October 7, 2008
October 6, 2008
The REAL John McCain - Please pass along to all your friends!
KEATING ECONOMICS: John McCain & The Making of a Financial Crisis
Registration Gains Favor Democrats
Voter Rolls Swelling in Key StatesWashington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 6, 2008
As the deadline for voter registration arrives today in many states, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign is poised to benefit from a wave of newcomers to the rolls in key states in numbers that far outweigh any gains made by Republicans.
In the past year, the rolls have expanded by about 4 million voters in a dozen key states -- 11 Obama targets that were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 (Ohio, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico) plus Pennsylvania, the largest state carried by Sen. John F. Kerry that Sen. John McCain is targeting.
In Florida, Democratic registration gains this year are more than double those made by Republicans; in Colorado and Nevada the ratio is 4 to 1, and in North Carolina it is 6 to 1. Even in states with nonpartisan registration, the trend is clear -- of the 310,000 new voters in Virginia, a disproportionate share live in Democratic strongholds.
Republicans acknowledge the challenge but say Obama still has to prove he can get the new voters to the polls.
"The machine that has been put in place by the Democrats is effective. They have a lot of people holding clipboards," said Brian K. Krolicki (R) , the lieutenant governor of Nevada. But he added: "There's a difference between successful registration and a groundswell. It's mechanics versus momentum."
The Obama campaign says it expects the numbers of new voters in swing states to swell even more later this month as elections offices process the tens of thousands of registrations still pouring in. And it exudes confidence about its ability to turn the new voters out with a vigorous follow-up operation. "This a lesson we learned. The old-fashioned way of registering voters was to stand on the corner of the street, stand on the campus quad and register one by one, which we still do," said Jon Carson, the campaign's national field director. "But another important component is getting people the information they need to participate."
Obama, who led a major voter drive in Chicago in 1992, has stressed voter registration from the outset of his campaign, seeing younger or disaffected Americans as a crucial pool of support. The campaign intensified its outreach over the summer, dispatching hundreds of staff members and volunteers to states with large percentages of unregistered voters.
Complementing its efforts are organizations that have been registering hundreds of thousands on their own, such as Democracia USA, which registers Hispanic voters; ACORN, the anti-poverty group; and Women's Voices, Women Vote, which targets unmarried women. More generally, this year's registration tilt is part of a broader shift since 2004 away from Republican affiliation, particularly among younger and Hispanic voters and among college-educated professionals in former GOP strongholds such as New Hampshire, Colorado, and the suburbs of Philadelphia and Northern Virginia.
In Florida, 800,000 voters have been added to the rolls this year, fewer than were added in 2004. The secretary of state's office attributes the drop to registration efforts reaching a saturation point and to the slowing of the state's population growth since 2004.
But the Democratic edge is still more apparent than it was in 2004, when Republicans made a big push to register evangelical Christians in the state. As of Sept. 1, the most recent date for which new registrations are divided by party, Democratic rolls were up by 316,000 and GOP rolls by 129,000 this year. The GOP figure falls short of the gain of 155,000 among independents.
This year's additions expanded the Democrats' registration edge in Florida to half a million voters, a gap expected to grow by Election Day as the thousands of voters who have signed up since Sept. 1 are added to the party totals.
The ratio is more lopsided in North Carolina, where Democrats have added 208,000 voters this year. The 34,000 voters the Republicans have added lags well behind the 148,000 new independents. Four years ago, when Bush won the state with 56 percent of the vote, the picture was different -- Democrats added 192,000 voters during all of 2004, but Republicans nearly matched them with 179,000 new voters of their own.
A disproportionate share of the new voters in North Carolina are minorities. At the start of the year, white voters in the state outnumbered blacks by nearly 4 to 1, and Hispanic voters by 10 to 1. Yet the 146,000 black and Hispanic voters added to the rolls represented nearly three-quarters of the growth among white voters.Gary Pearce, a Democratic political consultant in North Carolina, said the gap in new registrations is a big reason he thinks Democrats have a chance of carrying the state for the first time since 1976. "It's huge. You talk about a surge -- we think we're going to see it here," Pearce said.
Many of the registration gains in North Carolina and elsewhere came during the nominating battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. While resulting in a long and costly primary season, it also helped draw voters onto the Democratic rolls.
In Nevada, site of a highly competitive Democratic caucus in late January, the party has this year added 91,000 people to the rolls in a state that Bush carried by 21,000 votes in 2004. Republicans added 22,000 voters, while 26,000 independents have been added. Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the Silver State at the start of 2007, but registered Republicans now trail Democrats by 81,000.
The primaries produced an even bigger boost in Pennsylvania. In addition to several hundred thousand new voters registered as Democrats, tens of thousands of independent voters and Republicans switched their affiliation to vote for Obama or Clinton.
Some of them may vote for McCain, but the numbers are nonetheless eye-catching. This year, 474,000 Democrats have been added to the rolls in Pennsylvania -- while the GOP rolls have actually lost 38,000 voters. In 2004, there were 357,000 Democrats added and 66,000 Republicans.
n Virginia, where Obama volunteers have been a constant presence at Metro stations and grocery stores in Democratic areas, there are 310,000 more voters than at year's start. That compares with 210,000 new voters over the same stretch in 2004.Although voters do not register by party in Virginia, there have been increases of 10 percent, or close to it, in the Democratic strongholds of Arlington County, Alexandria, Norfolk, Newport News and Richmond, which combined have added 58,000 voters. Similarly, in Missouri, where registration is also nonpartisan, an outsized share of the roughly 200,000 new registrations this year have been in greater St. Louis -- suburban St. Louis County, which now leans Democratic, is close to having one-fifth of the state's voters.
In Colorado, which Bush won by 100,000 votes in 2004, Republicans were well in the lead for registrations at the start of the year but are now on the verge of being overtaken. By Sept. 1, Democratic registration was up by 80,000, partly because of the Democrats-only caucuses in February. That far exceeds the gain of 28,000 unaffiliated voters and 21,000 Republicans. In New Mexico, which Bush won by 6,000 votes in 2004, Democrats have added 40,000 voters since last year, compared with 12,000 Republicans.
Voter drives have been a lower priority in states with less growth and turnover. Michigan has registered an increase of 160,000 voters this year, small for a state its size and less than what it recorded in 2004. Ohio, the scene of such intensive organizing in years past, has seen roughly the same growth in new voters as in 2004 (it does not break down registrations by party). Indiana's growth has been roughly equal to that of 2004; in Wisconsin, voters can register on Election Day.
In several states, registration gains may not be enough for Obama. His campaign deployed dozens of staffers to Georgia, with an emphasis on seeking out the estimated half-million eligible African Americans there who do not vote. Volunteers from across the country spent hours in the summer heat at bus stations and in housing projects in small cities such as Macon and Columbus, and as of Sept. 1, the state's rolls had grown by 350,000 voters, surpassing the gain of 270,000 for all of 2004. But last month, the campaign began pulling staffers out of Georgia, deciding the gap was too wide in a state that Bush won with 58 percent in 2004.
Obama's investment in voter registration has taken some of the burden off the nonprofit groups that did much of that work in 2004, but they are still active. The groups are not allowed to coordinate with the campaign, but they try to target separate areas to avoid overlap.
In Florida, a network of most of the nonprofit groups doing registration work estimates that it has registered about 440,000 of the 800,000 voters added in the state this year, said Bob Schaeffer, a network coordinator.
The Obama campaign predicts that 80 percent of the voters it is registering will support the Democrat, and that 75 percent will turn out, a rate it bases on turnout during the primaries. That means that for every 100,000 voters it registers, it would net a 45,000-vote edge on Election Day. In Virginia, that projection would mean an extra four percentage points from this year's new voters in a state that Bush won by eight points in 2004.
Donald Green, a Yale political scientist, said history suggests turnout rates lower than 75 percent among truly newly registered voters. The Obama campaign's higher rates of turnout during the primaries may have been boosted by voters who were re-registering at a new address or under a new party, he said. "New registrants tend to vote at reasonably high rates but not very high rates," he said. "Most surge in turnout comes from already registered voters."
But Pearce, the North Carolina consultant, speculated that this year's election might shatter some of those expectations, based on the energy he is seeing and the reach of Obama's get-out-the-vote operation there. "It's the enthusiasm gap," he said. He added: "They'll get a lot of them out on Election Day. I'm not an organization guy -- I'm skeptical of the people who think the organization is going to turn it all. But they've made me a believer.
Electoral map takes big swing to Obama
Obama at 264 | First Read: Democratic candidate has opened up a nearly 100-point electoral-vote lead.
Monday, October 06, 2008 9:29 AM by Mark Murray | From Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Carrie Dann
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Likely Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NY, RI, VT (157 electoral votes)
Lean Obama: IA, MI, MN, NH, NJ, NM, OR, PA, WA, WI (107 votes)
Toss-up: CO, FL, IN, NV, NC, OH, VA (100 votes)
Lean McCain: MO, MT (14 votes)
Likely McCain: AL, AK, AZ, AR, GA, ID, KS, KY, LA, MS, NE, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY (160 votes)
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*** Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania: If there is one blue state the McCain campaign may never give up on, it's the Keystone State. Of all the Kerry blue states, it's the most competitive -- even right now at a time that appears to be Obama's high-water mark. Of the remaining blue states in play, Pennsylvania may be the most culturally sensitive and may explain why the McCain folks want to shift the debate a bit to character (see below). Shifting the campaign to character isn't about changing the national narrative; it's about keeping the undecided column larger in Pennsylvania. Now, the character strategy could backfire in a Florida or even a Nevada or Colorado. But Pennsylvania, by the numbers, is worth it to McCain. Speaking of state-by-state strategies, anyone remember the last time Obama was in Ohio?
*** To Ayers is human: The good news for the McCain campaign is that by using Palin to conduct the attack, the Ayers hit on Obama got an airing over the weekend that it hasn't received in months. (And she’ll do it again today, per remarks released by the McCain campaign.) But by unleashing a principal to conduct the attack, the campaign is being about as transparent as it could be: This could be their last shot to change the contours of the race. What if Ayers had been a part of the character attack the McCain camp was conducting a few months ago? (Remember Paris and Britney?). So is this the only choice McCain has right now, given the circumstances of this race? Is creating character questions the only way -- or do voters already have some questions about Obama and they want more from McCain? By the way, while Palin’s Ayers line got all the attention this weekend, wasn’t this line the tougher attack: "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and as I see America”?
*** Tipping your hand: Also, who in McCain Land keeps saying these things on background? "It's a dangerous road, but we have no choice," a top McCain strategist told the New York Daily News. "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose." These lines have been gold for the Obama talking-point memos. This is the big criticism the McCain camp has received this weekend -- why are they telegraphing their attacks and telegraphing their state-by-state decisions? Of course, Michigan Republicans could have been the ones to initially leak the McCain pullout rumor, hoping they could guilt the McCain campaign from actually doing it. Oops.
*** And here comes Keating: Remember the M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction) nuclear policy with the Soviets? Well, the Obama camp is indicating they'll "go there" if McCain wants to "go there." Today, it’s launching a multimedia campaign to resurrect McCain’s involvement with the Keating Five saving-and-loan scandal. The question we’ve got: Whom will the voters punish for the negativity? The Obama camp is gambling that McCain will get blamed for starting this fight. We'll see. Obama's brand could be just as tarnished if he's seen as being too negative, and we've seen what the negative campaign has done to McCain's image lately.
*** Health care returns: Ayres and Keating haven’t been the only attacks. Over the weekend, Team Obama went after McCain on the topic of health care, charging that McCain’s plan amounts to a tax increase on employees who get coverage from employers. As a tactic, this has been a fairly artful hit on McCain. Of course, as fact-checkers have pointed out, the attack is more false than truth. But as for the tactic, the Obama campaign has been pushing pivoting to health care for a week, hoping to be seen as the candidate of the middle ground on the issue. First, he started running an ad about health care that emphasized he was in the middle on the issue; now, the campaign is unleashing this attack on McCain's plan that attempts to paint his health care philosophy as "radical." He's put McCain on the defensive on the issue and it's an issue that was already breaking toward the Democrats.
*** License and registration: Today is a big day in battleground state land… It's the final day to register to vote in many important states. This is Part One of the Obama strategy of changing the electorates in places like Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. It appears the Obama effort to add more Dem voters to the rolls has worked. Part Two of his plan is to figure out how to get these new voters to vote.
*** Biden off the campaign trail: Per NBC/NJ’s Mike Memoli, Biden has canceled his schedule through at least Tuesday following the death of his mother in law, Bonny Jean Jacobs, after a long illness. Joe and Jill Biden remain in Delaware. “Other details will follow,” said spokesman David Wade, “but we appreciate everyone's respect for the family's privacy during this difficult time." Palin spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt released this statement: "Gov. Palin sends her condolences to Jill and Joe Biden and their entire family following the passing of Jill's mother, Bonnie Jacobs. Her thoughts and prayers are with the Bidens' during this sad time."
*** On the trail: McCain holds a rally in Albuquerque, NM. Obama continues his debate prep in Asheville, NC. Palin, in Florida, has rallies in Clearwater and Estero before hitting a fundraiser in Boca Raton.Countdown to the second presidential debate: 1 day
Countdown to the third presidential debate: 9 days
Countdown to Election Day 2008: 29 days
Countdown to Inauguration Day 2009: 106 days
The New Yorker Endorses Obama: Drink as much coffee as it takes to read and digest this thoughtful 4,172 word essay!
CommentThe Choice
October 13, 2008
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”
The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.
By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”
The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.
In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.
What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
—The Editors
October 5, 2008
Palin campaigns on a wink and a prayer
By LISA VAN DUSEN | Sunday, 5 October, 2008
After a two-week run so bad that a lot of people were starting to wonder whether it was the riskiest game of expectation-lowering in memory, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spent debate night with Joe Biden on Thursday winking and smiling her way to redemption.
For the past 10 days, Palin's fate as the funniest send-up subject on Saturday Night Live since Dana Carvey's George Bush was sealed with a series of clips of her being interviewed by NBC's Katie Couric that were downright scary in what they revealed -- not so much about her mind as about John McCain's.
It got so painful that at a certain point, the only thing more damning than Palin's fudgy answers were the reaction shots of Couric forcing herself with every fibre of her being to not actually react for fear of screaming, "Answer the question!" or "What are you talking about?!"
In St. Louis, Palin tried to disarm the power of wrong or missing answers by preemptively attributing any dodging to populist gumption instead of lack of pre-existing knowledge: "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear," she said to Biden, "but I'm gonna talk straight to the American people."
The resulting disconnect between moderator Gwen Ifill's questions and Palin's answers made Palin's contribution more of an infomercial than a debate.
By halfway through, there were answers that unravelled into such incoherent blathering of unrelated keywords that during her response on nuclear proliferation she started to sound like one of those short-circuiting fembots in Austin Powers just before their heads exploded.
But that was OK because Palin, who by last week seemed in so far over her head that the only thing still showing above the quicksand was the updo bun, had one bottom line mission in the debate -- save the furniture.
She did that and more by assuaging the base and not making any major, game- changing mistakes. If you weren't frightened out of your wits by the prospect of Palin as the president of the United States at 9 p.m., you weren't frightened at 10:30.
Palin's other task was to launch the GOP's newest tactic for distancing the McCain/Palin ticket from George W. Bush and the party that dare not speak its name.
At one point, Palin, echoing Ronald Reagan's standout "There you go again" moment from the 1980 debate, said, "Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again, pointing backwards again. You (prefaced) your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now, doggone it, let's look ahead."
Later, she added, "When we talk about the Bush administration, there is a time, too, when Americans say enough is enough with your ticket on constantly looking backwards and pointing fingers and doing the blame game."
Most Americans would have absolutely no clue as to what she was talking about and it's not just the syntax. Have Obama and Biden exaggerated wildly talking about Palin, McCain and Bush all being Republicans? Or by pointing fingers at the catastrophic economic wreckage from the past eight years and blaming the Bush administration? You don't have to look backwards to do that.
Biden, who must have had moments of wondering what game show set he'd wandered onto, sounded too senatorial at times. But it was hard not to on a stage with Palin, whose folksiness and accessibility are a major part of her appeal to the voters who identify with her in a "she's like me" way.
As for what this does for the rest of the race, the CNN post-debate poll of debate watchers had Biden winning 51 per cent to 36 per cent, but the conventional wisdom is that VP debates don't matter much.
More interesting, while Palin was seen as more likable, scoring 54 per cent to Biden's 36 per cent, 70 per cent said Biden was more of a typical politician and on the question of the candidates' qualifications for the presidency, 87 per cent said Biden is qualified and 42 per cent said Palin is qualified.
If Palin is more likeable and Biden is seen as a typical politician, which would normally be seen as a negative, why did twice as many of those same people say he's more qualified to run the country?
Maybe, in these tough times and in relative terms, a "typical politician" isn't such a bad thing to be.
October 4, 2008
Red Sox Take 2-0 Series Lead...11th Straight Postseason Win Over Angels
By now, it's a given By Dan Shaughnessy Globe Columnist / October 4, 2008
ANAHEIM, Calif. - Long ball, small ball, hard ball, soft ball, Wiffle ball, monster ball, disco ball, cotillion ball. If it's the Red Sox and Angels in October, the Red Sox will win.
Fenway, Big A, Jamaica Way, Blue Jay Way, Sittin'-on-the-dock-of-the-bay Way. If it's the Red Sox and Angels in October, the Red Sox will win.
The Angels lost to their Boston Daddies at home again last night. This time it was Red Sox 7, Halos 5, in what was easily the best game of the postseason anywhere yet this year. J.D. Drew won it for the Sox with a ninth-inning, two-run homer off Francisco Rodriguez while most of New England slept (the game ended at 1:28 a.m. EDT).
The best-of-five series moves to Fenway tomorrow, and the Sox should be drenched in champagne well before midnight. There might even be a closer with a cardboard box on his head step-dancing on the Fenway lawn. Make sure the bases are bolted down.
Regarding Red Sox vs. Angels, we have moved well past the arena of standard athletic competition. We have wandered into Rod Serling's space "between the pit of a man's fear and the summit of his knowledge."
When the Red Sox play the Angels in October, the Sox take a choke hold on the series. The Angels just take the choke. Eleven in a row. Eleven.
"What happened in '04 or 1986 does not matter to us," said Sox manager Terry Francona. "We set out to win today's game and we did it."
Game 2 felt like it was over before Angels starter Ervin Santana got the third out of the first inning. Jason Bay, the Anti-Manny, crushed a three-run homer to cap a four-run Boston first and sucked the air from the house of air kisses. The Angels (11 runners left on base) staged multiple rallies over nine innings. But nothing matters when the Red Sox and Angels play in October. We just know that the Sox will win. Every time.
The Red Sox have scored 11 runs in two games, 10 coming from extra-base hits. The Angels have 20 hits in the series, and 19 of them are singles. They've stranded 20 runners in two games. Poor Howie Kendrick (four punchouts last night) has stranded 12 all by himself in just two games.
The Angels loaded the bases with none out in the fifth. Daisuke Matsuzaka was on the ropes, staggering through a 36-pitch inning. But Los Angeles came away with only one run. The Angels juiced the sacks again in the seventh and scored only once. Juan Rivera, Kendrick, and Erick Aybar all struck out with the bases loaded.
Excruciating.
They even think the umps are against them. Just before Drew's killer homer off K-Rod in the ninth, Rodriguez appeared to pick off Coco Crisp with a throw to second. Crisp was ruled safe, then Drew struck.
It's not about the Rally Monkey when the Angels play the Red Sox in the playoffs. It's about the two-ton monkey on their backs.
And now they have to face Josh Beckett, the Bob Gibson of the 21st century.
Uncle Bud Selig can't be too happy looking at four 2-0 series after three days of tournament play. Both League Championship Series appear set. It's going to be the Phillies against destiny's Dodgers in the Senior Circuit and the Tampa Rays against the Red Sox in the American League.
The Phillies and Rays figured to be in good shape at this juncture. Both played the first two games at home against teams with strapped pitching staffs, teams that staggered just to get into the playoffs. Some might say the Cubs' collapse was predictable, but nothing is as certain as the Angels taking the apple against the Red Sox.
I have to admit, the Halos tricked me again. I fell for Mike Scioscia's 100-win team. I signed on to the theory that this year was going to be different. The Angels added Mark Teixeira and Torii Hunter and came into the playoffs much healthier than last year. They beat the Sox eight out of nine during the regular season. They were finally ready to beat the Red Sox in the playoffs.
What was I thinking? Neglected to check the calendar, I guess. I forgot that it's October. Picking the Angels over the Sox in October is like picking the Republicans over the Democrats in Massachusetts in November. Not going to happen, Sparky.
"We have a challenge," said Scioscia. "This game ain't over until somebody wins three . . . we go to Boston and win a game, the pressure's back on them."
If you missed this one live, find a way to see it on replay. It was an Instant Classic. It was also textbook Red Sox-Angels, with the Sox making all the plays and the Angels wallowing in frustration.
October 3, 2008
Stooge for the new Century
As a woman, I was embarrassed that a sister would have so little self-awareness that she would consent to be part of some things for which she is so very very woefully unqualified - being a candidate and participating in this debate.
As a voter, my decision to vote for Obama was more firmly supported when I pondered McCain's unfathomable reasons for choosing Palin who is, simply, the worst candidate for anything that I have ever seen. That is going some as Kay "Baby" Hutchison previously held that position in my regard. Kay "Baby", however, at least can present herself as a more serious person than this twit. When I consider all the choices McCain had, I am simply amazed. Yep - sure makes ME feel better to think that McCain's reasoning skills as evidenced by this VP candidate choice would also be the skill set used to deal with the economy, Iraq, and, OMG, "bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran".
As a citizen, I am even more disgusted with MSM who rated Palin's performance so well with the acknowledged reason that she didn't f**k up as badly as predicted. For pete's sake, the woman said and did nothing - NOTHING - that in any way at all demonstrated that she understands enough about anything that would qualify her to be a cashier in Wal Mart much less hold the 2nd most important position in the whole frickin' world.
I am an independent with conservative leanings and I just cannot understand how anyone with a straight face can support the McCain/Palin ticket. I voted for McCain when he ran against Bush for the R nomination but that McCain no longer exists (if he ever did.)
I have reservations about Obama but I have absolutely NO reservations in saying that he is a far far superior choice for President.
sheesh,
Independent, TX
October 2, 2008
October 1, 2008
September 30, 2008
September 29, 2008
'Stockton (CA) Record' Endorses Obama...First Democrat It Has Backed Since FDR
Barack Obama is our choice for president of the United States.He has demonstrated time and again he can think on his feet. More importantly, he has demonstrated he will think things through, seek advice and actually listen to it.
Obama is a gifted speaker. But in addition to his smarts and energy, possibly his greatest gift is his ability to inspire.
For eight years, American politics has been marked by smears, fears and greed. For too long, we've practiced partisanship in Washington, not politics. The result is a cynicism every bit as deep as that which infected the nation when Richard Nixon was shamed from office and when Bill Clinton brought shame to the office.
This must end, but John McCain can't do it. He can't inspire, nor can he really break from a past that is breaking this nation.
McCain is an American hero, and he has served this country in the Senate with determination. He has gone against his party, but the fact is his ties to the Bush administration and its policies are deep. Americans know we cannot keep going down this path.
McCain, who has voted consistently for deregulation, started off two weeks ago declaring the U.S. economy fundamentally sound but ended the week sounding like a populist. Who is he really?
He tends to shoot from the hip and go on gut instinct. The nation cannot go through four more years of literally and figuratively shooting now and asking questions later.
But the fact is, we worry he won't have four years. If elected, at 72, he would be the oldest incoming president in U.S. history. He's in good health now, we're told, although he has withheld most of his medical records. That means Gov. Sarah Palin could very well become president.And that brings us to McCain's most troubling trait: his judgment.
While praiseworthy for putting the first woman on a major-party presidential ticket since Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, his selection of Palin as a running mate was appalling. The first-term governor is clearly not experienced enough to serve as vice president or president if required. Her lack of knowledge is being covered up by keeping her away from questioning reporters and doing interviews only with those considered friendly to her views.
We're not suggesting Obama is without faults. He, like McCain, has demonstrated a marked lack of knowledge in recent days about the financial mess facing this nation.
But unlike McCain, who is trying to position himself as a born-again regulator, Obama would increase the oversight of our markets and demand accountability. He would actually put regulators in the oversight agencies that were systematically dismantled by the Bush administration.
While the blame doesn't all accrue to the Bush administration, the past eight years have been marked by looking the other way. McCain aided and abetted that behavior.
Republicans have tried repeatedly to paint Obama as an elitist. Hardly. He grew up in a single-parent home and, by the sheer force of his desire and cerebral horsepower, ended up at Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
He could have gone for the money. He didn't. He went to Chicago, where he worked to give a voice to those who didn't have one.
That's hardly the mark of an elitist.
He hasn't lost touch with regular people, whereas McCain doesn't even know how many homes he owns.
Obama rose quickly through the Illinois Legislature and propelled himself into the U.S. Senate.
After winning the Democratic nomination against a large and highly experienced field of candidates, Obama picked one of them, Joe Biden, as his running mate. Biden brings to the ticket the vast foreign affairs experience and knowledge that Obama lacks.
Obama has been accused of being an empty suit, all talk and no action. There's no "there" there, his detractors say.
The charge is no more credible than that of him being an elitist.
Obama can inspire, and our nation desperately needs an inspirational leader. And he does not carry the deep scars of Vietnam, as do many of McCain's generation.
He offers hope. A new way of doing business. And a belief that our system of government can be made to work.
He's the clear choice.
The 'Real' Bill/Hil Clinton
Watch these recent videos featuring Bill Clinton - the first from Saturday Night Live, the second from Meet the Press this Sunday past. They reveal the dripping insincerity that has become the operative Clintonian legacy - political opportunism with regard for nothing but political survival.For all of the talking that Bill and Hillary have done to 'support' Barack Obama, it
has been tepid, delivered out of one side of 'their' mouth. While saying what they have to say to 'support Obama' and protect themselves, their objective remains seeing that Hil' is elected president in 2012.So, if you are still one of those still undecided voters who needs a little more incentive to vote for Obama (other than the obvious reason that he is the best leader for our times) - add to your list the side benefit of keeping the Clintons out of the white house for good. - zjm
September 28, 2008
Debating to lead the tarnished States of America
This is, perhaps, the single most important opinion column I've read during this presidential campaign. I've often extolled the uniquely brilliant perspective and insight found in Lisa Van Dusen's writings - but today, Ms. Van Dusen has pierced the heart of what is wrong with American politics and contemporary American society.PLEASE pass this along to your families, friends, and co-workers. Now is the time for all of us to embrace our indignation, passion, and outrage - and lay claim to the hope of a restored America marked by values of justice and moral leadership.
That... is what is at stake in this election. - zjm
By LISA VAN DUSEN | Sunday, 28 September 2008Given the frenzy of anticipation whipped up ahead of the first McCain-Obama debate Friday night, the event itself was a bit of a shrug.
With the U.S. economy in its biggest meltdown since the Great Depression, last week's bail-out freak-out on Capitol Hill and John McCain's will-he-or-won't-he pre-debate tease, Americans were on the edge of their Lay-Z-Boys, waiting for some sense that somebody feels not just their pain but their outrage.As it was, most of the tension was between the two men on stage and not about the anger of the mob outside.
On the economy, Barack Obama and John McCain laid out their mixed feelings about Congress's reworking of the three-page carte blanche package from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a back-and-forth that was not helped by McCain's weirdly flaccid maverick turn Thursday.
(The thing about guys who make a career of ticking off their own party is that when they turn up in the middle of a campaign trolling for a consensus photo-op, scores get settled).
Though the two men clashed again on the wisdom of coming out against the invasion of Iraq versus the wisdom of coming out in favour of the surge, most of what was said on foreign policy reinforced what we already knew: McCain has been to places Sarah Palin's never even heard of and Obama is a bigger fan of diplomacy than of swagger.
More than anything, the dynamic between the candidates revealed just how much hostility can develop between two men caught in the vortex of a dysfunctional campaign week. There was a great pot/kettle joke when McCain, who's been running a chaotically id-driven, purely tactical game, accused Obama of not knowing the difference between tactics and strategy.
The format outlined by moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS actually allowed for McCain and Obama to address each other directly at regular intervals but McCain wouldn't look at Obama, much less address him, which was an excellent example of a tactic as opposed to a strategy.
The debate that almost wasn't came at the end of a Washington week so crazy that it was a triumph of polls over personality (85 per cent of Americans wanted the debate to go ahead) just for McCain and Obama to spend their Friday night on the same stage.
There was the disaster of the economic meltdown followed by a bailout package that landed on Capitol Hill like a gigantic radioactive meteorite nobody would touch without a very long pole and a hazmat suit.
Then there was the tactical disaster of McCain suspending his campaign without really suspending it and riding into town to create the illusion of an intervention nobody wanted.
Meanwhile, both Main Street and Wall Street now look like downtown Grozny, circa 1995, and America's standing internationally has been devalued to the point where its moral, strategic and economic leverage is receding by the day.
In foreign policy terms, the next president will be taking the tiller of a garbage barge piled with an illegal war, flaunted contempt for international law and the collapse of the latest WTO round, among other policy refuse.
Add to that an economic meltdown that will undermine America's authority with international financial institutions and a bailout that could seriously impede both the deficit cutting and priority implementing abilities of whoever wins, and the political discourse takes on a whole new sense of urgency.
In this context, the most important differences between the candidates Friday night were the stylistic ones. These days, McCain's 20th century posture that America is always right because America is America sounds downright reckless.
There's an advantage to being the new guy in a race against the party of an incompetent and unpopular regime. No matter how hard your opponent tries to disown the record, you get to stand as the advocate for and surrogate of the voters who can't be in the room.
For Obama, there's an added value in reminding people that McCain doesn't really have much right to be angry, given where he's spent the past 26 years, the past eight in particular.
That indignation should come from the guy who wasn't part of the problem, didn't endorse the policies and doesn't have 13 cars and nine houses.
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