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A Dead Campaign Beats A Dead Horse
With even many sycophants in the right-of-center punditocracy saying that the McCain-Palin ticket is toast, it was with more than the usual amount of interest that I waited for what the campaign promised would be a major announcement this morning.
The major announcement:
A 90-second Internet commercial beating the Bill Ayers-Barack Obama dead horse a few more times.
With millions of Americans feeling like they’re being beaten, this is the best the campaign could come up with?
Puh-thetic. Just pathetic.
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15 Responses to “A Dead Campaign Beats A Dead Horse”
The sad thing is that many of us who vote for liberal and Democratic candidates actually considered voting for John McCain if he had been chosen to run against VP Gore.
Where did that man go? Sarah Palin must have sold McCain's “Honor” on e-Bay. I hope he got fair value in these hard times.
Somebody should explain to Senator McCain that we can see Barack Obama, that we have seen him for two years now. Obama is one of us. Sorry, Governor Palin.
I thought the McCain campaign came out yesterday saying that they weren't going to press that connection any more. Hey, I guess at this point one more lie on top of the pile they've built up isn't going to make that big a difference…
Why is that even surprising? The RNC has swiftboated honorable men like Governor Dukakis and Senator Kerry without any qualms. Why? Because they could not win on the issues and so had to resort to all-out character assault. The truth is that politics often makes strange bedfellows– as McCain found out when he realized he had to make peace with the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells in his party.
Kritt,
Probably because we still like to think of McCain as an honorable patriot. Maybe he was once, but he is no longer.
He's dishonoring himself further with his lies and cowardice.
kritt11,
Dukakis lost because of his own ignorance and incompetence. Attack ads had little to do with it.
And it hard to argue that the Democrats are running n the issues when Senator obama has yet to explain how it can implement his plans while the government is running $500 billion deficits.
In 2000, many Repulbicans pointed out that McCain was unfit to be president and the 2008 race is demonstrating that they were correct. It was the extremely poor slate of candidates in the Republican Primary that put McCain into the general election and his own incompetence that is sinking his campaign.
I keep waiting for McCain's George Costanza moment, where he says to Obama, “Oh yeah, well I slept with your wife!”
Don't hold your breath, but it's coming.
SD- Its possibly true that McCain is unfit to be president– but you can't be saying that the victor in 2000 was fit!
If you want to understand Obama's stand on the issues all you have to do is go to his website. At least we know where he stands, unlike McCain who sounded like more of a liberal democrat than Obama with his 300 billion$ homeowner bailout plan. I'm sure that thrilled the George Wills, Grover Norquists, Pat Buchanans and Charles Krauthammers!
SD
BTW- Neither candidate has explained how they are going to make good on their campaign promises with the 500b deficit. At least Obama picked energy independence as a top priority- McCain is refusing to even go that far!
Since McCain is not going to win, it does not matter what he says on the issues. The important thing is how quickly can SEantor Obama move from camaign mode to leadership mode. the other quesiton is whether his staff can convert from campaign mode to operations mode. when I read that Senator Obama has 100 paid staffers in Indiana alone, there are a lot of people who are going to want positions in his administration.
Remember, the campaign is over with and it is obvious that Senator Obama will win. Now will the netroots make the same mistake the conservative bloggers did and stay in campaign mode or will they start insisiting upon results.
SD + Kritt,
Cutting back on spending would be the worst thing to do in an economic slowdown & credit crunch. Read my post on it here: http://www.whyweworry.com/blog/2008/10/09/why-w…
[...] 9th, 2008 By PETE ABEL, Managing Editor Watch the first video, if you didn’t watch it earlier, when Shaun posted it. Next, in the second video, see the type of dangerous idiocy the first one [...]
The circumstances are set. We have no other option but to go deeper into debt for now. Remember that the nature of the $700 billion package is that it is entirely possible that a major part of it is recoverable over the long run. But what really turned the stock market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression was government inaction initially and when they did take action it was the wrong kind that hurt trade and tightened up the nation's money supply. The Hoover Administration did everything wrong that they possibly could. While the people currently “in charge” are having problems they have learned those lessons.
The central banks are actually doing remarkably more than what I expected them to be doing at this point, which was less.
Obama's spending plans have to be revised. Other priorities will come first now.
Obama's threatened new taxes (including those he hasn't admitted to planning all this year) will only hurt the economy, no matter how strongly he can claim that the spending of the funds is stimulative and “beneficial.”
Obama's protectionist threats are particularly bad given that protectionism was one of the causes of the Great Depression. Hopefully he'll grow up quickly about this.
The goal needed now is for the central banks (more important than the governments) to act to forestall deflation or at least reduce it. Right now actions the governments can take (fiscal policy, other actions like buying bonds or even equities in addition to debts) are standard — to forestall a major slump and also deflation this time, the federal government needs a stimulative policy, consisting of spending increases and tax reductions financed by borrowing. Yes, borrowing. The devaluation of the dollar and increasing the money supply until people change their mindsets to anticipate inflation are stronger actions. (Tyrannical would be to introduce new electronically-controlled currency that continuously devalued so long as it wasn't being spent, trying to force people to spend it.) The real-estate bubble has burst and now we have to deal with the consequences, which never will be able to be prevented or concealed by government actions. Many “homeowners” should not be in “their” homes; home prices are still too high; many bad mortgages have yet to default or be renegotiated (HUD has a program for this already in Detroit; the banks can participate and trade off reduced principal and interest against the risk of loss through default, foreclosure, and home sales). When I was in California this week I had a chat with a colleague who said that the obvious is coming next, and is what the banks now fear, the end of the ballooning of personal credit-card debt and default on this debt.
While there is the most idiotic hype and stupid as well as childish panic by many right now, addressed by Bush's silly parental-style reassurance speech today, the economy as a whole is changing in much more slow motion. Not only have many of us not chosen to get ourselves into trouble by wanting houses we cannot afford, but in addition there are many people who are complacent or even ignorant of what is happening. Not only here in Detroit but also in California where I was this week, not only were people continuing to drive as they ordinarily did, not going more slowly and not reducing their trips (no reduction in traffic levels, that is), but I observed in California (and connection airports elsewhere) what I've seen in Detroit, people routinely continuing to purchase ordinary personal items with credit cards(!). They obviously don't have a problem yet. They may continue in their stupid ways until they and we all hit a wall, if we do hit a wall. (There is no certainty we, or we all, will.)
If we do hit that wall, it will be ugly. This was the product of the 1990s onward and an illusion of wealth and wanting something for nothing. If people are hurt hard, it may ultimately affect their mindset, which is why I've never disbelieved deflation could happen here just as it happened “impossibly” in Japan earlier. What if the banks don't want to lend and many people don't want to borrow? They can't be made to do these things. What if people want to start saving rather than spending (or borrowing with their credit cards)? They can't be made to keep spending if they don't want to spend or if they don't have the money to spend. All the academics who scoff at Japan (even though they didn't predict the bursting of Japan's economic bubble at the end of the 1980s, nor the deflation afterward) and say Japan didn't do the right things to end deflation are not in the real world; the real world isn't the same as what is in text books.
In the meantime, we're going to see a vast spending program by Obama (whom I believe will be elected) but it will be forced to change [tm] from what he promised (which only idiots believed, anyway) to something more broad and general in nature if we're going to try to get out of the slump and forestall deflation (in fact, this can now be the rationalization for all kinds of spending Obama would want).
In the meantime, I laugh at the anguished bubble-brains. Dow below 8000? Hoo-ah! I'd like to see it go below 5,000. And home prices are still too high. Who cares what speculators and parasites want? Down, down, down they need to go. Meanwhile, the governments will continue to intervene and might achieve good things, but it wouldn't hurt to let a lot happen that will happen anyway, and (in best Scroogey fashion): “purge all the rottenness we can out of the economy.”
“We have no other option but to go deeper into debt for now.”
Technically not true, but economically, yes — a book I own says it this way, which was intended to describe a more slow, long-term-oriented approach and was specifically addressing how to end deflation in Japan, but which can be considered more urgent and needing to be more rapid now throughout the developed world for anyone viewing the current situation as a “crisis” needing prompt attention:
“This needs to be a campaign of shock and awe to convince people that the authorities will be prepared to continue with antideflationary policies, if necessary without limit. The plan should combine central bank purchases of financial assets to drive long-term interest rates to zero, fiscal expansion, capital injections into the central bank, nationalization of bad bank debts and/or the commercial banks themselves, acceptance of a weaker exchange rate and the announcement of foreign exchange intervention to help bring this about, and the introduction of inflation targets.”
“Crucially, the plan needs to be adopted by both the central bank and the government acting in concert, in particular to facilitate a policy of fiscal expansion financed by money creation.”
“Where countries have a sound fiscal position, it is perfectly prudent to seek to fend off deflation by increasing government spending and reducing taxation, thereby increasing government borrowing. [...] it may be necessary to inject demand via increased government borrowing and to take risks with the long-term financial position of the government.”
“Neither candidate has explained how they are going to make good on their campaign promises with the 500b deficit. At least Obama picked energy independence as a top priority”
Obama is appealing to those who are also silly about stem cells, who believe in instant, magic solutions if only the federal government intervened and spent more money. (The reality is that alternative energy won't meet our needs today, and that alternatives that do develop well will involve the business world, which many of the starry-eyed people despises.)
Now for a more realistic and ruthless, opportunistic decision Obama can make, try this: the states, often mismanaged, are starting to run to Daddy in Washington for a bailout. Disgusting. Obama can exploit this and win the hearts of the mushy, with a clever move that achieves incrementalism toward universality of federal health care for everyone. In addition to his Insure the Children game, Obama can offer to take Medicaid from the states and make it a federal “responsibility” [gag] and ideally to incorporate Medicaid into Medicare. Immediately, people of all ages (the poor) are new beneficiaries of that system in addition to the elderly and disabled. Then S-CHIP can become part of Medicare, too, an S-CHIP that is expanded, Democrat-style, already to include multiples of the poverty level as an income ceiling. To grab Medicaid and make it federal and ideally part of Medicare would be a master stroke.