Added on October 6, 2008 at 09:10 Riga time
It is surely fair game to point
out that Obama is a man of the left with the wrong recipes in times of a
financial crisis which may lead to a long recession. However, constructive
ideas how to get out of the crisis are much more important. The American
voter wants solutions. It is a time to counter Obama's flowery slogans of
hope and change with concrete propositions for America's real problems. If
the McCain camp concentrates its energy primarily on negative attacks on
Obama, on character assassination, Americans will vote for Obama on November
4.
Article added on October 6, 2008 at 02:08 Riga time
McCain must stop being angry in debates and on camera in
general. He must look presidential like Obama or he will lose the
presidential election. Americans do not want an angry, ranting president.
Palin's
“palling around with terrorists” attack on Obama was over the
top, the wrong strategy in the election endgame. But later she pointed out
to the truth:
“I think it's fair to talk about where Barack Obama kicked off his political
career, in the guy's living room.” That's not character assassination
anymore.
Although Barack Obama is not a terrorist or believes in terrorism and
although he does not subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the United
States government created the HIV virus to decimate the African-American
population, it is not completely by accident that Obama met people like the
former terrorist Ayers and the ranting pastor Wright. Obama comes from a
left-wing neighborhood. He got elected there because he stood and stands on
the political left. Not an the extreme, radical left, but on the left
nevertheless.
If I was McCain and Palin, I would stress that Obama has no serious
bipartisan record. The cases he brings up were all cases where practically
all Democrats and Republicans agreed on a subject and
therefore it did not need a serious bipartisan effort to get something
passed. John McCain on the other hand stood up when in mattered, notably in
the case of the surge and in the case of torture, to mention just two of
many efforts by the candidate closest to an independent to have a chance to
be elected in generations.
Obama's entire Hope and Change slogan is baseless. In the Senate, he voted
96-97% on party lines. He is a left-winger. His 2004 Convention speech of
bringing the country together - there are no red and no blue states - is
preposterous.
As for the change we need now it is surely not more subsidies and
protectionism, as the Senate votes by Obama suggest. Vote for the free
trader McCain.
Another important argument for McCain is the fact that it is almost certain
that the Democrats will sweep both the Senate and the House. A Democratic
Congress will push a Democratic president to the left. That happened to Bill
Clinton, who was a centrist, unlike the social-democrat Obama, to speak in
European terms.
Obama has strange ideas when it comes to military and foreign policy. He and
Biden were both wrong on the surge. According to Obama's - several times
revised - Iraq plan, the U.S. troops would have been forced to give away the
victory in Iraq, leaving the country to chaos. To put it bluntly, Obama
would have fucked up the end game in Iraq, as did Bush the Elder, who won
the war but decided to leave the dictator in place for reasons of
“stability”, and who watched
Saddam subsequently massacre Shiites in southern Iraq.
The United Nations are a failed institution. The only candidate in the
entire race to come up with a new idea was John McCain with his League of
Democracies. Some details should be discussed, but the idea as such is a
step in the right direction.
When Barack Obama went to Israel, he told the people their that Jerusalem
should remain an undivided Israeli city. He backtracked later. But any
Palestinian who still trusts Obama is a nut. The Democratic candidate
single-handedly comprised his position as a future honest broker in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Repeatedly, Obama told audiences what they wanted to hear, be it in
Israel or in the United States, where he promised subsidies to farmers,
protectionism to workers hit by the
recession. Obama is an overhyped left-wing populist with old ideas that do
not work. That's not change we can believe in or change we need, as he calls
it now.
I was in Berlin when Obama came to the German capital to give a speech in front
of some 200,000 people. A campaign stop on foreign territory by a
presidential candidate who has not achieved anything in his career yet other
than writing a book about himself and giving a speech at a party convention
is odd enough. But Obama also insisted that the people coming to his rally
were not aloud to carry banners, political ads, hold up any kind of
propaganda. He was afraid of anti-Bush and anti-American propaganda, which
would have backfired. The crowd was good enough for his grandstanding in
front of a historic landmark on European soil, but to give the crowd free
speech, the right to express themselves, would have been to much for The
One.
As for the economy, Fannie May and Freddie Mac with their allegedly
affordable mortgages - you just got the $700 billion additional price tag -
was a project dear to Democratic ideologues who have not clue about the
economy, helped by greedy predator lenders, bankers and other fellow
travelers who sold the junk as secure securities.
The Democratic party is about to embark on a social-democratic makeover of
America in times of a financial crisis. Remember the 1930s. The New Deal had
no impact on the economy. It did not improve the financial situation.
Democrats are likely to subsidize larger parts of the economy and to
“protect” the United States from
international competition. That is what happened in the 1930s and led to a
world recession.
The situation is already critical enough, with British, French and now
German banks being nationalized.
The McCain campaign does not have to make up issues, to go into character
assassination. The facts speak for themselves. Point out to what he actually
did and said and to what Hillary Clinton and others said about him.
Added on October 6, 2008 at 02:36
Riga time:
AP gets it wrong. Because Obama was eight when Ayers was a terrorist, it was
incorrect by AP to quote Obama's strategist David
Axelrod, who told Politico in February:
“Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids
attend the same school. They're certainly friendly, they know each other, as
anyone whose kids go to school together.”
AP should have questioned this statement too. Ayers' children are much older
and out of school, therefore not at the same school as Obama's children. As
for the Ayers-Obama connection, Obama has clearly played down their
relation, e.g. on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge school project. Despite
the NYT article, it remains possible that Ayers had something to do with
Obama being appointed to the Annenberg Challenge.
Let's be clear, all that still does not make Obama embrace Ayers' radical
ideas.
