John Warren, PilotOnline.com

 

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain today compared Democrat Barack Obama's economic plans to those of Depression-era President Herbert Hoover and declared that he is the candidate who can fix the nation's ailing economy.

 

McCain and running mate Sarah Palin took the stage at the Virginia Beach Convention Center to the theme from "Rocky" and enthusiastic cheers from the audience for their first joint appearance in Hampton Roads.

 

McCain sought to spur his supporters to action, warning them that he is behind in the polls and claiming that Obama is "measuring the drapes" in the White House.

 

But many of those attending the rally were inclined to distrust polls showing Obama leading. Read article.

 

William Kristol, NY Times.com

 

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

 

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.

 

He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless — and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.

 

But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership. Read article.

Melanie Phillips, Spectator.co.uk

 

Obama is twisting and turning over his relationship with unreprentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, trying to pretend it didn’t amount to anything other than a chance acquaintance. But his story becomes ever more preposterous.

 

First, his spokesman David Axelrod said Obama didn’t know about Ayers’s past when he met him.

 

The idea that Obama didn’t know about Ayers’s past is absurd. He would have to have been living on Mars not to know. The Weather Undergound was notorious and received huge publicity in the media.

 

The key point about the relationship with Ayers is that Obama’s own actions as a member of the Annenberg board were in concert with Ayers’ subversive world-view. Indeed, even more explosive new evidence is emerging about Obama’s links with the New Party, a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left by ‘burrowing from within’. Read article.

Michael Barone, Raasmussen Reports.com

 

"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors," Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. "I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face." Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people's faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

 

That's what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign emails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago -- papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

 

Obama fans jammed WGN's phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg's example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One. Read article.

 

Byron York, NRO.com

 

After escaping prosecution, Bill Ayers famously said of himself, "Guilty as hell, free as a bird — it's a great country." But he's not going to press his luck. So he says he doesn't remember. His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, has memory problems, too.

 

If you haven't watched it, I would recommend you look at the Oscar-nominated 2004 documentary Weather Underground, available (cut into nine parts) on YouTube. In it, another of Ayers' fellow Weathermen, Brian Flanagan, says:

 

I'm not going to tell you, "Oh, I walked in here this day and put a bomb here, or I made this here, or I blew up this car, or I held up this bank." I mean, there were armed robberies, terrorism, all kinds of things that went down that were illegal. So I'll tell you that we did them, but I'm not going to tell you which ones I did or who did what, because you just can't do that…

 

To repent, you have to confess your wrongdoing. To be unrepentant, you have to acknowledge your actions and still maintain that you did the right thing. But to avoid prosecution, you have to duck the question altogether. That's what Ayers is doing. In a sense, he's still on the lam. Which might make Obama's situation even worse. Read article.

 

Mark Steyn, OC Register.com

 

Speaking personally, I'm not looking for a messiah in the White House. My favorite presidential heritage site is the Coolidge homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vt.: I have seen the mausoleums of mighty kings, but none compares with the row of headstones on a snowbound hillside cemetery, seven generations of Coolidges lined up in a row, all buried under simple, bald granite markers with only an all but imperceptible small American eagle to distinguish the 30th president from his forebears and descendants. The American ideal: the citizen-president.

 

Or so I always assumed. But let's be bipartisan here. If I were a Democrat, I'd salute Harry S. Truman, the Missouri haberdasher. The Republican candidate's tragedy in this election is that he's chosen to fight on Obama turf, to share so many of his assumptions. At a McCain rally in Wisconsin, a fellow in the crowd announced he was mad as hell and got a standing ovation. What was he mad about"? Obama, Pelosi and "the socialists taking over our country." McCain listened politely and then pledged to get back to Washington to reach across the aisle to work on some gargantuan bipartisan cure-all. Not the answer that chap wanted to hear, I'll wager.

 

If the more frightening polls are correct, America is about to elect the most left-wing government in history: an Obama Oval Office, a Pelosi House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof Senate … and a year or two down the road maybe three new Supreme Court justices. It would be a transformational administration that would start building (in Michelle Obama's words) "the world as it should be." That big empty hole in the heart of the Obama logo will not stay blank for long. Read article.

Washington Times.com

 

By 2013 Barack Obama would outspend John McCain by at least $27 billion and as much as $119 billion, according to a new analysis of their tax and spending proposals.

 

McCain would cut taxes more than Obama, but would make deeper spending cuts, too, leaving him less in the red, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, headed by a former top Clinton administration official and former Republican congressman.

 

The projected deficit for 2013 is already $147 billion, so both men would leave the country in poor fiscal shape.

 

The most surprising thing about the analysis is how close the candidates' proposals are by 2013: McCain's gradual reduction of troops in Iraq ends up saving nearly as much as Obama's faster pullout. Read article.

 

Kimberley A. Strassel, OnlineWSJ.com

 

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world's most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder. A thing of awe. Just watch him defy politics, economics, even gravity! (And hold your applause until the end, please.)

 

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% of American working families a tax cut, even though 40% of Americans today don't pay income taxes! How can our star enact such mathemagic? How can he "cut" zero? Abracadabra! It's called a "refundable tax credit." It involves the federal government taking money from those who do pay taxes, and writing checks to those who don't. Yes, yes, in the real world this is known as "welfare," but please try not to ruin the show.

 

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he'll do it by raising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact small-business owners, and the nation's biggest employers who currently pay some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with a flick of his fingers, show them how to create more jobs with less money. It's simple, really. He has a wand. Read article.

 

Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com

 

Barack Obama's supporters often try to sidestep questions about his character and judgment by saying that we should stick to what they arbitrarily define as "the real issues." But Senator Obama's record on specific issues is as bad as his record of repeatedly allying himself over the years with people who make no attempt to hide their hatred of America.

 

Among the so-called "real issues" are earmarks for Senators' pet projects, like the "bridge to nowhere." These are among the most indefensible parts of the inbred Washington political culture, which Obama has so often claimed to be against, as part of his promise of "change" to "clean up the mess in Washington."

 

Yet Senator Obama not only voted in favor of the bridge to nowhere, he voted against anti-earmark amendments proposed by Senator John McCain. Read article.

 

Burt Prelutsky, Townhall.com

 

It is is those on the far left who have done everything in their power to corrupt the election process. One of their chief means of doing so has been through the activities of a group known as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). With approximately 175,000 dues-paying members, they own TV stations, businesses and periodicals, and have offices stretching from Canada to Peru, with over 80 offices in the U.S.

 

To give you some idea how all-encompassing the group is, they have schools where the children of leftists are trained in class-consciousness; they run boot camps for training street activists; and, like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, they extort money from banks and other businesses by threatening racial violence and trumped-up civil rights charges. One can almost imagine Marx, Lenin and Stalin, shaking their heads in admiration and hoisting their glasses in toast.

 

An acorn, as we all know, is a nut. ACORN, however, home to 175,000 nuts, are the seeds, not of mighty oaks, but of political stinkweed, and the sooner they’re eradicated, the better. Read article.

 

David Freddoso, NRO.com

 

Barack Obama would have you believe that, after 20 years of friendship, he had no idea the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a bomb-throwing racial demagogue. And that after 15 years of what he described as a close friendship, he had no idea Tony Rezko was a crook.

 

Similarly, this week, his campaign claimed that when Obama entered William Ayers’s home in 1995 to raise money for a state-senate run, the future presidential hopeful didn’t know Ayers was a former terrorist.

 

So by his own account, Obama wanders through life completely unaware of his surroundings. Read article.

 

Hugh Hewitt, Townhall.com

 

Yes, of course it is.

 

Three weeks ago John McCain was ahead, and a furious attack on Sarah Palin was underway.

 

And Americans were several trillion dollars richer.

 

Our stocks will recover if the American economy, powered by democratic capitalism's relentless innovation and productivity, is allowed to work its magic again.

 

That is the record of our often disparaged but inevitably triumphant attachment to economic liberty.

 

The task for John McCain between now and the time the last vote is cast on November 4 is to speak this truth and articulate this record and thus help repair the damaged confidence of a nation while making the case that the combination of a President Obama, a Speaker Pelosi and a Senate Majority Leader Reid poses a real peril to the ability of the American economy to recover.

 

Part of that challenge will be to hammer away at the record of Senator Obama when it comes to choosing his friends, colleagues and mentors. If Obama is elected, he will be tasked with bringing not just his luggage to the White House, but more than 3,000 appointees to the executive branch. Senator McCain must focus the American electorate on the record of Senator Obama in this regard, a record that includes some names that need to be familiar to the voters: William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright, and one organization, ACORN, with which Senator Obama has been deeply associated with for the past two decades. Read article.

 

The Editors, NRO.com

 

It seems like an eon ago that John McCain and Sarah Palin came roaring out of the Republican convention with Barack Obama flummoxed by McCain’s vice-presidential choice. That was before the collapse of Lehman Bros. three weeks ago and the deepening of the financial crisis that has wiped everything else from the news.

 

McCain has seen all the work he did over the summer and with the pick of Palin blown away. He is trailing in the daily tracking polls by about eight points, and his numbers in the battleground states, following the national numbers, have tanked. No wonder McCain is eager to turn the page on this chapter of the campaign, and talk about something else — Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, for instance.

 

But the financial crisis and the weak economy aren’t going to disappear as issues. How should McCain address them? Read article.

 

Paul Greenberg, JWR.com

 

The rules of formal debate, with its scorecard of categories to judge, don't apply. This is a combination quiz show, beauty pageant and sparring match in which talking points are repeated as if they were actual thoughts.

 

The whole country looks on, waiting for the clouds of rhetoric to part and give us, as they inevitably and unfortunately say, A Defining Moment. It's got to be there somewhere, we tell ourselves, like a needle in a cliche stack.

 

The winner is the debater who breaks through all the hokum long enough to give the proceedings a touch of reality. And puts a human face on politics. Which is no small challenge. How best meet it? By recognizing that political debate is a branch of drama, of theater, of showbiz. As the great modern presidents — one thinks of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan — well understood.

 

Having suffered through more hours of political debate than is good for either mind or body, or soul, I take the great liberty of offering five simple — maybe too simple — tips to any aspiring political debater:

 

1.       Be happy to be there, be honored to be there. Think of it as an outing. Take control from the first. ("Nice to meet you. ... Hey, can I call you Joe?") The winner approaches a debate not as something to be endured but enjoyed. The loser looks at his watch and just wants it to be over. Read article.

 

Charlie Martin, American Thinker.com

 

Sometimes, if I'm puzzled by someone's actions, I like to ask myself "if he's really smarter than I am, why would he be doing what he's doing?"

 

You can learn a lot that way. Unfortunately, the American Chattering Classes often operate on the opposite assumption: "if I don't see the point of this, that other guy must be an idiot."

 

As a case study, let's consider the McCain campaign in the month since my piece on McCain's apparent use of the OODA loop was published here in American Thinker. God knows it's been a rough month: after the rush of the Palin selection, we had a couple of disappointing experiences with major media interviews, and worse -- much worse -- we had the credit market freeze and the fight to get a rescue package working.

 

Of course, then we had the Vice Presidential debate, which certainly restored a certain amount of respect for Sarah Palin. Following shortly after that announcement, the New York Times published a piece on Obama's association with William Ayers, describing Obama's association with the "60's bomber". The article argued, not very successfully, that there wasn't much of a connection. (It was timed perfectly to appear shortly after the first hints of McCain using the topic.) Read article.

 

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