Yeah.  He just said “my fellow prisoners.”

You know, with all this talk about Ayers and McCain going nuclear-negative the past couple of days, this debate really was sort of anti-climactic.  In fact, it was kind of weird for John McCain to not pull out any sort of new direction in this debate.  It was still all about spending cuts and earmark reform.  So what’s the deal?

McCain’s pretty much in a rough spot.  He can’t seem to figure out how to work this thing.  He ran for president so that he could be commander-in-chief, and now he finds himself smack dab in the middle of an economic crisis that he has no solutions for, and is not very well-versed on.  In fact, I think we’ll look back on this and find that there really wasn’t anything special about McCain at all, other than McCain™ (the brand).  He seems to always answer every question, not with specifics, but with either “I will solve this by reaching across the aisle…maverick…didn’t win miss congeniality…” or, inexplicably, “I know how to ________” or “look at my record.”  I mean, look at this BS answer on Social Security:

Social Security is not that tough. We know what the problems are, my friends, and we know what the fixes are. We’ve got to sit down together across the table. It’s been done before.

I saw it done with our — our wonderful Ronald Reagan, a conservative from California, and the liberal Democrat Tip O’Neill from Massachusetts. That’s what we need more of, and that’s what I’ve done in Washington.

Sen. Obama has never taken on his party leaders on a single major issue. I’ve taken them on. I’m not too popular sometimes with my own party, much less his.

It goes without saying that there’s no there there.  So McCain has to try to balance McCain™ with negative campaigning, which would seriously damage the brand.  We’ve already seen it happen.  McCain effectively lost his “base” over the summer, when he launched the first of his ridiculous and dishonest attack ads.  (On a side note, I want to know why the kindergarten sex-ed ad is the poster child for McCain’s sleazy tactics.  His Obama-won’t-visit-the-troops-without-the-media ad was much sleazier, and way more dishonest.)  So what’s poor McCain to do?

That’s a good question, and it has a lot of conservative bloggers befuddled at the moment.  I don’t think there’s a way out.  I mean, yeah, you can trot Palin out there to repeat her “palling around with terrorists” refrain, but how much longer will a bored media cover this non-story?

This thing is over.  And I think everyone is starting to realize it:

We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case [...]

Great.  Memo to McCain Campaign:  Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn’t; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he’s qualified for public office.  You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.

If that’s what the public thinks, good luck trying to win this thing.

With due respect, I think tonight was a disaster for our side.  I’m dumbfounded that no one else seems to think so.  Obama did everything he needed to do, McCain did nothing he needed to do.  What am I missing?

Absolutely nothing.

Yglesias gets pissed at the CW that since we’re in a financial crisis, there’s an urgent need to cut federal spending and reduce the deficit:

This is ludicrous. You need to respond to a downturn with expansionary policies of some kind. In recent decades, we’ve preferred relying on expansionary monetary policy (Fed interest rate cuts) rather than Keynesian deficit spending. But at the moment, there’s no real room left for the Fed to cut rates. That means you need deficit spending. Among other things, the nature of state and local budgets means that a contraction in the economy will naturally lead to a contraction in state and local spending. That will lead to further contraction in the economy. If the federal government did what Scherer’s suggesting and added its own cutbacks to state government cutbacks, local government cutbacks, and private sector cutbacks that would only deepen the recession.

Now is the time for some really big infrastructure improvements (internet fiber, mass transit, high-speed rail), which will create jobs and pump millions of dollars straight back into the economy.  Also, state governments are facing budget shortfalls across the nation, and municipalities are having trouble raising money because no one is buying their bonds, due to the credit crunch.  We need more aid for states and local governments to keep our cops on the street and make sure that local healthcare initiatives stay afloat.

Btw, I think Barack Obama did well tonight by pivoting questions like these back to McCain’s tax plan (although he tended to muddle the wording).  In a time of crisis, it’s ridiculously unpalatable to advocate huge, expensive tax cuts to the wealthy when that money could be much better spent creating jobs for the middle class.

But then again, when you advocate a spending freeze in the middle of a recession, you should automatically be excluded from the debate.

BarbinMD writes:

A supporter calls Obama a terrorist and McCain says nothing. Not that McCain should have been surprised, given that his campaign has been pushing the terrorist card in a last ditch effort to save his failing campaign. But it does say a lot about his lack of character that he doesn’t have the guts to confront hate face-to-face.

Here’s the video:

Now let me make this very clear, I am in no way condoning McCain’s recent attacks, as they clearly have the undertones of Barack-Obama-is-not-like-you, which is despicable in its own right.  But to pretend like McCain is responsible for the things that get yelled out at his rallies is kind of absurd.  And it’s also not very fair to say that McCain implicitly condoned this by not saying anything in response.  Look at his face after the guy yells it out:

That’s a microexpression.  And if you read it, it’s an expression of confusion and dismissal.  This is clealry not the response McCain had anticipated, and I feel like it’s safe to say he wasn’t condoning this.  What McCain is trying to push with this “otherness” attack isn’t the Barack-Obama-is-a-muslim attack (although that’s a nice fringe benefit), it’s the Barack-Obama-is-an-elitist-America-hater attack, which is again, completely ludicrous.

Look, there’s plenty of real issues to attack McCain with.  Let’s stick to the substance, please.

Turns out to be just about all of them:

AS THE financial crisis pushes the economy back to the top of voters’ concerns, Barack Obama is starting to open up a clear lead over John McCain in the opinion polls. But among those who study economics for a living, Mr Obama’s lead is much more commanding. A survey of academic economists by The Economist finds the majority—at times by overwhelming margins—believe Mr Obama has the superior economic plan, a firmer grasp of economics and will appoint better economic advisers.

The graphic from the article is pretty stark:

Now, this poll wasn’t scientific, but the Economist is a fairly conservative (well, European-conservative) publication.  It’s interesting to point out the relatively few self-identified Republicans in the sub-sample.  Are economists unlikely to be conservatives, or do they just not respond to a conservative publication when they send out surveys?  I’d bet on the former.  In fact, i’d be willing to bet that you won’t find too many economists that are market absolutists.

[Via ObWi]

A documentary on the McCain campaign and the whole Keating “fraud”

Watching it now. Posting ahead of time. Official Obama campaign video

Man, Obama is just so naive.  I mean everybody knew it was a failed state.  Except maybe the US ambassador to Pakistan during the takeover, William Milan Milam, and a bunch of other experts on the subject:

There are a number of interesting books, including a forthcoming one by me, that cover the 1999 coup by the Musharraf-led army. You might want to look at those already published by Steve Cohen, Hasan Abbas, Hussain Haqqani (long before he became the present Pakistani Ambassador), and especially Ian Talbot’s updated history of Pakistan.

I think that all of them would agree that, while there were a lot of things wrong in Pakistan during the years leading up to the 1999 military takeover, Pakistan was not a failed state as we normally define such states. I am on record as stating publicly that, having come to Pakistan from Liberia a year before the takeover, I had a pretty good idea of what failed states look like, and it was not one.

I guess there’s a lot of people that just don’t understand.

Alright, let’s break this one down.

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I’ll be looking for my check in the mail from the Obama campaign…

The truth comes out:

According to CNN, McCain’s camp is now proposing that the debate be postponed by moving it to into the time and venue of the vice presidential debate, scheduled for Oct. 2nd in St. Louis. The Biden-Palin debate would then be itself rescheduled to happen later on.

So, that’d be delaying two debates, not just one. And what are the odds that the vice presidential debate would manage to somehow never get rescheduled, given the McCain camp’s intensive efforts to keep her away from reporters and questioners?

I guess those cram sessions with Joe Lieberman aren’t going so well…

Our friend Chris showed me this, I found it hilarious.

The one thing that pushes my “InstaPissed” button faster than anything is when an undecided voter pulls the “haven’t heard any specifics” line.  I just have no patience for these people, because they are clearly just attempting make an intellectual excuse for their own laziness and lack of interest.  They don’t want to tip their hand that they haven’t read a damn thing about either candidate all year, and are basing their entire opinion of each candidate on the 30 minutes per week they watch of the babble coming from Wolf Blitzer’s mouth.  So, quit giving me the cop out of “lack of specifics.”  Not sure if these people know, but there’s this thing called the internet, and if you can spare the 30 minutes or so that you would have spent watching re-runs of the Dog Whisperer, you might just find out a few those “specifics.”

The one issue that frustrates me the most with this kind of discussion is the current financial crisis.  People still seem to think that neither candidate has given any specifics on how to deal with these issues.  In fact, John McCain is counting on the fact that people haven’t been paying attention.  He’s counting on the fact that you didn’t hear him calling for more deregulation back in March.  He’s counting on you not knowing that his “former” economics advisor championed most of the deregulation that got us into this mess.  He’s counting on the fact that you might think that John McCain is actually interested in doing something productive to prevent a mess like this from happening again.

So for the last time, if anyone ever says that they “haven’t heard any specifics” on the current financial meltdown then they might be right, as long as they’re talking about John McCain.

On the other hand, hit the jump to find out what Barack Obama said in March.

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From the St. Petersburg Times:

Five weeks ago, the St. Petersburg Times convened a group of Tampa Bay voters who were undecided about the presidential election. Their strong distrust of Barack Obama suggested it was a group ripe for John McCain to win over.

Not anymore. The group has swung dramatically, if unenthusiastically, toward Democrat Obama. Most of them this week cited the same reason: Sarah Palin.

I feel good about Florida.  I really do.  It doesn’t look good on the surface, but I’ve got a gut feeling that we’ll flip it this year.  Which is good, because I have a real bad feeling about Michigan.  I don’t think they’ve ever shaken the race riots of ’67 from their heads.

You know, looking back on this, Romney may have actually been a solid choice for McCain.  With the Wall St. meltdown, you get his economic chops, and he may have been enough to solidly flip MI into McCain’s column, forcing Obama to play some serious offense in a different state to make up those 17 EVs.

ZING!  I love it when he does the “Come on!”  It just screams “this is absurd.”  And it is.  It’s absolutely absurd for John McCain to even be talking about this with outrage, because the same guy that wrote McCain’s economic policy (who has since quit being an official “advisor” after he called us all “whiners”) was a principle engineer of this entire mess: Phil Gramm.  Phil Gramm is a former Senator from Texas, former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and one of the principle writers of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.  This act fully repealed the then-already-slightly-repealed Glass-Steagal Act.

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More of this please…