The GOP is hammering the organizing group ACORN, in part because it wants to create the imrpession that Sen. Obama is somehow a propagator of manipulations and shady dealings. It is a vital part of the Republican psychological fabric to make sure that somehow, no matter how dishonest or sinister in essence or intent, the Republican zeal must be directed like a lightning strike at something its adherents believe is morally degenerate, irresponsible and against all decency.
They will do anything to be able to tell lies with that sharp tone of condescension in their voices, in order to convince voters that they can vote their bias, vote their ignorance, and take shelter in the fabrications of the Republican party. This may sound exagerrated, but it is a consistent pattern and it is visible in every single election where Republicans feel it will not be an easy win. The ACORN issue is also part of the Republican strategy to accuse voters of defrauding the electoral system, when in fact it is a top-down organizational manipulation that they have been working to carry out in every presidential election since 1968.
We need to take this challenge seriously. They will not relent, and they will become increasingly vicious with every passing day. The more shocking their tactics, the more press they will get. If individuals working with ACORN falsified registration forms, there needs to be transparency, the group needs to take action against those individuals, and the Obama campaign needs to be clear about its absolute opposition to any such tactics.
But, we must also keep in mind that legitimate voter-registration drives are absolutely essential to our campaign, to the message of hope, renewal and change, and to the integrity of our democracy, as such. The Republican party counts in most elections on insuring that fewer citizens vote. That is not democracy, it is voter suppression, it is Bolshevik. We need to make this point and make it stick. Democrats, Barack Obama and community organizing groups that help register voters, want our democracy to work, want everybody to have a voice.
The issue here is ACORN was defrauded by volunteers or paid contractors. Someone for some reason decided to forge registration forms. It is likely that there is a trumped up Justice probe going on (this has been part of several corruption scandals for years, including the firing of US attorneys), and that ACORN is being blamed for individual actions, but we need to separate the wheat from the chaff and tell the truth to the American people. Government officials involved in pursuing false or trumped up prosections should be prosecuted, and now.
But the central note we need to strike is: election fraud of any kind is wrong; we need absolute transparency on all related issues, including the misuse of prosecutorial powers, the intimidation of voters, voter profiling for "challenges" and insecure electronic machines, plus links between the corrupt bosses of certain manufacturers and the GOP. Do with this what's been done on Keating: get the resources together, get the story ready, and if they try to use this to smear Obama or to suppress the vote, get the message out on what is known about these other issues.
Sen. John McCain is on national television telling one lie after another to the American people, and trying to spin the massive rescue package, without which the American economy would currently be hurtling toward the abyss, and for which he voted, as a sinister attempt by Democrats to give billions to big banks. John McCain is a politician who once stood on principle and who has consciously chosen to put aside every shred of basic integrity or human dignity in order to poison the minds of voters, because basically, he doesn't understand enough about what's happening to be convincing.
He once said he isn't all that interested in the fine points of economics. That would appear to be true, because he seems to have no knowledge at all of what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do in our economy. He alleges they are somehow responsible for promoting predatory lending and for tricking people into buying homes they can't afford. The fact is, since the Great Depression, we have had policies designed to help most working Americans find shelter and ideally, own a home.
Mass homelessness is a scourge on all of society, and unsustainable rent-levels are a drain on working people, sometimes forcing families into poverty. Home equity is a key to many aspects of our economic landscape, without which tens of millions of people would be marginalized, locked out and ultimately a drag on our economic output. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exist to help facilitate the long-term viability of home-loans. They do not lend directly, but help support the viability of loans given out by commercial banks.
The predatory lending practices and the irresponsible credit derivatives and potentially fraudulent financially unsupported "credit default swaps" that have brought this massive crisis to our nation, were the province of commercial financial institutions which were unwilling to make viable loans to those less able to pay, and which sought to extract usury-level rates of interest from those least able to pay them, for their own profit and with no mind whatsoever to the long-term health of those accounts or of the market generally.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with tacit government support, accelerated the pace of their buying up of problem loans, not in order to stimulate irresponsible lending, but in order to prevent or buy planning time for the looming credit crisis. As early as the summer of 2005, The Economist magazine warned that a global real estate collapse was coming, that would affect all industrialized nations, except perhaps those like Japan which had been struggling with the problem for more than a decade already by that point.
When Sen. Obama wrote to Treasury Secretary Paulson, warning of the problem of subprime mortgages and the potential catastrophic fallout from predatory lending practices —a problem he was working to tackle as early as 2001, in the bipartisan Illinois effort to counter predatory lending—, his effort was aimed at the real problem: the viability of credit derivatives that were being misused to prop up institutions whose portfolios were being poisoned by toxic inviable mortage-backed securities.
When Sen. McCain joined with other Republicans in attacking Fannie Mae, the concern was strictly ideological, and the move itself demonstrated a total misunderstanding of financial markets. The Republicans who fought to reduce the size of Fannie Mae wanted to do two things: 1) to force the assets of government-chartered firms like Fannie and Freddie onto the open market, at bargain prices; 2) to make it more difficult for individuals to leverage their buying power against major financial institutions.
The reasons? The move to force Fannie and Freddie to reduce their mortgage holdings was not an effort to shore up the economy, it was an effort to ignore the problem and avoid regulation of the financial sector. They wanted to help prop up private investment banks and financial institutions by allowing them to get cheap buys on mortgage-backed financial instruments, then count these as assets at market value, essentially, a veiled public buyout of private debt. Cover the financial institutions' rotting portfolio foundations with what look like suddenly rosy numbers.
The problem? Fannie and Freddie were already playing that role. That's what they do. They intervene in home-loan markets to help maximize the viability of loans to consumers, who are not as stabilized against sudden hardship as major financial institutions are. Fannie Mae's website clearly explains:
Fannie Mae is a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) chartered by Congress with a mission to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Fannie Mae operates in the U.S. secondary mortgage market. Rather than making home loans directly with consumers, we work with mortgage bankers, brokers, and other primary mortgage market partners to help ensure they have funds to lend to home buyers at affordable rates.
Fannie Mae is a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) chartered by Congress with a mission to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets.
Fannie Mae operates in the U.S. secondary mortgage market. Rather than making home loans directly with consumers, we work with mortgage bankers, brokers, and other primary mortgage market partners to help ensure they have funds to lend to home buyers at affordable rates.
Originally chartered by the US government in 1938:
The impetus for creation of Fannie Mae was twofold: the national commitment to housing and the inability or unwillingness of private lenders to ensure a reliable supply of mortgage credit throughout the country.
So, the misuse of that economic lever is the fault of the financial sector itself. Real decisions were made that distorted the nature of affordable-rate home loans, attempting to bend them by force into some sort of massively profitable adjustable-rate mortgages, which were designed to be misleading and which were sold over and over again, real estate flipping-style, in a kind of pyramid scheme where the last entity to hold the loan would eventually lose out.
The move to make it more difficult for individuals to leverage their buying power against major financial institutions (which could force down commercial interest rates), was part of a concerted effort by Congressional Republicans to reform credit and bankruptcy laws to shift bargaining power to big banks. Why? Because they needed help with their decaying solvency. The 2005 bankruptcy bill made it more difficult for individuals to escape debt repayment by declaring bankruptcy, but easier for major firms or even banks to do so.
The only possible reason for doing this was to help banks cover up the fact that they had inviable loans on their books. By now allowing individuals to escape repayment, in some cases even after losing their homes, the banks were able to continue counting those future repayments of failed loans as "assets", which were increasingly bundled together and resold as credible "financial instruments", when in fact they were essentially junk bonds in sheeps' clothing.
Sen. McCain's attack on Fannie and Freddie misplaces blame for this crisis in order to craft an entirely alternate history, which he then intends to use to blame Sen. Obama for a crisis that Sen. McCain actively worked to worsen, either from disinterest, confusion or worse. At the very least, it is clear that Sen. McCain's ranting on the subject bears virtually no connection to reality, and this is what we need people to understand.
The can-do campaign of Barack Obama is based in part on the idea that we as a people produce a broad variety of talented individuals and fresh ideas that can help us adapt to changing circumstances and meet the challenges of a crucial moment in our history. Is that not very much what we're facing now with the financial crisis? Barack Obama understands the underlying banking problems that have led to this — this is in part why he fought predatory lending in Illinois.
Let's demonstrate the leadership potential Sen. Obama brings to this issue by getting involved to bring together conservatives and progressives, Republicans and Democrats, to do something to make this happen. Let's propose:
John McCain has cancelled an interview with CNN's Larry King in response to an interview in which McCain's spokesman fumbled, dodged and spun, unable to provide one specific examle of a "command decision" made by Gov. Palin as "commander of the Alaska National Guard", a resume-builder commonly cited by the McCain campaign. Campbell Brown insisted on getting an answer to the question, and Tucker Bounds continued to spin and to try to dodge the question, as he was unprepared to answer it.
Though the incident was obviously embarrassing for the McCain campaign, is canceling an interview with the candidate himself really an appropriate response? It would appear that the once "straight-talking" John McCain is no longer comfortable taking tough questions or telling hard truths. It would appear he is no longer comfortable relying on character and judgment, and would rather dodge the issue while his campaign attempts to spin the American people with answers like "any decision she made... is more experience than Barack Obama has", a simple non-answer, combined with a ridiculous smear.
Are we facing the possibility that the Republican presidential campaign is really deteriorating into an adolescent tug of war with media and with the public, both of whom feel that a campaign has to make its own case and not just be treated like the inevitable successor to the least popular president in history? Maybe John McCain is no longer responsible for his own decisions, but this "handling" of uncomfortable issues makes him look like a shell of his former self.
We are hearing much about Gov. Sarah Palin's "executive experience", as governor of the state of Alaska. She has "made executive decisions"; one Republican strategist argued "she's right up there near Russia", as if she had acquired foreign policy experience by way of geography. But how much organizing, how much leadership has her executive position required? Is it really more than what Sen. Obama has acquired as the founder and head of the most successful national political campaign organization in recent history?
This may sound petty, and I take seriously Sen. Obama's admonition to be wary of the "smallness of our politics" (Feb. 10, 2007), but nevertheless it's worth making the point: Sen. Obama's work in organizing and steering a major national campaign has required no shortage of executive decision-making, including bringing together the most experienced group of foreign policy experts, over 300, turning his advisory team into a sort of cabinet infrastructure in waiting. He has received donations from over 2 million distinct individuals, and brought more than 18 million people across 50 states and multiple territories to his cause.
He plays an executive role (no one can argue against that) in steering the ship of 50-states-plus that is his massive grassroots campaign organization, started from the ground up, and now the most effective positive-message political campaign in modern history. His executive prowess vanquished the "Clinton machine" and has already redefined the entire nature and scope of our national political discourse.
His brilliant rhetorical vision is not the wishful thinking of an idealistic legislator and it is not the product of a man who has caved in to follow the established leadership of his party; it is a blue-print for what will likely be the most effective, most can-do, most energetic executive leadership we have seen in decades. He is compared to Lincoln and to JFK, not for speechmaking or for charisma, but for his leadership qualities, for his ability to take a stance, lay out a vision, and then build an organization led by himself, through which to commit the energy of millions to improving the lot of the average American and helping bring our nation closer to its ideals.
That is the executive we need. Whatever their qualities, neither of the GOP candidates measures up to this standard.
The GOP has now begun to say that "elections are not won on experience, but on leadership, and leadership is about judgment". This is —incredibly— the new talking point. They continue the relentless lies that "Obama has never done anything" and that "he has less experience than Gov. Palin"... both are tremendously insulting to millions of voters, and both are lies in every sense of the word.
So where does this leave us? Judgment. The GOP cannot even permit its candidate to follow the same campaign philosophy or the same line of argument —even where it was his ONLY chance— into the fall. Either they do not believe in him, or their idea of judgment is Karl Rove-style attack politics, and John McCain is not a strong enough leader to stop them from infiltrating and taking over his campaign.
His judgment looks shakier than ever, not only because he chose a VP-candidate based on a single brief meeting and a short interview, but because he has bet that nobody in America will notice. But beyond that, his judgment looks shaky because his campaign is trying to do everything simultaneously, with no attention to whether or not they produce evidence of their own lies by way of elemental contradictions.
His leadership amounts to... following Bush's lead on Iraq... following Bush's lead on taxes... following Bush's lead on drilling... following Bush's lead on delivering our system to far-right extremist judges... following Bush's lead on banking deregulation... following Bush's lead on dirty campaigning... following Bush's lead on contempt for the press and for voters... following Bush's lead in killing climate legislation by demanding free money for existing energy businesses. And, he even caved in on torture!
He even cozied up to a lobbyist and delivered favorable votes for her, all while proclaiming himself a reformer and a maverick. What aspect of his political philosophy is not beholden to the corrupt and discredited interests the American people are trying to throw out in the street? Why did it take Barack Obama arriving in the Senate and pushing for bipartisan support for the most sweeping ethics reform in a generation, when John McCain has been there for almost 3 decades and has had an all-GOP law-making process for 6 years of this decade?
George W. Bush will now address the RNC via satellite and giant screen, from Washington. We could say we acknowledge that there was something noble about not appearing last night, as Hurricane Gustav was ravaging the Gulf coast, but then Pres. Bush this morning decided to spin the hardship of the Gulf coast evacuees into an opportunity to push for offshore oil drilling, so I think he undercuts his own claim to noble action by using the evacuees as political pawns for big oil.
So, it is fair to say there is something reminiscent of George Orwell's 'Big Brother' system from 1984, when Pres. George W. Bush, already notorious in the eyes of history for his attacks on civil liberties and Constitutional rights. The RNC is not only offering "more of the same" in terms of dirty tricks, sinister smears, double-talk, double-standards, tax cuts and the party's heavily propaganda-driven cult mentality, but they are also offering more of the same in terms of W., the would-be overseer of the known universe appearing only digitally, and refusing to step aside and allow the annoying "maverick" to step out from under his shadow.
This is the moment when we see clearly how this is about imposing on the US a 3rd disastrous Bush term, full of lies and manipulations; this is the moment when we will ssee that —barring some sort of sudden spiritual revolution within himself, George W. Bush will be incapable of explaining how John McCain has very different but laudable goals; Bush will affirm the absolute strangle-hold of his damaged philosophy on the reeling Republican party, and we should make sure we see clearly where every crack in their vessel is shown, tonight.
John McCain was too weak a leader to stop smear ads emerging in South Carolina, during the primaries; he has been too much of a double-talker and too weak to even make an effort to disavow the 527s smearing Obama with racist and libelous lies; he has been too weak a leader to defend his long-held principles against the radical distractions of the Bush presidency. And now, he wants us to trust him, and he brings us direct to our living rooms, the screen-only speech of the Big-Brother presidency, complete with all its direct and concerted assaults on our Constitution and our founding values.
That is the only meaningful message that should emerge from the RNC, but we will hear a relentless effort to spin what is said there to make it sound as if it professes a positive vision for the future of the United States. We must launch an all-out effort to counter these claims, to reveal the lies, to upend the rhetoric, before it gains any traction.
John McCain rails against lobbyists and members of Congress tied up in the feeding frenzy for federal dollars that is the budgetary allocation process known as "earmarking". But after killing his own climate bill with an inexplicable, counterproductive and irrelevant demand that the nuclear industry be given federal dollars to make its own business easier, McCain continues to insist on the federal government giving billions in subsidies to an industry he wants to expand in his home state: Arizona.
This is the very definition of earmarking... allocating federal dollars for projects (especially where private business interests are involved) in one's own state. McCain is actively calling for such projects to expand, even as he continues to proclaim himself the arch-enemy of such projects. Why has he not been called on to explain this glaring inconsistency? Why are we not holding him to account? How would he pay for this new plant he wants for Arizona? Would taxpayers from across the US be asked to reward private business interests McCain favors in his home state? Who would pay for the security for the plants and their waste? Does he care?
What about drilling? It turns out that John McCain has received over $740,000 from the oil and gas industries since 1990, and now he is pushing their interests, despite their being either incapable of solving the economic crisis relating to fuel prices or unwilling to do so, and their inaction on diversifying energy production methods or cleaning up their own processes to prevent environmental degradation and public health risks.
All told, John McCain ranks behind only Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas in funds received from the oil, gas, electric utility, automotive manufacturing, chemical and nuclear industries, receiving over $2 million from these interests since 1990. Now in the midst of a campaign against kickbacks and earmarks, his record shows he has called for the very subsidies these industries are asking for in Washington, some of which are traditional "porkbarrel" spending that benefits private interests in his own state. This will sting, if we make it an issue.
An interesting article on "How the Arizona senator doomed his own global warming legislation with billions in nuclear subsidies" forces us to ask the question: why would McCain, who says he abhors project-specific funding and directed government money meant to line the pockets of regions or entities specifically, be fighting to give billions of dollars to the nuclear energy, especially knowing that it would kill legislation he says he supports?
While it seemed the legislation would help the nuclear industry do better in a market with new ground-rules, McCain wanted to give money directly to the private firms themselves:
In meetings with McCain's staff, environmental lobbyists argued the obvious points, according to Karen Wayland, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council: what to do with nuclear waste, the need to prevent nuclear proliferation, the problem with security at nuclear facilities. They noted that legislation restricting greenhouse emissions in and of itself would create a competitive advantage for nuclear energy companies. They made no headway, so the enviros appealed to Lieberman and his staff. "Lieberman didn't seem to care for this provision," one of the green lobbyists remembers, "but he needed McCain, and McCain was pushing hard" for the nuclear subsidies.
Why McCain was so devoted to these private interests, why he seemed to give equal weight to feeding private industry with free money and combatting climate change, which he had begun to think of as a security, economic and quality-of-life risk to his own state, remains in question.
In 2005, after the climate bill's failure, McCain and Lieberman introduced similar legislation, this time with the subsidies written into the original language. McCain declared "I am a a green" and said environmental objections to nuclear energy and the severe risks posed by its waste products were "wrongheaded", insisting that legislation to reduce carbon emissions should also include money directed to the nuclear industry.
According to Mother Jones:
Several Democratic senators who had backed McCain's original legislation—Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)—defected, and McCain picked up no new Republicans. (Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both voted for it.) "The staff didn't fully appreciate how much opposition there would be to the nuclear provision," Wicke says, adding, "I could say it was a bit of miscalculation.... It did stymie this climate change legislation." After collecting 44 supporters for the first bill, McCain had lost ground.
McCain was almost single-handedly responsible for killing a vital emissions reductions bill, and he did so fighting stubbornly for directed payments to private business for which no one could find a valid explanation. He also angrily told environmentally-oriented renewable energy proponents that renewables would never supply more than 1% to 2% of US energy needs. The US government had found as early as 1991 that wind from three states alone could —if properly developed— provide for all consumer electricity use, and 12 years later, the state of the art was such that the same hypothetical grid would cover all US energy demand.
McCain's position was and is out of touch with scientific and economic fact, and his allegiance to providing easy money to an environmentally dangerous, economically unsustainable industry smacks of the very politics of suspect gifts he claims to oppose. The degree of arrogance and stubbornness in fighting for the subsidies is only highlighted by the fact that he continues to proclaim himself to be an heroic crusader against such efforts, especially focused on how they contribute to killing much needed legislation.
Another GOP point attacking the Democrats, at all levels at all times in history, is to talk about "taking on do-nothing bureaucrats" and tout their own legendary efforts to "reduce bureacracy" or "cut red tape". In fact, it is often the other way around. It is often the case that Republican approaches to "bureaucracy" tend to set up roadblocks to effective social services —reference: No Child Left Behind— designing in phoney "standards" that together with micromanagement dictates are aimed at undermining standards and cutting funding to vital programs, while bureaucracy multiplies, as do funds directed to related "consulting" projects.
John McCain seems to have difficulty separating efforts to "reduce bureaucracy" from pro-corporate efforts to strip away vital regulations that keep accounting ethics standards and fraud protections in place. The result can be seen in the banking sector, where predatory lending has cost consumers and the government hundreds of billions of dollars, due to irresponsible, unethical or unsustainable practices. Sen. Obama was working to curb predatory lending in the home-mortgage sector back in Illinois in 2001. He is tuned in to what works and to what scams can undermine the system; he fought to do the same in Washington, while senators like McCain wanted fewer "regulations".
This makes McCain not a principled "maverick", but a rogue free-marketeer, who pushes Bush-like policies that give big breaks to big banks but force the average American into smaller and smaller cages with respect to their fiscal freedom and spending ability. McCain's tax cut proposals WILL NOT FIX THIS, because they are just an extension of Bush's, which have been one of the worst contributing factors to this anti-middle-class economic dynamic we have seen emerge and lead to this financial chaos.
Obama's working-class tax credits and targeted small-business tax cuts plan will fix this; responsible regulation, coupled with higher consumer-spending capacity relative to overall economic output, will restore order to financial infrastructure and keep the big cheats honest. McCain will not.
The GOP will now veer gradually away from the experience argument. Obama needs to keep showing his mettle, but McCain seems to have conceded to some degree that Obama has been "vetted" in the eyes of voters across the left and the center. Even conservatives seem to have acknowledge he can lead, they just disagree with his policies (largely due to historical bias about "liberals"). The item of choice will be fiscal policy, as Palin is not necessarily a strong security candidate.
They will try to scare Americans about how much Sen. Obama's policies will cost; they will say Pelosi is at the head of some sort of spending watershed and that Democrats cannot be trusted on fiscal discipline. For the record, Reagan and W. oversaw the two biggest spending expansions in US history. And H.W. raised taxes. The Reinventing Government program Al Gore ran for the Clinton administration was the most successful and most organized effort ever to counter wasteful spending and "reduce the size of government".
The Bush administration's record on that was: 1) to cut funding for vital programs, like education, veterans' affairs and even combat pay for deployed troops; 2) to direct spending to specific private entities through no-bid contracts. Neither of these did anything to reduce overall spending or the size of government, but both have caused serious harm to actual human lives. Katrina and Iraq are two examples of no-bid contracts causing mass suffering.
Sen. Obama is pushing for a Reinventing Government 2.0, and his fiscal policy is more disciplined and more precisely orchestrated than Sen. McCain's. We need to get this message out. We need to make it clear, we need to show how Barack has a wealth of experience in the fine-points not only of funding public programs, but of orchestrating budgetary priorities in order to keep spending under control, something no Republican president has done in more than half a century (get the historical references and say this every chance you get).
There is a two-pronged pitchfork aiming at Joe Biden every time he looks to tear down Sarah Palin in debates or on the stump: 1) she's a woman and it's best not to look like a bully; 2) in the wake of the Barack-Hillary standoff, it's necessary to treat her as a viable candidate (because a woman can be) but not let that treatment vet her for the voting public.
Strategy points to be considered are:
1. Clinton: let Hillary be Hillary; ask her to come in and do some of the grunt-work of blasting both McCain and Palin, let her take on some of the more flagrant attacks, pulling no punches on any point.
2. Spin: Palin is lying about her position on earmarks; the McCain campaign is touting her as a crusading reformer, when in fact she has reacted to Democratic-backed ethics reform, out of necessity and political expedience.
3. Oil: she may not be "in the pockets of big oil", but her energy policy is entirely rooted in her role as an Alaskan politician; her position on oil is not scientific at all, but is about directing foreign oil profits and federal dollars to a socialist fund that is paid to Alaskans; it's a way of steering money to Alaska, not a fix for our energy problems. If she cannot evolve on energy and recognize how little relevance new drilling would really have to reducing overall energy costs, she needs to be exposed on that failing.
4. Economic policy: we need the kind of elbow-grease budgetary work that characterizes Sen. Obama and Sen. Biden both, the complexities that affect our national economy in ways a small-state governor cannot see from her perspective. Is the woman who talks about the bridge to nowhere actually part of McCain's economic plans "from nowhere"?
5. History: Hillary can question Palin's ability to contribute "to history", and if Palin goes in that direction, she risks appearing to diminish the meaning of Sen. Obama's revolutionary candidacy, and she will bring up the stark contrast between the two tickets on that count.
6. Judges: she wants even more conservative judges than we now have; the balance on the Supreme Court is already radically conservative, with two of the most fringe-radical justices ever named now on the court. To continue that shift —when Roe has still not been overturned, due to the Constitutional basis of the ruling— is just to impose on generations of Americans a single ideology that does not represent the mainstream or long-standing judicial precedent.
7. Foreign policy: Biden knows foreign leaders, Obama has traveled to every corner of the world (except South America?) on official Senate business, Palin has negotiated fishing rights with neighboring states.
8. Cute vs. Charismatic: Gov. Palin is an intelligent, informed, well-spoken and determined political figure; she is capable and she can defend her positions with charm and poise. She will rely on that charismatic edge in supporting her rhetoric. Throw it back at her. There is too much about her that makes that tendency seem like a willingness to try to be "cute" instead of fully explaining herself. DO NOT BE CONDESCENDING on this point, but in a statesmanlike way, make her seem irresponsible if she looks like she's playing that card.
9. Joe: let Biden be Biden. He's unpredictable, a wild-card, but an experienced statesman whom no one doubts. Add verbal discipline and sharp answers to that host of edgy qualities, and she will be unprepared to give straight answers.
John Katz, Special Counsel to Gov. Sarah Palin, published an article in the Juneau Empire in March 2008, explaining that Gov. Palin does not oppose earmarks, except where they become "controversial". (John McCain says he opposes every form of earmark, no matter what it is, and claims he has never asked for or accepted any such funds for his state —we should look into this, thoroughly; we should examine every single line of every bill he's voted on to see if this is true or not—, so Palin's position is absolutely at odds with what McCain claims about her.)
Katz explains that "earmarks are not bad in themselves. In fact, they represent a legitimate exercise of Congress' constitutional power to amend the budget proposed by the president." Legally, this is true, but it clashes violently with Sen. McCain's claims of a reformist platform, based almost exclusively on the earmark issue. Katz also explains that:
Earlier this year, President Bush and the congressional leadership announced that the total number and dollar amount of earmarks must be reduced significantly. The Palin administration has responded to this message by requesting 31 earmarks, down from 54 last year. Of these, 27 involve continuing or previous appropriations and four are new. The total dollar amount of these requests has been reduced from about $550 million in the previous year to just less than $200 million.
Earlier this year, President Bush and the congressional leadership announced that the total number and dollar amount of earmarks must be reduced significantly.
The Palin administration has responded to this message by requesting 31 earmarks, down from 54 last year. Of these, 27 involve continuing or previous appropriations and four are new. The total dollar amount of these requests has been reduced from about $550 million in the previous year to just less than $200 million.
So Gov. Palin herself, in the midst of the period in which she now claims she was an anti-earmark crusader, requested 4 entirely new programs be funded by earmarks. He does claim that Gov. Palin's budget requests "incorporate" the concept of matching federal funds "wherever possible", but the specifics about any case where this was done are lacking. We know that in the case of the "bridge to nowhere", her standard was 100% should be funded by the federal government, despite the "federal interest" aspect of the initial request essentially having been questionable.
Speaking for the governor's entire administration, Katz writes that "We take the position that each entity must interpret the new budget realities for itself. The members of the Alaska congressional delegation are the final decision makers concerning which earmark requests to pursue." So, far from being a stalwart opponent of all federal earmarks, or saying "thanks, but no thanks", Gov. Palin left it to her state's corrupt political establishment to seek whatever money it would from Washington.
Commenting on the fact that a national debate on the integrity of the Congressional budgetary earmarking process had featured certain projects to build "roads and bridges", Katz says that Gov. Palin had decided to re-examine "certain previous decision", due to the fact that Alaskan projects were receiving "unwanted attention". Political expedience, one might say, or simply a reaction to the climate of the times.
So was it principle, or was it that she was told to make changes? Katz writes that "Palin has said the state can either respond to the changing circumstances in Congress or stick its head in the sand." He claims that efforts to re-examine Alaskan projects funded by federal earmarks will help make Alaska more credible in a new legislative climate.
The basic truth of the matter is that Gov. Palin was not a crusader against earmarks and she did not "cancel" the Gravina Island bridge project due to the moral indignation of a no-nonsense reformer; she took a new political position on certain earmark projects (and not on others), opposed some while still making new requests, because the times were changing and it was a Democratic Congress in Washington reacting to the outrageous quid-pro-quo scandals involving high-powered lobbyists, corrupt members of Congress and earmarks.
In such an environment, and with the Republicans losing their majority —during which funding these projects was easier to come by—, it was less viable to base the state's budget priorities on the easy flow of federal dollars. Katz reminds Alaskans that "The governor is very much aware of the importance of the federal budget to virtually every Alaskan." He adds that her decisions regarding earmarks are a response "to the new realities" and that "we are not abandoning earmarks altogether but are seeking to constrain and document them in the ways discussed here."
Her position was to adopt the policy on lobbying transparency, money and gifts that may change hands and earmarks, demanded in legislation passed by a Democratic Congress and pushed, supported and passed thanks to the efforts of none other than Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois. In this case, change came to Juneau, because reform-minded Democrats projected new standards out to the states, in connection with federal budget rules. Palin was just adapting "to the new realities".
The New Republic blog, The Plank, has called into question Gov. Palin's position on the infamous "bridge to nowhere" project. She reportedly told the Anchorage Daily News, during her gubernatorial campaign that "Yes. I would like to see Alaska's infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now--while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist."
As The Plank points out, Palin was in favor of milking the Republican majority in Congress for federal funds to pay for Alaska's own infrastructure development. This is not an unheard-of or horrible policy in the US, historically; public works projects can be great for economic stimulous and infrastructure upgrades of all kinds tend to pay dividends, but she is not telling the truth about her position regarding the Gravina Island bridge.
Shouldn't we expect for someone with such scant history in actually fighting the good fight to at least have one truthful example of how she did so?
The "bridge to nowhere" is a favorite issue of Sen. John McCain. And Gov. Palin is proud of proclaiming that she "ended the bridge to nowhere". She claims she said to the federal government "thanks, but no thanks". And she said in accepting John McCain's request to join his ticket that "if Alaska wants a bridge, we'll build it ourselves". Now it turns out that reports suggest Gov. Palin was a supporter of the bridge to Gravina Island, while it was funded with federal dollars (precisely what McCain says he opposes), and she began to oppose the construction project when it lost some federal funding and Alaska would have to pay a larger share.
In fact, the bridge does not go to nowhere, it goes to the airport located on Gravina Island, otherwised serviced only by a ferry. Wikipedia's write-up on the bridge includes the following: "Governor Sarah Palin also supported the bridge, but canceled it when the Alaska delegation was unable to prevent changes to federal funding levels that more than doubled Alaska's portion of the bill from $160M(40.2%) to $329M (>82%) of the bridge's cost."
The governor's own office issued the following press release, stating the reason for canceling the bridge project as its not being entirely funded by the federal government:
Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398 million bridge is not the answer. Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding for the bridge project, and it’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island. Much of the public’s attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here. But we need to focus on what we can do, rather than fight over what has happened.
So, Gov. Palin's position on the "bridge to nowhere" is exactly the opposite of what she and John McCain claim it is. Her actual position was that the bridge should be 100% funded by the federal government. She wanted the $400 million "earmark"; Alaska paying for even a fraction of it was unacceptable to her. That doesn't necessarily mean her position was wrong or not in the interests of Alaskans; it just means they are misleading voters and fudging the record on "earmarks".
Sen. McCain tends to forget that he is not the only public official who has sought to curb wasteful spending, or talked about it, and naturally he never seems willing to mention that Barack enacted more meaningful ethics and lobbying-transparency reform than he ever did, almost upon arriving in Washington. One has to ask if McCain is lying about this issue as relating to his own running mate, and if during nearly 3 decades in Washington, he was unable to enact the kind of meaningful reforms Sen. Obama achieved with the opposition of a Republican president and majority, whether he is serious about reform at all.
In fact, McCain is soft on transparency, soft on fiscal reform, soft on real earmark spending (the Iraq war is the biggest earmark bonanza in the history of the US Congress), soft on accountability and soft on talking straight. Gov. Palin may have good intentions, but her record is not even what they say it is. They are padding her resume, lying about the meaning and timing of her positions and deceiving the American public. Let's ask them: why do they have to lie, if they are what they claim to be?
The Palin nomination seems in many ways to be a reaction to the Democrats, and to Sen. Obama's speech last night. First, because he wants to court "disgruntled Hillary voters" and because the move seems designed to answer Barack's reminding us that "the change we need does not come from Washington, it comes to Washington". We are already hearing McCain campaign operatives warn about how it will look if Biden takes the "attack dog" role against a younger woman, however valid his points may be.
So, are we looking at the possibility that one of the best assets we have as a campaign for a Democratic presidency may be Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in that, she is poised, relentless, credible, and eloquent, and she can make the clear case for why Gov. Palin may not be an excellent choice, and for why the McCain-Palin ticket may be wrong for America, letting her do the attacking against a female VP candidate who just happens not to be a "leap to the center" but is rather quite seriously a sudden jerk to the far-right?
It may be good for the campaign, good for party unity, good for the overall landscape of American politics, if the Democratic party comes together in this way, and reminds Americans that this campaign could bring not only Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House, but also other party luminaries who are able to judge what it takes to do the job and are well-positioned to speak truth to the right-leaning 2nd to John McCain.
Sen. John McCain has done a great thing for women, and has rewarded the hard work of Gov. Palin herself, in a very serious and historic way. But he has made a calculation so fraught with divergent motives that one can only wonder at how many weaknesses he seeks to cover at the same time. He wants to seem fresher and more vital, he wants the charisma factor, he seems to be ceding that he does not have the stuff to achieve real reform himself, he is inoculating himself against the charge he is not conservative enough, he is assuming women will vote for a woman, despite the radical nature of her views.
And, we must consider that: this has been so unpredictable that McCain has eliminated his own "trust me, I'm steady" strategy as an option and due to her "youth and inexperience", he has eliminated any possiblity of attacking Sen. Obama for having fewer years in the halls of Washington foreign-policy that he does, as she has zero. She is also facing a federal investigation on ethics charges, and the whole affair seems to raise questions about Sen. McCain's faith in his own colleagues, his own judgment and his own talents for taking on the dynamic Obama-Biden ticket.
Barack Obama has been, from the start, one of the most poised and visionary candidates we have ever seen, and he has brought not just eloquence, but a depth of vision and a genuine gravitas —seriousness about and firm devotion to working with major problems facing American citizens— about major issues and the real human scale of the political arena. Joe Biden's joining the ticket only deepens and affirms this reality.
We now have the most promising and inspiring ticket our party has seen since Clinton-Gore, and perhaps even more potential for revolutionary reform, economic innovations, and major change to our economic infrastructure and the meaning of our role in a participatory democracy. We need to take the moment seriously, on every level and we need to make sure the McCain campaign knows: each and every one of their lies about Obama and his campaign is just that, a transparent lie.
There is no dearth of experience; there is no radical agenda; there is no possibility of there being anything but devotion to country and to the wellbeing of the American people and our cherished system of democratic government. This ticket will not cost you more, but will inspire an economic rejuvenation that helps break the crushing grip of Bush economic policies.
Most of all, let's take the fight to them, not let them get up off the mat at any rhetorical turn. Good luck everybody; this is our now!
