October 3, 2008

Exclusive: Friday, October 3

Presidential Watch

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Time for McCain to Name Names

C. Edmund Wright, American Thinker.com

There is but one issue in the 2008 election. The economy. Or more to the point, the economic meltdown. Whoever wins this debate will win the election. Or perhaps more accurately, whoever loses this debate will lose the election. Period.

When folks are this angry, there is hell to pay and "hell to pay" includes figuring out who to blame. For all of McCain's wanting to stay "above the fray" and his too-clever-by-half comment that now is not the time to assign blame, he is not hearing the public. It is indeed time to assign blame. With this kind of financial destruction on the part of most American families, someone is going to get blamed. You can count on it.

Let me repeat. Someone will get blamed. You will either enter that debate or you will lose that debate. Period.

The good news for McCain, should he decide to grasp it, is that the party against which he is (supposed to be) running can easily be pegged with the lion's share of the blame regarding our economic meltdown. There is no doubt that liberal policies on energy and housing have combined to put the country in this situation, and only unwinding these policies will lead the nation out of this problem. Naming names properly will name a whole lot of folks with "D" beside their names. Read article.

Time is Running Out

Victor Davis Hanson, Pajamas Media.com

Obama's constant deference to McCain as in "John is right..."; the worried side-looks over at McCain, who, in contrast, addressed the audience; and the desire for false intimacy (employing "John" instead of "Sen. McCain") reflected the relative lack of gravitas on Obama's part-something that transcends education, eloquence, and youthful vigor.

The most liberal presidential candidate in our memory is suddenly posing as a moderate centrist not much different from McCain (e.g., "I agree with John..." ad nauseam). And McCain thus far has not been able to scratch the thin veneer. Had Palin once worked in community organizing with a Timothy McVeigh, or had McCain been the member of a white supremacist church for 20 years, or had McCain been judged the most conservative member of the Senate, the McCain-Palin ticket would have long ago imploded.

Did the McCain debate victory matter? Yes, it helped, but time is running out and the economy is trumping the campaign battlefield.

In the next two debates, McCain has to hit Obama harder on his past and rattle him. Or barring that, the proposed settlement will have to improve markets and stop talks of the Great Depression. The voters want to tilt McCain, but the last 10 days have been framed (in part accurately) as hyper-capitalism, greed, and wildly unregulated free markets hurt Middle America-and that narrative has cost (unfairly) McCain, who wanted to regulate Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac more than did any Senate Democrat, in aggregate about six points in the polls.

The irony is that the basics of the US economy-demography, productivity, innovation, infrastructure, legal structures, and higher education-are, as McCain said, sound. They are in far better shape than anywhere abroad. Read article.

McCain Needs to Get His Campaign Back on Track

Dick Morris, Vote.com

John McCain isn't dead in the water. But he sure is dying. He lost the debate and the polls are dismal. Gallup has him down 50-42. Rasmussen has Obama ahead 50-44. And both polls are only partially after the debate. Obama won the debate. When the polls come in fully after the debate, the picture won't get any prettier for those of us who favor McCain.

His gambit of suspending his campaign and going to Washington has failed because he did not think it through adequately or correlate it with what was happening in Congress. The Republicans teed up a perfect shot for him. He took the bat but went back to the dugout without even swinging. McCain should have gone into the debate challenging Obama on his $700 billion taxpayer bailout of financial institutions. He should have pushed the Republican alternative. He could have said, plain and simple, that Obama wants to make Americans pay for $700 billion in bad mortgages and McCain wants to make businesses pay for their own bailout through loans and insurance premiums. It would have been a straight shot. But McCain copped out and mumbled something about the deal being the "end of the beginning" and said he hoped to vote for the bailout. It was a failure that may have cost him his best shot at the presidency.

But not his only shot. McCain can still win. Read article.

McCain's Uphill Battle

Peter Wehner, Commentary Magazine.com

The last few weeks have been quite damaging for McCain. For one thing, this period has acted as an unfortunate circuit breaker. Senator McCain came out of his convention with a blast, achieving the first real lead in the polls. That bounce was almost certainly artificial, but it was something to build on. What the crisis in the financial system did was to dramatically shift the election debate onto terrain that is more favorable to Obama.

What compounded the problem is that McCain's actions during that period - when his early responses seemed all over the lot and later, when his gamble to temporarily halt his campaign and postpone the debate if no deal was reached didn't work - have damaged him further. It also seemed to me that McCain's criticism of SEC Chairman Christopher Cox was symptomatic of a larger failure, which was to explain to voters the key role Democrats played in blocking necessary reforms, backed by both McCain and President Bush, of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. This allowed the history of the crisis to be presented in a way that was very incomplete and far too generous to Democrats. Read article.

Pinning the Tail on the Donkey

David Limbaugh, David Limbaugh.com

But McCain's first order of business must be to address the financial crisis head-on -- instead of in generalities, as both he and Obama did in round one.

McCain should not consider this a problem but a softball served up by recent history and the comparative behavior of the two political parties and the two presidential candidates that he must knock out of the park. If McCain is willing to hit Obama in the gut with the full truth about the genesis of the crisis, he could emerge from the next debate as the clear favorite.

McCain's opportunity here is even richer when you consider that on this matter, despite his scant political record, Obama has very dirty hands. He cannot be allowed to pretend to have been a bystander when it's incontrovertible that the policies leading to this crisis were vintage Obama. The people who caused it are Obama's political allies and close friends.

McCain must take the gloves off -- as he did after Obama made the mistake of showing his nasty, haughty and condescending side in the first debate -- and place the blame for this mess squarely at the Democrats' and Obama's door.

As you've surely heard by now, much of the ammunition he needs is contained in a well-done YouTube video showing the congressional Republicans' efforts in 2004 to rein in Freddie and Fannie and the Democrats' thwarting of those efforts. Read article.

Subversives for Obama

Melanie Phillips, Spectator.co.uk

There are two American election campaigns currently running. The first, in the mainstream media, accepts Barack Obama at face value, no questions asked, while it viciously turns over Sarah Palin and her family whom it subjects to lies, smears and character assassination. The second, being conducted in the blogosphere and (with one or two notable exceptions such as the Wall Street Journal) not alluded to at all by the mainstream media, is the site of verbal warfare between Camp Obama and bloggers who are practising journalism as it used to be practised - going behind the propaganda to dig out information and asking questions about it.

The blogosphere is not only rebutting the Palin lies but also piling up the most disturbing revelations about Obama's background and associations -- compounded by the troubling manner in which Camp Obama responds to these discoveries.

A few months ago, a claim was made by former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton that Obama had been funded through Harvard law school by Khalid Al-Mansour, a ‘mentor' to the founders of the Black Panther party and advisor to ‘one of the world's richest men,' Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal. It was Prince Alwaleed whose $10 million check to help rebuild Manhattan after 9/11 was refused by New York mayor Rudy Guiliani because the Saudi prince hinted publicly that America's pro-Israel policies were to blame for the attacks. Read article.

Guilty Party - ACORN, Obama, and the mortgage mess.

Mona Charen, NRO.com

The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and "direct action" that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn't get tenure at universities wound up. That the bill-writing Democrats remembered their pet clients during such an emergency speaks volumes. This attempted gift to ACORN (stripped out of the bill after outraged howls from Republicans) demonstrates how little Democrats understand about what caused the mess we're in. Read article.

Obama Supreme Court Candidate Deval Patrick

Ed Whelan, NRO.com

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is another highly touted contender for a Supreme Court appointment by a President Obama. As the Boston Globe reported two months ago in an article entitled "Speculation swirls around a Patrick appointment":

Legal blogs have been spreading Patrick's name as a potential Supreme Court pick for at least a year. In recent months, both The New York Times and The Washington Post have mentioned Patrick either first or second in stories handicapping potential Obama high-court nominees.

Deval Patrick has made his mark on the law in the field of racial preferences. Let's take a look at his remarkable record: Read article.

Barack Obama's team believes he can win by a landslide

Tim Shipman, Telegraph.co.uk

Barack Obama's senior aides believe he is on course for a landslide election victory over John McCain and will comfortably exceed most current predictions in the race for the White House.

Their optimism, which is said to be shared by the Democratic candidate himself, is based on information from private polling and on faith in the powerful political organisation he has built in the key swing states.

Insiders say that Mr Obama's apparent calm through an unusually turbulent election season is because he believes that his strength among first time voters in several key states has been underestimated, both by the media and by the Republican Party. Read article.

An ACORN Falls from the Tree

Ken Blackwell, Townhall.com

As negotiations over Congress's emergency rescue bill continued over the weekend, repeated rumors leaked out that the Democrats were trying to funnel money to a hyper-partisan organization involved in criminal voter fraud. I'm speaking of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - known by its acronym, ACORN. Although ACORN was cut from the final legislation, it's important to understand this organization and its long history with, of all people, Barack Obama. And it's important to see how partisan this emergency legislation has become.

As the weekend progressed, reports were constantly emerging of the sticking points preventing a final agreement. One of these reputed points of contention was whether 20 percent of the profit proceedings for asset sales in the future would go to what is called the Housing Trust Fund, subsidizing certain groups for ostensibly nonpartisan activity. One of these groups that this trust supports is ACORN. Read article.

Financial Affirmative Action

Matthew Vadum, Spectator.org

Activist groups were encouraged to agitate by the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act, which enshrined in law a kind of lending protection racket. Banking regulators were given the power to make trouble for banks that failed to lend enough money to so-called underserved communities. Banks that paid enough -- whatever that means -- got left alone, but banks that didn't, got their legs broken.

After CRA came into effect, Saul Alinsky-inspired "community organizer" groups such as Greenlining, ACORN, and National Council of La Raza got into the shakedown business. They preach the hateful class-warfare rhetoric of their fellow community organizers Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Michael Pfleger.

They rage against capitalism and demand crushing taxes and aggressive wealth-redistribution programs. They demand more government spending on social programs, a higher minimum wage, and gun control. Depending which way the economic wind is blowing, they demand more subprime lending, or curbs on subprime lending, which through the magic of dysphemism, is linguistically transformed into "predatory lending." Read article.

Plenty of Questions Still Remain in This Bifurcated Election

Stuart Rothenberg, RCP.com

Is the presidential race opening up for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), or is GOP Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in the middle of a comeback even as analysts note that the financial crisis is hurting the GOP?

Are Democratic House and Senate candidates getting a bounce because of the crisis, or are Republican numbers on ballot tests around the country relatively steady?

There is so much contradictory data out there - some of it seemingly illogical based on the recent news - that it's hard to know what to believe.

But there are some things about this election cycle that now appear crystal clear. First, the Republican brand remains damaged. The most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed voters had a much more favorable view of the Democratic Party than the GOP, and the Republicans trail in both party identification and the generic ballot nationally. Any uptick in the public's attitude toward the GOP after the party's convention has now disappeared. Read article.

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