Obama Opens Up a 9-Point Lead

[Supr49er]

Why not just switch the debate from 'Foreign Policy' to 'The Economy'?

[Asher]

Originally posted by The Emperor Fabulous
Obama camp: "The Debate is on"

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/09/mccain-not-comm.html

Also, McCain cancels Letterman appearance tonight and pulls campaign ads from website.

WTF is he doing?

He's probably going to try to spin it like: "While Obama was out riding on planes and chatting with people, I was hard at work to fix our economy. Vote McCain -- a doer, not a talker."

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Supr49er
Why not just switch the debate from 'Foreign Policy' to 'The Economy'?

Good idea.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Wait, I thought this was the ACS OT Forum. Where the hell are all the right-wing flamers?

[Asher]

They're too busy flying to Washington to fix the economy also.

[Ramo]

WTF is he doing?

Trying to lower expectations for himself, I'd assume.

It's pretty hilarious. He's waiting until the evening before the debate to suspend campaigning. For the good of the country.

[Kidlicious]

It's called senility.

[Impaler[WrG]]

I agree this is probably an expectation lowering move, also suspending campaign ads may help him stretch his money which is now limited under Public Financing. It also feels like another 'Hail Marry' being injected into the Campaign when it became obvious that 'buisness as usual' would lead to defeat. This opens/reinforces the "McCain is reckless" line of attacks, I think they can sell that very well as McCain has now in the span of a month performed two of the most reckless campaign maneuvers in history, Obama has been a bastion of stability by comparison.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

It just doesn't make sense, politically. Didn't McCain learn anything from the Palin stunt? Voters are gullible, but eventually they realize what's really going on.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

SurveyUSA. 9/24. Adults. MoE 3.2% (No trend lines)

The first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama is scheduled to take place in two days. Should the debate be held as scheduled? Should the debate be held, but the format changed to focus on the economy? Or, should the debate be postponed?

Hold as scheduled 50
Hold with focus on economy 36
Postpone 10


Is the right response to the turmoil on Wall Street to suspend the campaigns for president? To continue the campaigns as though there is no crisis? Or, to re-focus the campaigns with a unique emphasis on the turmoil on Wall Street?

Suspend 14
Continue 31
Refocus the campaign 48


If Friday's presidential debate does not take place, would that be good for America? Bad for America? Or would it make no difference?

Good for America 14
Bad for America 46
No difference 35

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by The Emperor Fabulous
It just doesn't make sense, politically. Didn't McCain learn anything from the Palin stunt? Voters are gullible, but eventually they realize what's really going on.

They've done everything possible to tick off the press.

I haven't seen such savaging of the press since Nixon's "you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" speech.

Palin gave one press interview, then had a brief lovefest with Hannity and went into hiding.

McCain went for over a month without talking to the press. Finally, he just did so, and answered sever (7) questions.

[GePap]

I think McCain is trying to play up his "Country First" theme, while taking some time to figure out a way to stop losing ground and retool his message.

This has been a bad week for him politically, so I can see why trying to create a halt to things might seem very attractive.

[Imran Siddiqui]

answered sever (7) questions.

Did you put the number there on purpose because you knew you'd misspell the word?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
This opens/reinforces the "McCain is reckless" line of attacks, I think they can sell that very well as McCain has now in the span of a month performed two of the most reckless campaign maneuvers in history, Obama has been a bastion of stability by comparison.

On that note, this piece from Keeper of the Conservative Flame George Will in yesterday's WP on-line, in which he all but endorses . . . Obama

McCain Loses His Head

By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; 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). 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; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)

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?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/22/AR2008092202583_pf.html

Hard to know if Will speaks for anyone other than himself, but given his stature among conservatives of a certain stripe (High Tory), it's still pretty damning.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

answered sever (7) questions.

Did you put the number there on purpose because you knew you'd misspell the word?

Bah. Anyone can copy words out of a dictionary. But some of us are creative souls who must remain unbound by society's mundane conventions.