The McCain Thread

[Marx]

Has Bush made a public endorsement of McCain yet? I haven't seen any commercials or public announcements.

Yes.

GEORGE W. BUSH ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN[YT]fqWcgXZaems[/YT]

DICK CHENEY ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN
[YT]YGcM6MPqVM0[/YT]

 

[StrainedEyes]

McCain did just fine on SNL tonight.

"Double Maverick, where I just go bizzerk and freak everybody out." t:

 

[Marx]

McCain did just fine on SNL tonight.

"Double Maverick, where I just go bizzerk and freak everybody out." t:

He's just not funny. Any attempt that he makes feels incredibly forced and fake.

 

[StrainedEyes]

He's just not funny. Any attempt that he makes feels incredibly forced and fake.

I disagree. McCain is a pretty funny guy. All of his SNL appearances have been decent, with notable marks to his out-of-left-field turn as the creepy husband. And his roast speech was better than Obama's.

 

[ChrisBaleBatman]

Which is the problem, isn't it?

The Republicans want us to pay a flat tax....which would be insane.

I mean, the flat tax would HAVE to be low. Very very very low, because if it's too high, nobody's going to pay it...because they won't be able to.

Then again, if the tax is too low...nothing will get done. No schools will be built. No roads will be fixed.

Well....a few might. I'm sure Hollywood stars with hearts would pick up a few tabs...but if we paid a flat tax, the poor would still get screwed.

 

[LostSon88]

He's just not funny. Any attempt that he makes feels incredibly forced and fake.

You didn't find this funny?

[YT]WeocOXQx_iU[/YT]

 

[StrainedEyes]

You didn't find this funny?

[YT]WeocOXQx_iU[/YT]

This is McCain's shining moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhomInJ7Pc
[YT]3lhomInJ7Pc[/YT]

 

[Holiday]

I thought his SNL appearance was sad. They dogged him and Palin hard and he was standing right there! Its not gonna help him get votes either.

 

[StrainedEyes]

I thought his SNL appearance was sad. They dogged him and Palin hard and he was standing right there! Its not gonna help him get votes either.

The point of doing an SNL appearance is to get in on the joke. Unlike Palin, McCain was more than happy to. He was involved in the joke, while Palin just sat there being made fun of.

 

[ChrisBaleBatman]

I dunno, though....I remember the Obama and even the Clinton skits seeming very...eh...political. That is, they'd get THEY'RE message out without giving away any of they're dignity.

Atleast, that's how I remember it. Just seemed...entirely too surreal to see them literally diss McCain and Palin infront of Palin as she bobbed her head.

Funny though. Funny. But I dunno if I'd feel the same way if they were my 'guys', so to speak.

 

[Kurosawa]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/10/31/socialism/index.html

Is Barack Obama a socialist?
If he is, then so is John McCain. But the charge is just a racial dog whistle anyway. Can you say "welfare queen"?

By Michael Lind

Nov. 01, 2008 |

John McCain, struggling to catch up with Barack Obama in the last days of the campaign, has finally found a theme for a campaign that until now has lacked one. He is running for the White House to defend capitalism against socialism. Because Barack Obama in an unguarded moment to Joe the Plumber said he wanted to "spread the wealth," McCain and Palin are painting the senator from Illinois as a "redistributionist" or "redistributor" (they can't decide on the appropriate term), a subversive and sinister figure who is peddling "socialism." It's not enough for McCain to run against Obama as though he were George McGovern. McCain is trying to equate Obama with Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, the socialist candidates for the presidency of yesteryear. Never mind that Jonah Goldberg has spent a couple of years denouncing liberal fascism. Fascists last week, progressives like Obama are now socialists. Which is to say, "commies."

McCain's desperate use of the socialist smear is particularly shameless, given the dubiousness of his own conservative credentials. The left's chant of "McSame" to the contrary, McCain and Rudy Giuliani were the (relative) moderates among the 2008 Republican contenders. Most conservatives in the GOP primaries voted against McCain, who won the nomination only because of the support of moderate Republicans and independents and the mutual annihilation of the real conservatives -- Romney, the business right's candidate, and Huckabee, the religious right's candidate. The radical right can be counted on to know its own. On March 12, 2007, the Club for Growth wrote of McCain, "his overall record is tainted by a naked antipathy towards the free market and individual freedom." Like George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988 and 1992, McCain, the rich and establishmentarian son and grandson of admirals, has had to overcome the suspicion of the Republican base. This dynamic explains the decisions of his campaign, from his choice of right-wing heroine Sarah Palin as his running mate to his charges that Obama is a socialist and redistributionist.

In a country in which substantial numbers believe that space aliens crashed at Roswell, it would be foolish for Obama supporters to let the socialist charge go unanswered. Fortunately, conservative and libertarian heroes like Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and John McCain himself can be called by the Obama team as witnesses for the defense.

McCain and Palin claim that Obama's proposed healthcare system is socialist. It is nothing of the sort. It is a variant of the employer-friendly, insurance-friendly "play-or-pay" scheme discussed in the 1990s. Employers will be given the choice of providing tax-favored health insurance to their employees or being taxed to support a public insurance system. Over time the latter might expand, but for the foreseeable future our dysfunctional private insurance system will survive.

But what if Obama had proposed a single-payer system of "socialized medicine" instead? The bible of free-market libertarians is Friedrich von Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (1946), which, like the other Bible, few acolytes appear to have read. In his masterpiece, von Hayek attacked central planning, but made it clear that his arguments did not apply to government-run healthcare systems like that of postwar Britain.

Another champion of healthcare socialism was the late Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist who popularized free-market fundamentalism in tracts like "Free to Choose." While he favored individual health savings accounts for minor expenses, Friedman proposed that major costs be paid for by mandatory catastrophic healthcare coverage run by the federal government. Ronald Reagan -- yet another socialist like Obama, it appears -- liked this redistributionist idea so much he proposed its enactment.

Milton Friedman's socialism did not end with healthcare. McCain and Palin claim that Obama is a socialist because he supports various refundable tax credits for the poor. A refundable tax credit is a government payment to those who make too little to pay income taxes, in the amount of the credit they could have claimed against their income taxes if they were more affluent. In the 1970s, Friedman pushed the granddaddy of all refundable tax credits, the Negative Income Tax, which would have replaced most in-kind welfare benefits with checks to the poor. Friedman's Negative Income Tax was proposed by that well-known leftist radical Richard Nixon.

The negative income tax went nowhere, but another refundable tax credit became the favorite tool of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in combating poverty -- the earned income tax credit (EITC), which is paid to workers with low wages. Conservative Republicans favor the EITC because it is a subsidy to sleazy low-wage employers. They also believe it averts political pressure for a decent, which is to say much higher, minimum wage. In other words, the EITC so beloved by Reagan and Bush is not only socialism but also corporate welfare.

Obama favors more progressive income and capital gains taxation. In spreading this kind of socialism and redistributionism, he was until recently allied with his fellow member of the U.S. Senate, John Sidney McCain of Arizona. McCain was one of only two Republicans to vote against Bush's 2001 tax cuts and one of only three to vote against his 2003 tax cuts. McCain, sounding suspiciously Bolshevik, explained why: "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the more fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief." What a commie.

Finally, Obama has been attacked by the right for proposing to lift the cap on how much income is subject to the Social Security payroll tax. On July 23, 2005, John McCain, asked by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" whether he could accept lifting the cap on payroll taxation, replied, "As part of a compromise I could ..."

Without exception, all of the policies supported by Obama belong to broad categories of public policies that have been supported, in one form or another, by conservative-libertarian thinkers like Friedman and von Hayek and conservative politicians like Reagan, George W. Bush and McCain himself. The differences between them and Obama are differences of degree, not of kind.

But while this is true it may not matter, if McCain's last-minute clarion call is really a racial "dog whistle." The McCain campaign may appear to be debating public philosophy, when in fact it is making a disguised appeal to white racism. If that is the case, then "redistributionist" and "socialist" may be intended to be understood by white swing voters as code words that function the way that "welfare queen" did for the Reagan campaign. A "socialist" or "redistributionist" is a politician who taxes white people like Joe the Plumber and gives money to ... you know who.

If this is the tactic, then it might be working. The polls are tightening in the final days of the campaign. Should McCain surprise the pundits and pull off a victory, historians may judge that it was because of his desperate insinuation that white people would be taxed to pay for welfare for Latinos and blacks. And if he should lose, conservative operatives planning for the next cycle may decide that this was the right tactic, pursued too late. Whether he wins or loses, by using "socialist" and "redistributionist" in an environment in which they were likely to be interpreted as racially charged smears, John McCain may have damaged not only his reputation but our society.

-- By Michael Lind

It's definately a racial code to a degree. This tactic goes back to Reagan's "welfare queens" idea, which itself was extremely racist, and also extremely effective.

 

[Holiday]

The point of doing an SNL appearance is to get in on the joke. Unlike Palin, McCain was more than happy to. He was involved in the joke, while Palin just sat there being made fun of.

Yes he was in on the jokes and the jokes were embarrassing. It just felt desperate to me.

 

[kane9321]

I liked the "double maverick"...lol it made me laugh

 

[Superman]

The only thing I can say about McCain on SNL was that it was cute. It won't help him but it won't hurt him either.

 

[Bathead]

I keep hearing (especially from McCain's supporters) that if certain things happen, i.e. he wins certain states, etc., McCain coud still win. My question is, is how likely, what are the odds, these "certain things" WILL happen?

 

[SuBe]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8

 

[Holiday]

I keep hearing (especially from McCain's supporters) that if certain things happen, i.e. he wins certain states, etc., McCain coud still win. My question is, is how likely, what are the odds, these "certain things" WILL happen?

According to John King of CNN and his magic map McCain has to win all the toss-up states and take a state from Obama. So the odds are not good to say the least.

 

[Bathead]

Has anyone actually calculated the odds, Vegas-style?

 

[sasquatchs]

fivethirtyeight.com currently has Obama winning in 96.2% of their simulation runs. On election day, alot of places pretend the election would happen at the time of the poll numbers

 

[Nivek]

According to John King of CNN and his magic map McCain has to win all the toss-up states and take a state from Obama. So the odds are not good to say the least.

I live in Florida in the I4 Corridor and drive by an early voting location every day to and back from work, given the line and the demographic of the people waiting for hours, I doubt McCain will win this state. Even if the Governor is a McCain buddy, and it may be close, but Obama is motivating people to vote like I have never seen in any election in my lifetime.

 

[jaguarr]

Has anyone actually calculated the odds, Vegas-style?

Oh, yeah. Here's just one such example:

http://www.bettorsworld.com/presidential-election-betting.htm

There have been several studies that have shown that the bookmaker odds are usually much more reliable when it comes to elections than the polls are.

jag

 

[danoyse]

I liked the "double maverick"...lol it made me laugh

I got a laugh out of the "sad Grandpa" tactic, myself.

 

[Bathead]

Oh, yeah. Here's just one such example:

http://www.bettorsworld.com/presidential-election-betting.htm

There have been several studies that have shown that the bookmaker odds are usually much more reliable when it comes to elections than the polls are.

jag

Not being the betting type, could you explain those numbers? What does the plus or minus before a number mean?

 

[The Senator]

I keep hearing (especially from McCain's supporters) that if certain things happen, i.e. he wins certain states, etc., McCain coud still win. My question is, is how likely, what are the odds, these "certain things" WILL happen?

I give McCain a less than 1% chance of winning. Obama only needs three states to win, assuming he keeps all of the Kerry states: Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico. He has held a double-digit lead in Iowa and New Mexico since the end of September, and has been ahead in Colorado by a significant margin. Virginia is also looking like a solid Obama state.

The ONLY way McCain can stay alive is if he wins Pennsylvania, but McCain hasn't led in that state since May and huge voter turnout in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia will most likely counter the turnout in rural areas he hopes will put him over the top.

 

[jaguarr]

Not being the betting type, could you explain those numbers? What does the plus or minus before a number mean?

The higher the number (which would include anything with a plus sign), the lower the odds are that the correlating candidate would win, thus a higher payout if you bet on them to win and they did. The lower the number (which would include anything with a minus sign), the higher the odds are that the correlating candidate would win, thus a much lower payout if you bet on them to win and they did. All of the betting odds I have seen recently pretty much have Obama having a massive chance of winning the election thus the bookmakers aren't willing to give good odds on him winning because it would mean a higher payout on their part to those who bet on him to win. They're offering higher payouts to those who bet on McCain should he win because the betting trends they're seeing indicate that Obama is the favorite so it's unlikely they'll have to pay out to anyone betting on McCain. The bets placed for or against a candidate tend to dictate the odds. If a bunch of people start betting on Obama, which appears to be the case, then the lower the payout because it's an indicator that the voting trend will be in favor of Obama. Because they aren't getting as much betting action for a McCain win, it's taken as an indicator that the voting trend will also not be in McCain's favor.

jag