Grave Error

At the GOP Convention, we heard plenty about the hero John McCain, especially about his courage. Everytime someone praised his courage, I wondered what courage had to do with a modern presidency. I mean, is the presidency like a Hollywood movie — say Air Force One — where John McCain may be in mid air when his presidential 747 is taken over by terrorists and he, in true Harrison Ford style, subdues the bad guys and saves the day? Or maybe they want a Jack Bauer president, or a president, bar knuckled, on the front line and muddied in the trenches.

Maybe the heroism they are talking about is John McCain’s special breed of maverick heroism. The type where you don’t choose the running mate you really want (ie, Senator Lieberman), but rather the one who Carl Rove and Rush Limbaugh want. Or the courage to change all of your positions and cave into the extreme wing of your party’s demands, or to vote 90% of the time with your team’s president.

It’s Sunday and we’re in election season, that means it’s the day where the most important candidates and their surrogates appear on the political talk shows and answer tough questions about their policies and positions. John McCain, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have spent the past year appearing on these programs so that the American people can develop an informed basis from which to judge them. For example, today Joe Biden is appearing on Meet the Press (his 42nd ever appearance on the show), Barack Obama on This Week, and John McCain on Face the Nation. Sarah Palin is not appearing on any of these shows. With just under two months until the general elections, Palin has yet to give an important interview to the press or participate in a serious debate. Looks like today everybody is ready for questions except for Palin.

After more than a year of this exhaustive get-to-know the candidates election season (where, for example, Obama has already participated in 20 televised debates), the American people should be treated with respect and be allowed to meet Sarah Palin, a person who could foreseeably become the acting President of the United States. You’d think that John McCain would have the courage to let his vice presidential choice meet the press and the voting public.

Hiding isn’t very brave.

UPDATE: McCain/Palin is not scared, but Palin will not do interviews until the press makes the pitbull hockey mom feel more comfortable: (more…)

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more cynical (say than Palin), McCain gives an even more shockingly cynical speech. His plea for bipartianship is marked by portraying Democrats as elitists (what Paul Krugman calls McCain’s “Resentment Strategy“). Next he vows to fight the elitists in Washington who are running the show, but here he forgets to mention that it is McCain himself and his Republican clan who are and have been running the show for the last eigh years in the presidency and the last twelve in Congress.

Then McCain defines himself as a maverick who believes in country before party, but this comes after he has just negotiated the official GOP platform where he has yielded on almost every position dear to him, thus giving in to his party’s most vested interests.

After telling us how much of a hero he was, still is, and how he, and no other person in the country, will fight for the country that saved him, he does not believe himself to be “blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.” Then what was the entire speech about, John?

Finally, our hero cries out, “Americans want us to stop yelling at each other.” Did he hear Rudy’s or Palin’s speeches? As the New York Times properly asks today in its editorial,

Americans have a right to ask which John McCain would be president. We hope Mr. McCain starts to answer that by halting the attacks on Mr. Obama’s patriotism and beginning a serious, civil debate.

Don’t count on it.

I am sorry to be focusing on the GOP V.P. choice, but I am frankly shocked and horrified. I just watched the video of Sarah Palin’s vanilla GOP Convention speech and it was mean-spirited, arrogant, spiteful, and cynical. She didn’t once mention what her ticket’s policies would be. It was nothing more than Obama slander, one-liners, and a call to vote for McCain for the sole reason that he is a “great man”.

This is what the country has turned into — a bad high school election speech. Thanks, John, for fighting for me. Great job.

Here’s a list (compiled by the AP) with some of the factual misstatements from the GOP Convention.

Don’t take my word that the Palin choice is a sign of desperate cynicism. Listen to the Republican pundits, thinking they were off the air.

Furthermore, by selecting someone with almost no public record, no major interviews or debates or public exposure who lives sheltered from the rest of the country — in other words a complete unknown — the national conversation only naturally centers around discovering Palin and moves away from the issues and policy debate. McCain has turned the election into an even greater farce. The choice has simply cheapened the entire election even more than the 2000 contest, essentially rendering the U.S. presidency a joke.

Just when I had thought that the DNC Convention was a total load of dung, then the GOP came to the rescue with two statements that have left me shocked by the shere extent of their cynicism: first, the vice presidential candidacy of Governor Palin, and second that Bush would not be speaking at the GOP Convention (the president was too concerned — albeit a few years tardy — with the weather).

I suppose that after watching Hillary, Bill, and then Obama (i) highlight the historic importance of Obama’s candidacy and then (ii) detail how the Bush Administration has deteriorated the country, the McCain people scrambled to adjust their convention’s agenda. Pick a woman, hide Bush under the carpet, and avoid looking like what they are: old, white, and crusty.

Having met Palin only twice and interviewed her at the very last minute, McCain determined that, at such an important historic moment and after considering every other potential choice in a nation of close to 300,000 million inhabitants, Governor Palin was his perfect vice-maverick. First Lady, Laura Bush, rushed to praise Mrs. Palin. I am paraphrasing here, but Mrs. Bush thinks Palin is just precious. Laura knows her well; they’ve met a couple of times (in other words, twice). They sat at the same table last year. Now, that is some heavy vetting if you ask me.

Tom Brokaw, who has proven himself to be a more serious yet less likeable interrogator than Tim Russert, thankfully asked the serious questions to McCain Palin surrogate Tim Pawlenty: (more…)

The old pick the young. The rookie picks the veteran. The Hawiian picks the continental, and the continental picks the Alaskan. The black canidate picks the white guy, the man picks the woman. The dark hair picks the white hair, and the white the dark.

Is it all a lack of creativity? The need for balance? The realization that two old white guys on the same ticket is political suicide? Contrast to blur any contrast as we merge into one monotone stain of meaningless political nihilism. I suppose if there is a bright light for everyone — both Republican and Democats would prefer worlds in which the opposing party’s VPs ruled rather than their foe’s front runners.

To give a little balance to my forthright Obama support, I recommend you read conservative (yet extremely balanced) New York Times columnist David Brook’s satirical piece today entitled “A Speech to Delegates“.

He does a great job of poking fun at how ridiculous and over-the-top the DNC Convention and the speeches have been (even though I did see him at one point during the NewsHour’s live coverage in total awe of Michelle Obama). While I do think this particular line from the article is very funny,

No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope!

and I think he is totally correct to highlight the holes in the blind hope movement, there is nothing funny about what has happened to the country under Republican rule. There is no way around the facts.

I have never hid the fact the I both admire Bill Clinton’s great political gifts and despise how he wastes those gifts with his divisive antics. I also have to admit that the Democratic Convention, and I am sure the Republican one will be the same, is a load of over-the-top only-in-America trash. Having said this, Bill Clinton reminded us last night of what an amazing orator he is. He might truly believe what he said, he might not. He’s Bill Clinton, and he’s as good an actor as Ronald Reagan ever was, plus he’s also a lawyer, and last night he sure looked like he was missing being the country’s head hauncho.

Love him or hate him, Bill made the compelling argument of why the U.S. cannot afford another Republican term in the White House. Another Bill — Bill Moyers — in the same vain made a similar argument in last week’s Journal:

As wages stagnate, prices are soaring. Economists call this pain the “misery index.” It’s a combination of the unemployment and inflation rates, and it’s what politicians have in mind when they ask, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Well, the misery index is the highest it’s been since George Bush’s father became president, seventeen years ago.

. . .

This year oil hit a record high - $147 a barrel when last year, it was less than half that - around $68. A loaf of bread is up 14% from last year, a dozen eggs is up 33%, and pizza makers have seen the cost of their cheese soar from $1.30 to $1.76. Flour used to make the dough has tripled in price. As these prices soar, the value of homes is sinking. One in three home buyers since 2003 now owe more than their property’s estimated worth. Not only has home equity plummeted, so has the value of other holdings, like stocks and bonds and pensions, the investments families count on as a cushion during hard times.

Has the Bush Admininstration done anything that was not destructive?

A lot will be written (mostly today) about how Hillary’s speech, although well delivered, was merely a half-hearted praisal of Obama. Richard Cohen called it “when you can’t say something nice“. But can anyone really be surprised about Hillary making it all about herself? She talked about herself, her issues, her campaign, her outfits, and the women who supported her. Some are saying that Hillary dissed Obama. Nevertheless, Hillary was just being her self-loving self, but what I found more surprising was her strongest dis.

Hillary started out her speech, introducing herself . . . “I am a proud mother . . .” At that moment, I looked at my own mother and said, “Mom, watch and see what she does not say, what she does not say she’s proud to be”.

I am honored to be here tonight. A proud mother. A proud Democrat. A proud American. And a proud supporter of Barack Obama.

That’s right! Curiously absent was a declaration of being “a proud wife”. She was a proud supporter of Barack and mother to Chelsea, but her husband — making his stupid condescending faces — was the real one to get dissed. Go girl.

As I have mentioned previously, the press may talk more about Obama than McCain, but they are easier on McCain. Regardless of the evidence, it is always Obama who has problems with women, white men, and is fairing poorly in the polls. Obama is an unknown entity, and we all know exactly what McCains thinks and/or will do as president. As Frank Rich writes today in the New York Times,

What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.

What Obama also should have learned by now is that the press is not his friend. Of course, he gets more ink and airtime than McCain; he’s sexier news. But as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs documented in its study of six weeks of TV news reports this summer, Obama’s coverage was 28 percent positive, 72 percent negative. (For McCain, the split was 43/57.) Even McCain’s most blatant confusions, memory lapses and outright lies still barely cause a ripple, whether he’s railing against a piece of pork he in fact voted for, as he did at the Saddleback Church pseudodebate last weekend, or falsifying crucial details of his marital history in his memoirs, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered in court records last month.

. . .

Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

And then there is the POW card that McCain plays, as Maureen Dowd, explains (more…)