The financial "bailout"

Senator John McCain thought it important enough to suspend his campaign and suggest postponing the debate. Senator Barack Obama obviously didn't, so the debate went on, since McCain couldn't just let it go to Obama by default. (If I'd have been in McCain's shoes, I think I'd have sent Gov. Sarah Palin to Mississippi to debate Obama!) But both have apparently signed off on the resulting solution with reservations.


It's clear that the responsibility for following up on this process will extend long beyond Jan. 20, 2009. So the incoming President (and since we do not know who that will be, both Obama and McCain) needed to be involved in these discussions. What could possibly have been on Obama's mind when he first said he wasn't needed, then only came to Washington because President Bush gave him a personal phone call?

Is Barack Obama prepared to take on the responsibilities of the Presidency?

Last night's debate

Barack Obama is supposed to be a great orator — and perhaps he is, when reciting a prepared speech. But last night he began just about every remark with a heming and hawing that shows he cannot think on his feet.

And he seems to forget that his opponent is John McCain, not George Bush — at least he used Bush's name at least as much as he did McCain's. Perhaps he might like to be charged with every mistake of a past Democratic President?

McCain made one great point: The President to be inaugurated in January doesn't have anything to do with how we got where we are (In Iraq, which was the topic being discussed at the time, or in any other matter). He has to determine what we do from this point on, and he cannot rewind the clock and do a "do-over" from 2000.

Obama seems to think that Iraq was a distraction from fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He fails to see the interconnection; perhaps because what he considers important in Iraq is that he was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein's banker, Nadhmi Auchi. We don't want Middle Eastern Arab money controlling our President.

Swiftboating?

Some of the Obama supporters seem worried by the likelihood of being "swiftboated" as John Kerry was 4 years ago. But what does that mean? The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth pointed out things about Kerry that were true, and reflected badly on Kerry. They should have been pointed out. What this meant, though, was that the people were turned away from the issues that Kerry wanted to stress to others, like Kerry's character and honesty, which reflected badly on him.

Obama, similarly, wants to pick and choose the issues that the American people will use as a basis for their votes. He is afraid that they will vote based on his character and trustworthiness, rather than on his issues.

So "swift-boating" isn't such a bad thing, really.

The women supporting Gov. Palin

I see a number of liberal Democrats taking offense at many women's switching to the McCain-Palin ticket after having supported Sen. Hillary Clinton's failed Presidential run. They object that Gov. Palin isn't someone who favors the things that Sen. Clinton did — which is true.


Actually, I have to agree that people should support a candidate based on their political positions and their qualifications, and not just their gender (or race). But I never saw those liberals disavowing the support of those women when it was going to Sen. Clinton. Now, all of a sudden, when this lock-step "support her because she's a woman" attitude turns them away from the Democratic Party and toward a (gasp!) conservative Republican, Sarah Palin, it's something reprehensible to them. And none of them seems to be complaining about the stratospheric levels of African-American support for Barack Obama!


Frankly, if I were campaign manager for McCain-Palin, I'd take all the votes I could get. And not worry about whether they are voting for Palin without studying her ideology. I bet a lot of them supported Hillary Clinton without looking at her ideology.

The Obama-Biden ticket

In 1988, the Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis for President and Lloyd Bentsen for Vice-President. Some people thought Bentsen was a better candidate for the Presidency than Dukakis. Even one member of the Electoral College — the only people who had the ability to do so — voted that way.



This year, it looks as if the Democrats repeated this trick (nominating a ticket with a better-qualified Presidential candidate in the #2 slot). Certainly, at least one Democrat I know thinks so; she was preparing to vote for Biden in the Presidential primary, and would have done so except for a glitch in the notices, so she was given the wrong location for her polling place. (Since Biden had already dropped out, even though he was still on the ballot in this state, she didn't try very hard to find out where her polling place really was.)



But when I asked her whether Biden's presence on the ticket might get her to vote Obama-Biden, she pointed out that it would still be Obama in charge if that ticket won, and she just can't trust him. Right now she's still expecting to vote for McCain-Palin. But it seems likely that had the Democratic ticket been Biden-Obama rather than the other way around, she would have voted that way.

On Sarah Palin

Well, I said I wasn't happy with Sarah Palin as John McCain's choice for a running mate. But it looks like an act of political genius!


McCain's poll numbers are skyrocketing, and Palin seems to be the reason. Conservatives find her someone they can enthuse over, and those women who were supporting Hillary Clinton just because they wanted to see a woman in an important position seem to be flocking to the McCain-Palin ticket. Last figure I saw was that 29% of the people who had supported Hillary Clinton will vote for McCain-Palin; quite a big number considering the political spread between the two!


I still think it undercuts the experience issue. But people see in Sarah Palin what they had been seeing in Barack Obama: a fresh face, someone who might bring about some changes in the Washington establishment. And with Sarah Palin, these characteristics are real— she actually has a record of bringing change in Alaska!


No question that Obama is running scared: How often do we see a presidential candidate deigning to train his rhetorical guns on a vice-presidential candidate? But he has been doing so lately!


It looks as if John McCain made a pretty good decision after all. And making good decisions is really what we elect a President to do.


McCain-Palin in 2008!

Is there really such a thing as "too honorable"?

The September 8 issue of Time magazine has a cover picture of John McCain, with a cover story that seems to imply that he has too much of a sense of honor to be a good President. Seeing this made my eyes blanch in disbelief. Can anyone be too honorable for the Presidency?



It's true that Jimmy Carter had a sense of propriety that went well beyond the usual — the "lust in the heart" quote, for example. But Carter's flaws were not excessive honor; they flowed from naïveté about the way the world works. And I think that McCain's sense of honor poses a refreshing contrast to his opponent's rather dishonorable past. A person who would stab his political mentor in the back, as he did Alice Palmer; a person who would favor a corrupt machine politician, like John Stroger, even against a personal friend (Forrest Claypool); a person who would steer government favors to a corrupt slumlord (Tony Rezko), even while representing a poor constituency in the Illinois State Senate; this is Barack Obama.

I for one say that John McCain's sense of honor is an unalloyed positive.

The McCain-Palin ticket

One thing I'm not going to be accused of is inconsistency. And it would be hard to hide the fact that (as noted in my post of August 1) I've never thought that Sarah Palin would be a good choice for Vice-President. So I'm not going to defend it. I think that Sen. McCain made a mistake. But hardly one that would make me re-think my endorsement of his candidacy.


The choice undercuts the experience theme; Sarah Palin makes Barack Obama seem experienced by comparison. And it was clear that Obama and his Democratic allies would pounce on that; that was hardly a surprise. And obviously they will use this to question McCain's judgment; I've already admitted in my previous post that Obama made a good choice in picking Joe Biden for his running-mate. But one somewhat unfortunate pick is hardly enough to question John McCain's judgment. Look at all the bad judgment calls that Obama has made! (Let me mention William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and John Stroger, just as examples!)

It would appear that the choice of Sarah Palin was made for two reasons: first, to win over disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton (and McCain's ad talking about the Democratic Party's snubbing of Hillary Clinton might have clued me off to this announcement, if I'd read it correctly! But there were really more highly-qualified women, like Carly Fiorina), and second, to reassure conservatives that he was not going to ignore their thoughts. And given those two factors, it was understandable. But that is not the same as saying it was a good choice.

Despite it all, my vote will still be cast for the McCain-Palin ticket in November. But not as happily as if the names on the ballot were McCain-Romney or McCain-Fiorina.

Credit where credit is due!

It seems that Barack Obama actually did something right. So let’s give him proper credit for the decision.


Of all the possible vice-presidential choices, Joe Biden is certainly the best he could have chosen. Oh, Biden is certainly too liberal for me, but there aren’t any moderates highly enough placed in the Democratic Party for one to be the nominee. At least Biden has a lot of experience, and actually has made some statements on foreign policy that make sense.


Though I’ve been taken to task on this comparison, it actually reminds me of the decision in 2000 by George W. Bush to pick Dick Cheney. In both cases, we see a relatively inexperienced candidate (though Bush certainly had more experience than Obama has now) picking a highly qualified and very experienced VP candidate, and also a VP candidate that is certainly not a moderate, but one in his party’s mainstream.


No chance that I’ll come out for Obama — after all, Biden’s really too liberal for my taste anyway — but for Obama, this is a good sign.

McCain's houses

So, the Obama campaign is trying to make some political hay out of the fact that John McCain, who married into a lot of money, could not remember how many houses he and his wife own. It's funny that Barack Obama had no trouble supporting John Kerry, who married into even more money, for the Presidency in 2004.

Yes, McCain is rich. But should that disqualify him for the Presidency? I think not. Whatever you think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (and I am not a fan of his, but most Democrats, I believe, are!) he was also an heir to a lot of money, and I believe that Nelson Rockefeller, whose very last name suggests money, would have made an excellent President.

The real issues in this campaign should be three: Obama's great lack of experience, his radical agenda (which include his political mentors, such as Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers), and his dishonorable character, as evidenced by his treatment of Alice Palmer and his strong backing for the Daley machine in Chicago. There are no other issues that come even close to these in importance.

What "change" means to Barack Obama

We know that the big theme of Barack Obama's campaign is "change." But what really does "change" mean to Obama?

We might get some clues from his first job in Chicago, before he sought political office, working as a "political organizer." He was hired from New York by Gerald Kellman, a political disciple of Saul Alinsky, who was among other things the author of a book entitled Rules for Radicals. Alinsky was an extreme radical, who regularly used the word "change" himself, with the specific meaning of "socialist redistribution of wealth." And of course, Kellman, as Alinsky's disciple, taught Alinsky's ideas to his worker, Barack Obama. (In fact, as can easily be found from such sources as Freddoso's book and this website, Kellman clearly saw Obama as a tool to help reach African-Americans, as his own organization at the time was mostly white and ethnically Jewish. But clearly, Obama was too bright to stay merely a tool.)

Can we doubt that Obama's "change" means anything else? He talks about repealing tax cuts, and instituting more taxes, and it is clear that redistribution of wealth is an idea that resonates with him too. Can we conclude that "change" in an Obama administration could mean anything else?

Jerome Corsi's book on Obama

Recently I recommended David Freddoso's book on Barack Obama. About the same time, Jerome Corsi's book, "The Obama Nation," a pun on "abomination," came out. This book is also worth reading. The two are very different, though.

Freddoso concentrates on recent events, the past 12 years, starting with Alice Palmer. Corsi's covers Obama's whole life. You should read both, though. It is really interesting to see, in Corsi's book, just how Obama can't even tell the truth about his own life story.

This is a man who wants us to trust him with the Presidency of the United States?

Taking a break from election-related posts...

I just saw an interesting book, of which so far I've only read a small part, but which I really like and want to recommend. It is called "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness," by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. The book espouses a political philosophy that the authors call "libertarian paternalism," which can be basically defined as giving the maximum amount of freedom, while encouraging desirable behavior through incentives rather than compulsion. It's a pretty good idea to me.

He has some ideas I like very much — though the one I'm about to mention is one I'd hate to praise too extremely, because it's an idea I had myself several years ago. The authors' idea to solve the problem of disagreement over gay marriage is: Let the government get out of the role of defining marriage entirely, but just provide a sort of civil union or domestic partnership arrangement; let marriage be defined by churches and any other organizations that want to grant status as married, and keep the two separate. Thus if a church wants to deny gay couples the right to marry, they could, but some other church might marry them, and the policies of neither would matter under the law, as the legal status of a couple (same sex or different sex) would depend on a legal contract, which might set up whatever conditions the law and the couple might want to be included. It seems very sensible to me.

More about Barack Obama and his "movement for change"

In the book I recommended Monday, there are lots of great reasons to reject Senator Barack Obama and put your support behind Senator John McCain. Yesterday and the day before I featured one: his unscrupulous, machine-politician methods of eliminating his political mentor, Alice Palmer, and bulldozing his way into the Illinois State Senate. Another proof that Obama is just another corrupt Chicago-machine politician is the way he behaved in a recent election, where, after his election to the Senate, when he might have effected some change if he really wanted to, he could have but refused to, and once more stabbed a friend in the back. It was in an election for President of the County Board back home in the Chicago area.

If you can't go and get the book, at least read about it here, and here, and here.

More about some of the machine corruption which Obama has supported can be found here, too.

Read all about it!

Besides the book I recommended earlier this week, you can read about Barack Obama's gaming the rules in 1996 to stab his erstwhile mentor Alice Palmer in the back...

here, and here, and here, and here...

This is the guy who'll bring change to politics? This is simply a Chicago machine politician!

How Barack Obama got his first elective office

Barack Obama this year has shown that he is a master of gaming the rules to his advantage. It turns out he has been this from the beginning of his political career.

Alice Palmer had been an Illinois State Senator for years. Obama was one of her staff members. It seems that in 1996, the local congressman, Mel Reynolds, got into legal trouble over a charge of having sex with a minor. When he left the Congress, Palmer decided to run for the congressional seat, and Obama was her hand-picked successor.

The only trouble was, after Palmer chose to run for the congressional seat, a certain Jesse Jackson, Jr. chose to run for that same seat. With such a famous name running against her, she finished very poorly, actually coming in third after Jackson and another State Senator. So she decided to go back to her old State Senate seat — the only problem was, Obama wanted it now!

In the ensuing primary, each candidate needed to get a certain number of petition signatures to qualify for the ballot. She needed something over 700 signatures, she filed over 1700; but Obama, as machine politicians often do, managed to get around 1000 of Palmer's signatures voided, enough to rule her off. In addition, he got two other competing candidates disqualified the same way, so Obama ran unopposed. Naturally, he won the seat! (It was a solid Democratic district, so the primary was all he needed to win.)

A machine politician par excellence, Barack Obama used all the nasty tricks that the Daley machine is known for. Naturally, since Daley had thought of Alice Palmer as a rival for power, he was not too unhappy at what Obama did.

Is this person worthy of being President? Hardly.

More about Obama's past to come in later posts.

Book recommendation

If you want to learn more about what kind of politician Barack Obama is, get this book and read it:

"The Case against Barack Obama"

by David Freddoso

This has all the information you need to have: how he schemed to get elected to the Illinois Senate by getting his opponents ruled off the ballot, the story about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and other radical types, etc.

The vice-presidential candidate

Obviously, no choice that John McCain or Barack Obama could make regarding a running mate would be likely to change my support for McCain against Obama. But McCain could make some good choices, or some bad ones, and so here are some points I would like to make.

I had previously said some favorable things about Mitt Romney as a VP nominee. Nothing has changed; Romney would still be one of the better choices. But today I saw a newspaper article saying that McCain is being recommended by some supporters to pick a female VP. Two names were given: Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and Carly Fiorina.

I find the whole idea of picking someone purely on the basis of race or gender as somewhat repugnant, but I recognize that politics can work that way. In any case, however, if McCain does pick a woman, I would hope that it would be someone who is qualified. And while I feel that Palin is not really qualified, Fiorina would be an interesting choice.

To nominate Sarah Palin would be the equivalent of the Democrats' nomination of Geraldine Ferraro some years ago. Ferraro clearly had insufficient experience, and would never have been nominated if it weren't for her gender. (In fact, I'm certain that Barack Obama would never have been nominated this year if it weren't for his race, for the same reason.) Sarah Palin, and Bobby Jindal (another governor being talked about for VP, who would break precedent because of his ethnicity), will, I am sure, be rising stars of the Republican Party, and if they do good jobs in their States' executive mansions, they may well be tapped for high national office in future years. But neither one has been Governor for even a full term; Jindal not even for a year!

Carly Fiorina, in a sense, has even less experience; she has never held any elective or appointive office. But her experience as CEO of a major high-technology corporation is valuable. She's actually run something that is bigger than some States. And I think this gives her some of the same appeal that a Mitt Romney has. I think she'd be a good choice.

Obama dēlendus est!

In the early history of Rome, there was a famous statesman, Marcus Porcius Cato (known as Cato the Elder), who is reputed to have ended every speech with the phrase "Carthagō dēlenda est" ("Carthage must be destroyed"). I'm beginning to feel tempted to end every post with the phrase, "Obama dēlendus est!" (Note the change, appropriate to the masculine subject, which I had planned to make, but which would I'm sure be approved by N. S. Gill, whose blog has a post, "Delenda est" shouldn't be destroyed, about getting the Latin right in using this phrase.)

People have given me many reasons for their support of Obama, just about all of which make me more inclined to oppose him:

1. His steady pursuit of "change," to the point of its becoming the #1 theme of his campaign. There is a lot about this country that I love and do not want to change. Perhaps some things need to be fixed, but I want most things about the U. S. to stay as they are!


2. His popularity in Europe: Well, I'm sorry. One difference between the U. S. and Europe is the great popularity of socialism there. While in this country, even the Democratic Party, which favors a lot of socialistic ideas, denies anyone's characterization of it as a socialist party, in Europe, openly socialist parties thrive. And Obama's extreme-left ideas (endorsed by the New Party, after all!) would (not surprisingly) appeal to socialistically-inclined Europeans (and to those who, though perhaps not socialists themselves, are not as unalterably opposed to socialism as Americans are).


3. This morning someone actually pointed to Obama's being a lawyer as a favorable thing. As if we do not already have enough lawyers in places of high power. One thing about lawyers is that they can argue in favor of anyone and anything, as long as it supports their client; no consideration to whether it's good for their city, state, or nation. That is not the kind of person I want to see leading the country!


4. And of course, people like his youth and vigor. But this goes with a serious inexperience. Hey, four years ago the man was an obscure Illinois State Senator. And now he wants to be President of the United States? Most presidential candidates spend a bit more time as governors, United States Senators, corporate executives, or military leaders before trying for the highest office in the land. Is three years in the U. S. Senate enough? I think not.

I don't really intend to put it in every post between now and November, though I feel as if I should.


Obama dēlendus est!

Obama is for principle -- except when it hurts his cause!

I hope that the people who have been thinking that Barack Obama is any more principled than the average politician have really studied his record in this campaign. He felt that he could not disavow Jeremiah Wright — until he realized that unless he did so, he'd lose a lot of votes who were turned away by Wright's bigotry. He embraced public financing — until he realized that he was bringing in more cash privately than he could publically. Similarly, he favored denial of immunity to ISPs in those surveillance cases — until he realized that there was political risk in doing so, and abandoned his position when it actually came to a Senate vote. So much for principle!