FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

Foxfyre reported: "2. Vice Presidential Debate. Date: October 2nd " Site: Washington University (St. Louis) " Moderator: Gwen Ifill " Staging/Answer Format: Debate will consist of both foreign and domestic policy questions asked by the moderator. Format will be similar to the presidential debates."

Based on recent news reports, the format of the VP debate has been changed pursuant to a request by the McCain campaign. Senator John McCain's secured a highly structured vice-presidential forum. In other words, we're not really going to see a debate. The moderator will ask questions, and the VP candidates will regurgitate rehearsed answers. There will not be any free-flow exchanges.

If McCain wants to run as the candidate most likely to make the right decisions in a time of crisis he's going to have to learn to count to 10 Really, couldn’t he at least placed a secrete phone call to Phil Graham [sic] before making an absolute fool of himself regarding the economy/regulation/Cox thing?

... but he must learn to take council from his advisors in areas he knows he needs assistance.

“As soon as Gov. Palin was nominated, one of … Obama’s chief campaign surrogates, [Florida Rep.] Robert Wexler, went out and accused her of being a Nazi sympathizer,” Schmidt said. “Where is the outrage to that aspersion on the part of some of the biggest newspapers in the country?”

But Wexler didn’t call Palin a Nazi sympathizer. He called former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan a Nazi sympathizer, and attacked Palin for allegedly having endorsed him.

“John McCain's decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel,” Wexler said.

(Wexler was apparently wrong: Though Buchanan claimed that Palin had supported him, she said she backed Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000, and no evidence has emerged to the contrary.)

Asked about the series of errors, McCain aides could not provide evidence to back up Schmidt’s assertions.

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was “quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.”

Another, Brian Rogers, responded more directly:

“You are in the tank,” he e-mailed.

...Sadly, she was talking to supporters tonight in Media, Pennsylvania, a Philly suburb, and not engaging my colleagues in her travelling press pack.

Palin has yet to hold a single press conference or take questions from any group of reporters.

McCain has talked to local reporters on his bus, but has not held a press conference with national media since August 13th.

We will get past this economy thing but the Iran debacle must be addressed, Putin must be pushed back, DPRK is still unresolved, and Osama bin Laden's representatives still want us dead. We all know who they want to be president. That's why we need McCain as Chief Executive.

McCain Loses His Head
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; Page A21

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."

-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17, Page A4; and the New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

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

Forget the Veep debates. McCain has to ace the upcoming Presidential debates this Friday to, in my opinion, gather even odds to win. Seems the Palin phenomenon has pretty much run its course and has been overshadowed by McCain's absolute horrendous behavior this past week.

I had mentioned before not only his weaknesses in understanding economic and business issues but also his almost knee jerk reaction of starting crusades against perceived moral wrongs and his poor ability at anger management. This past week they all came to a head-- the flip-flop on the state of the economy, that on regulation vs. less regulation, and the almost maniacal and certainly irrational call for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox's ouster. Contrast this with Obama waiting to gather some info and responding in a relatively calm and cooler manner.

If McCain wants to run as the candidate most likely to make the right decisions in a time of crisis he's going to have to learn to count to 10 before blurting out populist rants usually attributed to the likes of the Rev. Al Sharpton and Senator Charles Schumer. Really, couldn’t he at least placed a secrete phone call to Phil Graham before making an absolute fool of himself regarding the economy/regulation/Cox thing?

The election is still Obama's to lose. McCain is the best man to be chief executive, but he must learn to take council from his advisors in areas he knows he needs assistance. Obama's commercials are increasingly negative; some even misrepresentations if not outright lies. Negativity in campaigns, though much maligned, is quite effective when not true and devastating when true. Obama is playing to win, time is short--McCain should cool down, smarten up and do the same.

We will get past this economy thing but the Iran debacle must be addressed, Putin must be pushed back, DPRK is still unresolved, and Osama bin Laden's representatives still want us dead. We all know who they want to be president. That's why we need McCain as Chief Executive.


JM

But for now our choices seem to be the guy prone to shoot from the hip or the guy who is afraid to draw at all if there is any risk.

I have a gazillion 'present' votes, a fair number of flipflops that appear to be based on the polls, and a voting record that goes against the old boys' club so seldom you really have to hunt for an exception. What evidence do you have that Obama can make a tough decision in a pinch?