If President Obama wants to do bipartisan legislation in the Senate, his best bet may be the co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, McCain-Lieberman, etc. If he wants sole Democratic ownership of the colossal stimulus bill, he can just say “I won” and leave ready-to-make-a-deal Republicans without a reason to make a deal. Looks like Senator McCain has figured out that the President has chosen Door #2: | Read More »
For a guy who loves to talk and loves to be on TV, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank sure is touchy about having his own words from a national TV interview quoted: “Here’s what he said, my friends, and I quote, ‘focus on an immediate increase in spending,’ we should take him at his word,” McCain went on. “And when he says there | Read More »
III. John McCain: The Zeal of the Convert Given the length and public nature of John McCain’s career on the national stage, I won’t go here through his record in the depth that I explored those of Gov. Palin and Sen. Obama. But I will lay out a number of examples that show the sharp contrast between McCain’s approach to situations calling for integrity and | Read More »
It’s not a secret or a surprise that people on both sides of the political aisle try to drive stories and common themes, but one of the things that’s especially amusing about the Left is the willingness of Democratic talking heads and lefty bloggers to mindlessly parrot verbatim the talking points handed down by their campaign, in the hopes of driving particular words into the | Read More »
From the annals of silly, and perhaps revealingly silly, arguments – an email from the Obama campaign following last night’s debate repeats a line he’s used before: I will fight for the middle class every day, and — once again — Senator McCain didn’t mention the middle class a single time during the debate. It’s true that Senator McCain didn’t use the words “middle class.” | Read More »
Who won this one? Well, it depends where you stand, where you think the candidates stand, what they were trying to accomplish and whether you saw the first debate. The elephant in the room for those of us who follow these things carefully – and for the candidates – was Obama’s recent surge in the polls. Obviously that colors everything, in the sense that it | Read More »
So far as I can tell, nobody in the history of modern polling has won a presidential election from as big a hole as John McCain now stands in, at last check a national polling advantage in the neighborhood of 5 points for Obama. Now, if you are a betting man, surely you like your odds on Obama. But does that mean that the race | Read More »
I have previously discussed at length the extent to which the public mood has focused on the issue of integrity in this presidential election. If anything, the recent credit crisis has heightened that concern – frankly, the public doesn’t understand the crisis and isn’t convinced the candidates do, either, but wants reassurance that the next President will be above outside influence in dealing with its | Read More »
UPDATE: Looks like they are voting anyway and at last check, the House is all but set to vote the deal down. Hold on to your seatbelts, folks. So, the word just came down that the Senate will not vote on the bailout package until Wednesday night. House Republicans should refuse to vote on the deal until the ballots are cast in the Senate. And | Read More »
I had thought out in advance a week ago or more what John McCain needed to do tonight. But for better or for worse (in a macro sense, for McCain, probably worse) the financial crisis and McCain’s decision to double down on getting a deal done in DC, followed by his unsuccessful game of chicken aimed at getting Obama to postpone the debate, has totally | Read More »
The question of the day is whether House Republicans are going to support some form of bipartisan bailout deal. The Paulson plan is pretty much the only plan that is on the table with any conceivable chance of passing a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, period. There will undoubtedly be battles over what to add on to the basic bones of the Paulson plan, or whether | Read More »
Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.” In politics, actions speak louder than words, and inaction sometimes speaks even louder. With John McCain leaving the campaign trail to go to Washington to | Read More »
Like a lot of conservatives I was gnashing my teeth on two levels at the initial interview clip yesterday of Governor Palin, in response to a question from Katie Couric, not being able to name any examples of John McCain pushing for more regulation in his 26-year career – that’s like if somebody running with Joe Lieberman couldn’t name examples of him bucking his party. | Read More »
Here’s the state of play as I write. Bush and Capitol Hill Democrats are hammering out an agreement to, in essence, bail out financial institutions and possibly other companies that hold bad debt, mainly mortgage-backed securities. Pretty much everybody on all sides agrees that the bailout proposal stinks to high heaven and is a fundamental violation of everything conservatives believe in and everything liberals believe | Read More »
I’ve been saying privately for some time now that we’ve never really seen what it looks like when John McCain is mad at the same guy for months on end, and we’d find out as this election rolled into the fall. I think we are getting our answer. Here, via Jake Tapper, is a two-part video of Senator McCain speaking last Thursday in Minnesota. This | Read More »
I tried over the weekend to do a more serious post with my analysis of the credit crisis and the bailouts, but basically there’s just no way for me to get into this further without running afoul of my day job. At this juncture, given the limits on what I can write, the best I can offer my readers on the whole Wall Street/bailout issue | Read More »
We stand today deep into the silly season of the 2008 presidential election; most of us have our dander up, and naturally some Obama partisans like Josh Marshall and Joe Klein have floated off on clouds of rhetorical overkill in an effort to push the idea that their opponent is somehow running an unusually dishonest campaign. Even aside from the partisanship, you have to be | Read More »
A lot of conservatives are up in arms about John McCain’s call for the firing of Chris Cox as SEC Chairman due to the collapse of numerous Wall Street firms on his watch. There is a more than fair argument against McCain’s position: that Cox is a smart, capable conservative and expert in the area who hasn’t really done anything wrong, or at least hadn’t | Read More »
If there’s one lesson we should all bear in mind as fear stalks Wall Street and the presidential race keeps getting tighter as it races towards its conclusion, it is this: Don’t Panic. Now, the current crisis is not an illusion; at its core, it’s about markets that valued assets one way and now value them as being worth considerably less, and that has all | Read More »
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