by Blue Stockings | THE DEBATE & THE CAMPAIGN
At Alicublog, Roy Edroso (on GOP shill Peggy Noonan):
Noonan wonders at Obama's slim lead, and attributes to it to Obama being "unusual, singular," "not your basic Dem," and "exotic," without ever mentioning that he's black. This too is audacious, but only in a familiar way.
Bonus: Masters of the Buffoniverse, especially the part where he sees off "Obama supporter" and Procrustean Libertarian "thinker" Megan McArdle.
If Obama had nudged McCain just a little bit more, either on climate issues or on meeting with foreign leaders, McCain would have exploded like a beached World War II mine bumped by an old man with a metal detector.
Avedon Carol at The Sideshow discusses one of the things about the debate that really, really bothered me.
The Anbar Awakening preceded the Surge and had nothing to do with it - it had to do with the fact that we've been paying The Enemy not to attack us. Dems should have been screaming about this, but it's a bit late to introduce this kind of new information on the fly. And the stated purpose of the Surge was that it was supposed to reduce violence so we could leave, but we show no sign of thinking of leaving; ergo, the surge has failed. Period.
McCain said a lot about how he helped the troops while Obama didn't support them. Obama countered fairly weakly, I thought. This is something Democrats as a whole have been pretty sickly on. McCain's attitude toward our troops has been horrible all the way down the line, and that goes back to the aftermath of Vietnam. He should be repeatedly called on it and never, ever permitted to get away with pretending to be a champion of our military personnel. Allowing him to get up in front of God and everyone to claim his loyalty and steadfastness in aiding POWs/MIAs then, and supporting our troops now, is just outrageous negligence on the Democrats' part.
And I felt the same way about the debate as Carol; I was resigned to hearing the press proclaim McCain the winner just for exceeding very low expectations. I too was remembering this:
In 2000, I watched Gore wipe the floor with Bush during the first debate, but (with the exception of Chris Matthews, who momentarily spoke the truth), all the pundits wanted to talk about was how magnificent Bush was for managing to string a few whole sentences together - and by the next morning (by which time Matthews had forgotten his earlier evaluation) and for the rest of the week, all I heard was about how Gore had sighed and "misstated" (and not a word about Bush's outrageous lies and inability to defend his own policies). In 2004, Bush looked like he'd had a stroke and literally - and I literally mean "literally" - drooled on the lectern, and Kerry told the truth while Bush babbled (and what was that thing on his back?), and again the talking heads described some other debate.
So if this time the press wants to be lean toward the Democrat rather than jump down his throat and make haggis out of him, well, I suppose I can't complain, although it's not as if they are likely to ever treat McCain the way they treated Carter, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.
Melissa McEwen at Shakesville was more concerned about Obama's failure to riposte strongly on the earmarks-earmarks-earmarks thingie.
The only thing I really wish Obama would have done, at some point during the debate, is turn to McCain and ask him: "John, what the fuck do earmarks have to do with the financial crisis, you enormous ass-flavored tool?" McCain kept talking about reining in spending in Washington as if that was the root of this crisis, when the Congressional issue with regard to the economy is deregulation, not spending.
I'd have been satisfied if he'd just mentioned some of the earmarks Palin took.
TBogg has some pre-debate pep talk from The Corner which is even funnier in light of what actually happened:
I just noticed that former prisoner of war John McCain is going to make it to the debate tonight which must mean that the economy has been saved! Yay, former prisoner of war John McCain! And this is good news for John McCain because, as Rich Lowry who has been in a coma for the past week, points out:
If This Campaign..plays to type, McCain will hit an absolute home run tonight and the narrative will shift yet again.
John Cole on McCain's new, hastily assembled commercial, which baldly takes advantage of Obama's gracious debating style:
Just as McCain is deeply, hopelessly, and, at his age, irreparably confused about the difference between tactics v. strategy (something that is pretty appalling given his alleged military expertise, Biden is exactly right here), so too is his campaign confused about the difference between style and substance. If what you took from the debate last night was that Obama simply agreed with McCain on every issue, you are, to put it simply, a fool.....When Obama agreed with McCain last night, in almost every case it was agreeing that there is a problem so self-evident that to disagree would make one seem insane or out of touch....(Balloon Juice)
Update: Eager to prove that he, too, is profoundly stupid, Jeff Emanuel at Red State serves to further illustrate my point- if you thought that Obama was saying he agreed with McCain last night, you are a fool.
[T]he McCain campaign seems to think that pointing out the occasions when Obama said that McCain was right is a winning strategy. I think this is wrong, not only for the reasons I mentioned, but because it undercuts one of McCain's main lines of argument: that he is willing to reach across the aisle and work for bipartisan solutions, whereas Obama is not.
Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast on the GOP's most recent attempt at spinning the economic crisis away from their own doorstep:
First it was Neal Cavuto blaming the credit crisis on minorities buying houses they couldn't afford. Now that disgusting, racist meme is infecting the entire right wing like a virus.
As Glenn Greenwald notes, Mark Krikorian in the National Review reprints a Washington Mutual press release pointing out its awards for diversity and titles his post, "Cause and Effect?" -- the assumption being that because WaMu was diverse, that's the reason it failed.
I see this as a mark of the GOP's desperation. At this point, the GOP shills and pundits are shit-scared about the reckoning that is to come and have every reason to be. This is all they have left. The people who will seize on this weren't ever going to vote for the Dem anyway, whatever his or her skin colour.
Sadly, No! has the fact check.
The meme that the Community Reinvestment Act, which allegedly forced banks to make loans to lazy inner-city blacks, is the root cause of the credit crunch continues to circulate through the cheet-o-sphere, most recently appearing at a blog written by a pretend nun. As I’ve already shown, the idea that the CRA and deadbeat Negroes caused the problem is, succinctly put, cheeto-flecked crap.
Steve M's comment on GOP tactics has a bearing here:
[T]he GOP playbook has one play in it: Make your opponent seem scary and dangerous and utterly unfit to serve. The Republicans have had quite a bit of success in doing that to Obama. (They would have run the same play against Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or Biden or Richardson or Dodd or whatever candidate emerged from the primaries, and they would have kept running it until they'd done serious damage.)
Alas for them, the real Obama is a hell of a lot more impressive than his caricature. He's prepared. He's sharp as a tack. He's gracious but persistent. And he's not a secret-Muslim-whitey-hating-flag-non-pledger.
That's why I ain't worried how they spin and spin.
The always laconic Atrios, on Tweety asking Eugene Robinson whether he was surprised that Obama was so "un-ethnic": "Tweety really has issues."
I just saw Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post on MSNBC say that the candidates got too wonky on the bailout plan last night. I’m sorry… that’s kind of the whole point. We want our leaders to be wonky. We want them to be detail oriented. Especially after our current leader, who has made clear he isn’t a details guy, we need someone who’s going to do the freaking math.
Yeah. Amen.
THE ECONOMY
Kevin Drum at MoJo Blog:
The good news is that Paulson's original bailout proposal has been improved. Hooray. The bad news is a little more extensive. John McCain decided that his campaign might benefit from gumming up the negotiations a bit, so he swooped into Washington and did just that. House Republicans, who apparently earned their high school degrees from a rack of gumball machines, decided to hold their breath and stamp their feet unless capital gains taxes were eliminated, a lunatic proposal that has exactly nothing to do with our current problems.
A band of Democrats (I can only pray it was a small one), in an apparent effort to prove that idiocy is not confined to one party, decided that this was the right time to insist that all profits from the plan be plowed into housing programs. Profits! You betcha.
Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, & Money:
House GOP says we can solve the problems created by companies possessing now-worthless securities can be solved by...a temporary suspension of the capital gains tax cut. I can't see any problems with that logic!
Evidently, no deal is better than a Republican
solutioncrackpot scheme.
...Meanwhile Back in the "Real" Economy, There's almost half a million more (493,000) whiners this week who filed initial claims for unemployment insurance. UI Claims are at their highest level since September 2001.
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