Why Obama isn't the man for the White House and Why McCain-Palin will Lose

[dnalexander]

Why Obama isn't the man for the White House and Why McCain-Palin will Lose



Why Obama isn't the man for the White House

Debra J. Saunders

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Barack Obama has waged a brilliant, disciplined campaign for the White House. To the extent that Obama's campaign demonstrates his strategic and organizational abilities, the junior Illinois senator has the potential to be a great leader. The son of a Kenyan father who came to Hawaii for a university education, Obama can claim a personal story that makes him, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell put it, "a transformational figure" in American politics.

Having opposed the war in Iraq before it began, Obama never had to gin up phony excuses for voting to authorize the use of military force in Iraq - as did four of his Democratic primary election opponents, including his running mate Joe Biden. He had the cleanest slate of all the Democratic presidential hopefuls, and thus appeared as the candidate most consistent with his party's values.

Yes, he is impressive, but here are my problems with Barack Obama:

Taxes. During the last presidential debate with GOP opponent John McCain, Obama repeatedly claimed that under his plan, the rich would pay "a little more" in taxes.

A little more? Obama has proposed increasing the top tax rate to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. He also has talked about extending Social Security taxes on those with incomes above $250,000. The Tax Policy Center noted that if Obama carried through on the idea, which is not included in his official plan, "the proposal could raise effective tax rates on labor income for high earners above 52 percent (and more than 55 percent for residents of states with high income taxes such as California)."

The Tax Policy Center also estimates that, under Plan Obama, 49 percent of Americans will not pay federal income taxes. So when Obama talks up his plan to send a $500 to $1,000 "rebate" to American taxpayers, he is talking welfare. And if half of American voters don't pay income taxes, then what is to stop them from raising taxes on the half that does? So much for Obama's 30-minute television commercial calling for a "new era of responsibility."

Iraq. When Obama talks about Iraq, he usually focuses on the $10 billion spent in Iraq each month that could go to domestic spending, not on the more than 4,100 U.S. troops who have made the ultimate sacrifice on foreign soil. Will Obama decide that he can leave Iraq even if it collapses - then wash his hands and toss the blame to George W. Bush, as he has done for the last two years?

Afghanistan. Then how much support will there be for the war in Afghanistan when costs $5 billion a month?

He's no moderate. In 2005, Obama could have joined the Gang of 14 - the group of seven Democrats and seven Republicans (including McCain) who worked out a compromise to successfully limit judicial filibusters - but he didn't. In his memoir, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama explained his decision thus: "Given the profiles of some of the judges involved, it was hard to see what judicial nominee might be so much worse as to constitute an 'extraordinary circumstance' worthy of filibuster." Moderate? Hardly. Obama even voted opposite 78 senators who confirmed the nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts.

Results don't matter. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002. The challenge spent some $49 million to reform Chicago public schools - with nothing to show for it. According to 2003 audit, "There were no statistically significant differences between Annenberg schools and non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain."

In his first memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama writes about his days as a community organizer and of his efforts to fight inner-city crime and improve public housing. He barely addresses whether a project met its stated goal of reducing crime or improving housing. To him, the effort worked if participants felt good about being organized.

The pander problem. You see it in his call for a 90-day moratorium on housing foreclosures - which he rightly scoffed when Hillary Rodham Clinton first proposed it. Sounds good - Who cares if it works? Ditto his promised 5 million "green collar" jobs.

One-party rule. With Democrats running the House and Senate, an Obama White House threatens to bust the budget, just as one party-rule bloated federal spending from 2001-2006 with Republicans in charge of both Congress and the executive branch. Already Obama's proposed stimulus package has grown from $60 billion to $175 billion, while D.C. Democrats now are talking about $300 billion package. See what happens if he is elected.

To comment, e-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.



Why McCain-Palin will lose

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post Writers Group

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Probably, John McCain and Sarah Palin will lose this election. Certainly, they deserve to.

With a campaign designed more to play on insecurities than promote ideas, McCain and Palin have practically framed Barack Obama's "closing argument" for him. "The question in this election is not 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' " Obama told an audience Monday in Canton, Ohio. "We know the answer to that. The real question is 'Will this country be better off four years from now?' "

The Republicans don't even try to formulate an answer, and with Obama's lead growing by the day, it's hard to imagine what might turn things around. An "October surprise" international incident might end up working against McCain rather than for him, given his all-over-the-map reaction to the financial crisis. The vaunted Republican get-out-the-vote machine looks almost puny beside Obama's next-generation juggernaut.

There's always race, of course, and we can't say with certainty whether there's some huge, hidden racist vote out there just waiting to emerge Tuesday. My hunch is that race is already factored into the poll numbers - that it has already been "discounted by the market," to use the financial jargon that's so fashionable these days. I believe that race is a subtext of Republican attack words such as "dangerous" or "socialist," and that it's the real target of the attempt to paint Obama as unknown, mysterious, exotic and somehow alien. My guess is that voters who are responsive to this kind of coded appeal have already responded.

So we're not likely to see some kind of deus ex machina salvation for McCain, Palin and their down-ticket allies, and that's as it should be. It's not just that they have run a weirdly erratic campaign, bitingly sarcastic one minute, earnestly serious the next, uncertain whether to present McCain as a serious, experienced statesman or a hyper-caffeinated, overeager publicist for Joe the Plumber. It's not just that Palin, and let's be honest, should never have been allowed anywhere near the ticket - and certainly not anywhere near those frocks from Saks and Neiman Marcus.

More damning is the fact that at a time when it could hardly be more obvious that Americans desperately want to change direction - more than 80 percent tell pollsters the country is on the wrong track - the Republicans offer nothing new.

That's a shame. McCain's repeated references to "maverick" have drained all meaning from the word, but it's true that he's an iconoclast with little reverence for Republican orthodoxy. Why he chose, in an election that was always going to be decided by independents and Reagan Democrats, to campaign on a platform of slavish devotion to Republican orthodoxy is beyond me.

On the economy, McCain offers some relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, but only within a context of classic Republican trickle-down economics. He wants to lower taxes on business and rejects Obama's plan - raise income taxes for the wealthy and lower them for the middle class - as rampant socialism. If you set aside the incendiary rhetoric about class warfare that McCain and Palin have been tossing around, basically what they propose is staying the course that brought us to this point of global crisis.

McCain makes much of wanting to get rid of congressional earmarks; everybody wants to get rid of earmarks, except the one that benefits my community or my industry. He proposes an across-the-board spending freeze - during a recession? - and then, in the next breath, proposes new spending. He overestimates the voters' tolerance for incoherence.

On foreign policy, once the centerpiece of McCain's campaign but now mostly an afterthought, McCain promises "victory" in Iraq and Afghanistan without telling war-weary voters how much more time, money or blood he will spend.

In choosing a running mate, McCain made absolute mockery of his "country first" slogan and instead put politics above all other considerations. It suffices to note that the Anchorage Daily News - the biggest newspaper in Palin's state - endorsed Obama, saying that Palin was being stretched "beyond her range" and that she clearly is not ready to be "one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world."

It's hard to imagine that a McCain presidency could possibly be as scattered, irresponsible, uninspiring and intellectually bankrupt as the McCain campaign. It's even harder to imagine that Americans, at this crucial juncture, will take that risk.

To comment, e-mail Eugene Robinson at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.