MSNBC by McCain senior economic adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer, a frequent guest on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour.

According to the US Census Bureau, the population of the United States based on the 2000 Census, was 282 million. Of that total, 222 million people live in urban areas and 59 million in rural. Or if you prefer to use the definition for metropolitan area there are 226 million people living in metropolitan areas and 55 million in non-metropolitan areas.

Apparently, according to the McCain campaign, this country is on its way to perdition with 80% of the population unpatriotic and anti-America. Some of these people even think paying taxes to fund the military, home land security, Medicare, and the financial rescue is something citizens ought to do.

Joe the Plumber

To really understand Republican values, all you need to do is look at the 26 references to Joe the Plumber by John McCain during the last debate. McCain shed tears of anguish for the plight of this individual, who was concerned that a plumbing business that he wanted to purchase would see its taxes rise under Obama’s tax plan as its income would exceed $250,000. McCain will spare no one in order to make sure that the Republican ‘average man’ gets his due. He becomes visibly upset at the redistribution of wealth from a plumbing entrepreneur to people making less than $250K.

What doesn’t upset him at all is the continuation of the Bush tax cuts.

Approximately half of the $364 billion Bush tax cut over its ten year period, which McCain at first opposed but now has flip flopped to support completely, is going to the top one percent of Americans, those with incomes of $350,000 a year or more. Some 65 percent will go to the top ten percent. The bottom 80 percent of the population, in income terms, gets less than 10 percent of the tax break.

Somehow in the McCain/Bush logic, this is not a redistribution of wealth.

But that is not the whole story. It turns out that once again the McCain team did not fully understand what it was doing. Joe the Plumber, according to his state’s standards is not a licensed plumber and makes nowhere near $250,000 and so would receive a tax cut under Obama’s tax plan. He also owes over one thousand dollars in unpaid taxes. Since Sarah Palin believes paying taxes is not patriotic, I guess she also considers Joe a Republican hero.

But these facts don’t fit the accusation that McCain hopes will assist in getting him elected so they are ignored. His campaign continues to accuse and imply that Obama will raise taxes on everyone, despite Obama’s claim that he will only raise taxes on incomes greater than $250 thousand. Just like Bush, he uses words to further his beliefs regardless of the underlying truth, and by repeating them ad nauseum, prays they will be accepted.

The tax debate is based on falsity. If McCain argues that his and Bush’s policy is the old GOP standby of trickledown economics, that is position about which people can agree or disagree. But there is no mention of that economic strategy. Rather there are false and misleading assertions about his opponent and little honesty about his own positions.

Erraticism

Actually it’s sad to see. John McCain once was the maverick he claims to be. But his apparently long sought desire to be President led him to conclude that anything he did that would lead to that end was justifiable. So he jettisoned those views that occasionally had him oppose Bush/Republican policies and shifted completely to the right. Once opposed to Bush’s tax cuts as inherently unfair; now he is a strenuous supporter. His claim to be a straight talker and an ethical politician have given way to negative attacks about Obama rather than demonstrating why he has the temperament to be President.

Unfortunately for him, the capture of the right wing base of the Republican Party has correctly saddled him as a supporter of the policies that have led to the worst financial crisis since 1929 and jeopardized his election hopes.

With the need to demonstrate why he deserves to be President despite the Bush record, he has launched a series of what can only be called desperate campaign moves that show a willingness to gamble and an erratic lurching from position to position.

Selecting a woman as a vice-presidential candidate on the heels of the Hilary Clinton supporters’ dissatisfaction was a brilliant political move and really worried me when I first heard it. But the reality of Sarah Palin took about a day to sink in and expose the paucity of the thought processes that led to McCain’s decision.

It turns out she is a flawed candidate, unqualified, disinterested in the world beyond Alaska, but a willing surrogate who will say anything regardless of the truth. The result so far is that she has stirred the passions of the people who were going to vote for McCain anyway (even if he had nominated Dennis Kucinich as VP) and alienated the independents, and women who are appalled at the thought of the setback to women achieving high office if the first woman so elected is so unfit for the position.

When this maneuver didn’t work and Paulsen and Bernanke began ringing financial alarms, in the space of a day, McCain declared the economy to be sound and then after hearing from his advisors publically recognized we were in a crisis.

As his poll numbers began to drop, he dramatically announced that he was placing his campaign on hold to rush to Washington so he could act as the leader he believes himself to be. This led to the breakup of an agreement between Congressional Democrats and Republican by inserting Presidential politics into the middle of very difficult negotiations.

The next day at a meeting at the White House, McCain was essentially silent as the debate raged. During the next week, while Obama was convincing ten or so members of the Black Congressional caucus to change their votes to support of the bill, McCain remained passively in his local office. He then announced his support for the rescue plan.

Back on the campaign trail, he allowed Palin to accuse Obama of terrorist associations, allowed speakers to emphasize Obama’s middle name to draw connections to the false rumor that he is an Arab, and allowed Palin to charge that Obama is different than most Americans. When the revved up crowds responded with hate and viciousness, McCain realized that he had been the catalyst for behavior that was abominable, and he tried to correct the more extreme statements of his supporters, getting booed by them for the effort. The polls though kept widening in Obama’s favor, but the negative ads remained and Palin continues her attacks. In the middle of the financial crisis, she felt it was important yesterday to tell gun owners that Obama would take away their gun rights. Given the current direction of the economy, no one is going to be able to afford bullets, let alone guns.

The McCain campaign has been reduced to a combination of false and misleading accusations of Obama coupled with McCain assertions that McCain knows how to find Osama Bin Laden, knows how to fix the financial crisis, and knows how to win wars. Very little that he has done over the past four years and in managing his election campaign support those extravagant claims.

Chicago Terrorists

Greg Hinz, a reporter for Chicago Business, one of the many Crain’s publications that cover business in the US, wrote the following article on October 13, 2008. It identified the other people on the same committee with Obama and Bill Ayers. Guess they were ‘pallin around with terrorists” also.

Behind in the polls and running out of time to change the subject from the sinking economy, the McCain/Palin campaign has gone hyper trying to morph Chicago Weatherman-turned-professor Bill Ayers into Barack Obama's soul mate.

Mr. Obama can't be trusted because he's not one of us, Sarah Palin keeps suggesting. "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who has targeted his own country," she declared.

Well, Mr. Obama apparently had a lot of company at work. Among those who served on the boards of the two Chicago charities at the heart of the Ayers-Obama "connection" are the former president of Northwestern University, the head of the city's most powerful business group, officials from petroleum giant BP Amoco and banking heavyweight UBS, and the ex-publisher of a noted liberal rag, the Chicago Tribune.

Kinda gives it a different spin, no? The story of the Ayers affair isn't that the radical Vietnam-era protester was embraced by Mr. Obama. The story is that a wide swath of Chicago's establishment, rightly or wrongly, gave Mr. Ayers a second chance — and that Mr. Obama, not one to challenge Chicago's power structure, raised no objections.

Mr. Ayers, of course, is the son of William Ayers, who used to run Commonwealth Edison Co. That likely didn't hurt him when he resurfaced, took a teaching post at the University of Illinois at Chicago and became a big player in the burgeoning school-reform move here.

Mr. Ayers, who declines to comment, apparently is good at school stuff. His fans include Mayor Richard M. Daley and numerous educators.

By the mid-1990s, Mr. Ayers was active with a group trying to get a foundation spawned by billionaire and Nixon administration ambassador Walter Annenberg to invest $50 million in Chicago schools. Key to the effort were three women who headed powerful local foundations: Joyce's Deborah Leff, MacArthur's Adele Simmons and Spencer's Patricia Graham.

All told me the same thing: They knew of Mr. Obama (he served on the Joyce board), liked his work and asked him to chair the Annenberg effort. Though Mr. Ayers co-wrote the Annenberg application, he "played no role in my recruiting Obama," Ms. Graham says in an e-mail.

Among those Mr. Obama recruited for his board, says Ms. Simmons: industrialist Susan Crown, former University of Illinois President Stanley Ikenberry and ex-NU chief Arnold Weber. Publisher Scott Smith and former Continental Bank exec Edward Bottum also served, Ms. Graham says.

A bit later, Messrs. Obama and Ayers overlapped again on the board of the Woods Fund, which helps community and arts groups. Among others on the board during Mr. Ayers' tenure, which continues to this day: BP's Midwest community affairs director, USB Investment Bank's public affairs chief and R. Eden Martin, president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club.

Mr. Martin knew of Mr. Ayers' past. "One can simultaneously have one's own opinion about things that occurred 35 years ago and deal with them on contemporary issues." He adds, "Ostracism, excommunication is not the way we usually run our lives."
The only other known joint activity between Hyde Parkers Obama and Ayers came in 1995, when Mr. Obama declared for the state Senate and attended a brunch with about 10 people at Mr. Ayers' nearby home.

Mr. Obama "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist," Ms. Palin says. But others active in these events, including Dr. Quentin Young and Rabbi A. J. Wolf, say the coffee was one of several held that day and may not have been the first.

That's pretty thin backing for the "pals" stuff being peddled, particularly when a bipartisan probe in Alaska concluded that Gov. Palin abused her authority by seeking to fire a family foe.

Team McCain is on stronger ground in suggesting that Mr. Obama is tight with Chicago's power structure and has co-existed with, not challenged, Mr. Daley. But that's a harder spin. It certainly isn't as sexy as screaming about domestic terrorists and their fellow travelers in the living room.

The Undecideds

Conservative Family Values

Conservative Republicans and fundamentalists love to insist that their strict view of the world be adopted by everyone, but when it comes to following those strictures themselves, their own moral discipline suddenly becomes much more liberal.

Here is a puzzle. Which of these do you think more closely fits the family value model?

1. Two people, who met when they were single after law school, fell in love, married, had two children, and are raising them with the mother having left her six-figure law firm job to stay home with the children.

2. A father of three, whose wife raised the children alone while he was in a POW camp and then was seriously injured and scarred in an accident, who after returning from Vietnam began a series of sexual liaisons, then after meeting a rich 15 years younger heiress, divorced his wife and left the children in her care.

3. A politician who believes in abstinence only sex education and the sanctity of marriage, whose teen age unmarried daughter becomes pregnant.

I doubt that the majority of far-right conservatives will be able to see the incongruity of this and how it contradicts their basic beliefs, because they too often don’t think, but just believe. But the hypocrisy is startling. Only God could imagine the reaction if couple #1 were Republican, and #2 and 3 were Democrats.

VP Debate

After having written four books on the Bush presidency, Bob Woodward summarizes his opinion of George Bush in the latest “The War Within”.

For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut.

Reading this quotation and agreeing with it wholeheartedly, I found myself thinking not only of Bush, but immediately saw that the conclusion fits both John McCain and Sarah Palin as well.

The split in the country and the campaign seems to be between those people who think a President should be like them (folksy, someone to have a beer with, a Mom – just a regular person) vs. those people who think the President should be smarter, more accomplished, better educated, and much better at applying the judgment needed to govern the country.

In the Vice Presidential debate, Sarah Palin exceeded the extremely low standard that had been set during the Katie Couric interview, but hardly made the case that she has the qualifications to become the President of the United States. She delivered the briefing notes she had learned over the past week in Sedona, rather than answering the questions posed. Most revealing was her statement early in the debate:

And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.

She was able therefore to fill up the short time allotted for each of her responses, almost like delivering a speech, and if the response did not always relate to the question, she just continued blithely onward without a second thought. It was a good performance for someone applying for a local news anchor or public relations position, but not one for a potential leader who would be facing new crises, dare I say at three in the morning, without a bevy of briefers available and a week to memorize her lines.

She did demonstrate one of the major attributes that makes her so popular with Republican supporters: the willingness to make assertions that were either outright lies or gross distortions of the truth. Joe Biden got a few of these in as well, but the difference in the degree of distortion was distinctive. Biden’s were based on truth, which at times he somewhat exaggerated. Hers were straight out of the McCain playbook. They were excessively exaggerated, distorted, or just plain wrong.

Palin charged that [the Obama/Biden] “plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq and that is not what our troops need to hear today, that's for sure”. Bush/Cheney couldn’t have said it better. If you don’t agree with me, you are not patriotic and you don’t support the troops. Supporting the troops means keeping them in Iraq, whether it makes sense or not. If you really support the troops, you should want to get them out of harm’s way, unless there is a clear indication that our strategic interests are at stake.

Palin said McCain's proposed health care tax credit is budget neutral. The Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center, however, says the McCain plan could cost $1.3 trillion from 2009 to 2018. The Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates the McCain plan would cost $141 billion in 2013.

Palin said Obama's tax plan would raise taxes on millions of small business owners. (McCain has actually put the figure at 23 million). This is false, according to factcheck.org. 23 million is an old census number for all businesses -- most of which employ at least hundreds of people. In addition, most people who run small businesses do not file as individuals but as companies. In fact, Obama's plan would only raise taxes on couples making more than $250,000.

Palin tried to burnish her credentials with her executive experience as governor of a huge state, although Alaska’s population is actually smaller than Delaware’s, and presented herself as a struggling middle class Mom. According to the Anchorage Daily News:

Sarah Palin and her husband have pieced together a uniquely Alaskan income that reached comfortably into six figures even before she became governor, capitalizing on valuable fishing rights, a series of land deals and a patchwork of other ventures to build an above-average lifestyle.

Add up the couple's 2007 income and the estimated value of their property and investments and they appear to be worth at least $1.2 million. That would make the Palin’s, like Democratic vice presidential rival Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, well-off but not nearly as wealthy as multimillionaire couples John and Cindy McCain and, to a lesser extent, Barack and Michelle Obama.

Palin’s description of the cause of the current financial crisis:

Darn right it was the predator lenders, who tried to talk Americans into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house. There was deception there, and there was greed and there is corruption on Wall Street. And we need to stop that.

It is not corruption when for the most part the activities that Wall Street engaged in were permissible in a Republican era that either deregulated or ignored regulations that were in effect. It is the market acting as markets do when they are free to do anything they want.

Palin tried to escape her claim that climate changes are not caused by man.

I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.

Biden’s response demonstrated the paucity of her intellectual reasoning:

If you don't understand what the cause is, it's virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is man made. That's the cause. That's why the polar icecap is melting.

Palin, trying to distance herself from the Bush albatross stated:

There have been huge blunders in the war. There have been huge blunders throughout this administration, as there are with every administration.

Thankfully, there is something I can agree with her on. Biden responded by referencing McCain’s support of Bush:

I haven't heard how his policy is going to be different on Iran than George Bush's. I haven't heard how his policy is going to be different with Israel than George Bush's. I haven't heard how his policy in Afghanistan is going to be different than George Bush's. I haven't heard how his policy in Pakistan is going to be different than George Bush's.

Palin sounding like the spawn of Dick Cheney came up with a new interpretation of The Constitution, which describes only two functions for the Vice President – breaking tie votes in the Senate and replacing an incapacitated President:

Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation.

Palin claimed that Alaska under her guidance is “building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America's largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever, to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets."

Palin has often touted the pipeline deal as a singular achievement of her administration as Alaska governor. But, as reported by NPR, she talks about it as if it is under construction, when it is still more glimmer than reality. The pipeline project, which dates from the 1970s, is still at least a decade from being built -- if it is built at all.

Not a single section of the pipeline has been laid. And some Alaskan lawmakers have begun to have second thoughts about Palin's approach to the project. When she became governor, she walked away from a deal negotiated by her predecessor with major oil companies, instead opening up the bidding in a way that would commit the state to pay a subsidy to offset costs and expenses. TransCanada Alaska Co. won the bid. Some estimates indicate the state could lose as much as $500 million on the deal pushed by Palin.

First Debate

With foreign policy being the theme, Obama had to appear as if he was comfortable and knowledgeable about the subject given the expectation that foreign policy was McCain’s strongest asset. Obama more than held his own. If there was any memorable phrase from the entire evening it was the series of assertions that McCain got it wrong about why we went to war in Iraq.

A draw, therefore, was all Obama needed. Of course, having the financial crisis intrude on the planned subject matter did not help McCain. I thought McCain demonstrated knowledge himself, but his demeanor was unimpressive. The polls have shown contradictory results with a slight tightening nationally, although Obama still leads. McCain’s inability to reduce Obama’s lead significantly after the debate is encouraging.

The respected Quinnipiac University poll just released its first post-debate findings, which show Obama increasing his lead in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, compared to where he was prior to the debate. Obama now leads in those three states having crossed the magic 50% threshold: 51-43% in Florida, 50-42% in Ohio, and 54-39% in Pennsylvania.

During the debate McCain continually harped on two points– his years of experience and his role as a maverick who will take on his own party.

While Obama countered these repeated thrusts, I think he can make a better case. McCain talks about his visits to foreign countries as prime evidence of his experience. Obama needs to describe McCain’s visit to the Baghdad market and his conclusion that things were not as dangerous as the press had led us to believe. But he never mentioned that he was surrounded by 100 or so soldiers and access to the market was closely controlled.

The point about this is that the President’s job is not to travel the world on VIP trips where he is presented with what his hosts want him to see. The job is to listen to the reports from people who know the situation because they are on the ground for more than a short visit, and evaluate conflicting reports while setting strategy and making realistic judgments that are in the best interest of the US.

The maverick claim ought to be presented by talking about two John McCain’s – pre-2005 when he often opposed George Bush and flirted with John Kerry to the point of discussing running as Kerry’s VP, and post 2005 when he reversed that maverick stance by adopting George Bush policies. McCain was against the Bush tax plan before he was for it, he has voted for Bush legislation 90% of the time, and he was against regulation and now is for it.

A final consideration is that if McCain is elected you get more than McCain and Palin. The McCain administration would be staffed by people who have supported Bush and in many cases were in the Bush administration. It is going to be hard to be a maverick and a reform candidate when you are going to be relying on the same people who got us to where we are today.