Some Thoughts on the U.S. Election

Let's consider the McCain-Palin ticket.

Ah.

As Joseph Biden said in the Vice Presidential debate, 'where do I begin'?

John McCain, the all-American Vietnam war veteran, as he would no doubt like me to refer to him, could not possibly run the United States as well as George 'dubya' Bush has -- and that's saying something. He is so out of touch with real Americans, it is untrue. For 158 years Lehman Brothers traded competitively on Wall Street, and then, one weekend, it went under. It put thousands of employees around the world out of a job, while investors hurried to get shot of shares in banks and the Dow was sent into a downward spiral. John McCain's helpful verdict on the Monday morning? "The fundamentals of the U.S. economy are sound." Does this sounds like a stable economy? All this on the same weekend as the Fed and the Treasury rescuing Fannie and Freddie, with banks hoarding money. And I am yet to mention the thousands of Americans who have had their homes repossessed and the thousands more who probably will. "The fundamentals are sound." Good call, John.

How can U.S. citizens elect a man who could not even give a journalist a straight forward answer to the rather plain question "How many houses do you own"? Now it emerges he has more cars parked on his various driveways than some Americans will own in their entire lifetimes. Does this sound like a man who has any idea what the average American is going through?

His running mate is trying to convince the nation that she does. The problem is, Sarah Palin knows exactly the same amount as the average American. No sound human being would put some Alaskan 'hockey Mom' a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, surely? Her epistemology seems to evolve around geographical location: she knows a lot about foreign policy, she says, because she is from Alaska and that's closer to the Russian Federation than most of the United States. The absurdity of such nonsense was just flatly disregarded by Barack Obama on Face the Nation last week. "I'll let the nation be the judge of that," he told Bob Shieffer. If there was any doubt about Ms. Palin's foreign policy knowledge -- or lack of it -- I think she made it perfectly clear when she called General McKiernan 'McClellan'. She is, without doubt, a huge liability to the security of the United States and the western world.

But let's not forget, the McCain-Palin ticket is a self-styled 'anti-Washington' ticket. Right, okay. John McCain's been in Congress since 1981. That's twenty seven years! And he is leading an anti-Washington ticket? Give me a break. During that time, he voted constantly for deregulation of the financial sector. He doesn't seem to be in a hurry to hold his hand up and accept responsibility for his actions.

The McCain-Palin ticket is also a self-styled maverick ticket. How ludicrous. Out of the Democratic Gore-Liebermann ticket and the G.O.P. Bush-Cheney ticket from the 2000 election, which one would you think to be the maverick one? Yep, me too. And look where we are now, eight years later.

But hang on, McCain supporters say this is an anti-Bush ticket as much as the Obama-Biden ticket is. What nonsense. The G.O.P. could not pick a sane presidential candidate in 2000 and they have not picked one eight years down the line.

But back to Ms. Palin. She was on the BBC's ten o'clock news last night citing the New York Times as suggesting Barack Obama was in contact with a 1960's terrorist in his early days. That might be true. Whilst Barack Obama is a great man, I don't think he can really be held accountable for what every person does once he has come into contact with them. Forty years from now one of my friends I went to school with might be behind bars for one thing or another. I'm sure as hell not going to take responsibility if I haven't seen the guy for almost half a century.

Perhaps Ms. Palin did not make it through to the Op-Ed section of the Times. That is a real shame. She really would have had something to mull over then. Like her complete lack of popularity with the paper's Op-Ed columnists. Intelligent and much-respected critics such as Bob Herbert, David Brooks and Maureen Dowd tear her apart and mock her day after day after day, and she just does not get it. She made, excuse my language, a complete arse of herself in front of Katie Couric, and she still does not realise she has a hell of a lot more in common with George 'dubya' Bush than she realises. What ties them together most explicitly, of course, is the complete butchering of the English language.

America! Please -- please -- spare us (the rest of the world) from more gory slaughtering of our much-loved language! One is not sure quite how much mutilation it can valiantly withstand.

More importantly, of course, America's failure to elect Barack Obama would signal a great step backward for the nation. He is, by far and away, the best candidate for the Presidency. Whether or not he gets elected simply depends on whether a lot of white Americans bring themselves to put a cross on a ballot paper next to the name of a black man.

(Yes, yes, I know the U.S. has far more technologically advanced ways for people to vote, but hey, the old cross in a box system here in the United Kingdom has never let to some gun crazy, slack jawed vagabond of a candidate to steal a marginal constituency.)

Okay, let me be honest. I was not sure whether to include this last thought, but here it is. The main reason I dislike John McCain is the fact that he is a Vietnam war veteran, and therefore, in my opinion, encapsulates everything that is wrong with the United States. (Cue the sharp intake of breath.) He initially got elected to the House because of his military background, which culminated in Vietnam. Congratulations, Mr. McCain. You fought in most unjust war waged by the West in the twentieth century, save perhaps the Boer War. Nice going. I know this is getting a little outspoken, but Vietnam war vets enjoy too much respect in U.S. society. Personally I have a hell of a lot more respect for Mohammad Ali, and all the other drafted men and women who refused to go and fight 'the yellaman', and for all the anti-war protesters who marched through the streets chanting 'hell no, we won't go'. The fact is, Mr. McCain, like so many other misguided Americans, did not take the moral high-grounded; he folded, and went anyway. At the very least, this shows a lack of strength in his moral character. There can be no questioning of his physical and mental attributes, which were proved in a P.O.W. camp. But he should never have been anywhere near there.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

Bob Herbert: The Best Teller Of Truths In All The United States

Maybe it's because I have too much time on my hands at the moment (or maybe it's because most editorial sections in British newspapers fail to take a solid stance against anything and fail to publish expert arguments), but for the past month I've been an avid reader of the opinion section of the New York Times.

On the whole, the Op-Ed Columnists seem to be leaning more towards the Democratic ticket of Obama-Biden. They do this not through the glorification of Obama's policies, but through the tactical and well thought out destruction of the McCain-Palin ticket. It makes for fantastic reading.

Bob Herbert is, for me, the leader of the pack.

Herbert's writing is clear and to the point, and he makes sense in everything he says. Each paragraph is filled with scolding remarks. Here, as evidence, are his two previous articles. This first one has the headline "When Madmen reign", and was first published in the New York Times on September 29, 2008.

"Madness.

I’m not holding my breath, but I would like to see the self-proclaimed conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealots step up and take responsibility for wrecking the American economy and bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

Even now, with the house on fire, the most extreme among them won’t pick up the fire hoses and try to put it out.

With the fate of the Bush administration’s desperate $700 billion bailout of the financial industry hanging in the balance, Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, stuck to his political playbook like a man covered in Krazy Glue. He pronounced himself “resolute” in his opposition to the bailout because to be otherwise would amount to a betrayal of party principles.

To deviate from those principles, in Mr. Issa’s view, would be like placing “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.”

We are in very strange territory here.

George H.W. Bush warned us about “voodoo economics” in 1980, but the ideologues clamped a gag on him and put him on the Gipper’s ticket. For much of the time since then, the madmen of the right have carried the day. They were freed of their remaining few restraints with the ascendance of George W. Bush in 2000.

These were the reckless clowns who led us into the foolish multitrillion-dollar debacle in Iraq and who crafted tax policies that enormously benefited millionaires and billionaires while at the same time ran up staggering amounts of government debt. This is the crowd that contributed mightily to the greatest disparities in wealth in the U.S. since the gilded age.

This was the crowd that cut the cords of corporate and financial regulations and in myriad other ways gleefully hacked away at the best interests of the United States.

Now we’re looking into the abyss.

When President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck.

“Our entire economy is in danger,” he said.

He should have said that he, along with his irresponsible Republican colleagues and their running buddies in the corporate and financial sectors, put the entire economy in danger. John McCain and his economic main man, Phil (“this is a mental recession”) Gramm, were right there running with them.

Credit markets have frozen almost solid, banks are toppling like dominoes and brokerage houses are vanishing like props in a magic act. And who was one of the paramount leaders of the manic anti-regulatory charge that led to this sorry state of affairs? None other than Mr. Gramm himself, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Where is Mr. Gramm now? Would you believe that he’s the vice chairman of UBS Securities, the investment banking arm of the Swiss bank UBS? Of course you would. A New York Times article last spring noted that the “elite private bankers” of UBS “built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires.”

Toadying to the rich while sabotaging the interests of working people was always Mr. Gramm’s specialty. He was considered a likely choice to be treasury secretary in a McCain administration until he made his impolitic “mental recession” comment. He also said the U.S. was a “nation of whiners.”

The tone-deaf remarks in the midst of severe economic hard times undermined Senator McCain’s convoluted efforts to reinvent himself as some kind of populist. But they were wholly in keeping with the economic worldview of conservative Republicans.

The inescapable disconnect between rhetoric and reality is often stark. Senator McCain has been ranting recently about the excessive pay and “bloated golden parachutes” of failed corporate executives. And yet one of his closest advisers on economic matters is Carly Fiorina, who was forced out as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Her golden parachute was an estimated $42 million.

Voters have to shoulder a great deal of the blame for the economic mess the country is in. Too many were willing, for whatever reasons, to support politicians who spat in the eye of economic common sense. Now the voodoo that permeated conservative economic policies for so many years has come back to haunt us big-time.

The question voters should be asking John McCain is whether he has stopped serving his party’s economic Kool-Aid, which has taken such a toll on working families, and is ready to change his ways. Is his sudden populist transformation the real thing or just a mirage?

In the gale force winds of a full-fledged economic hurricane, it’s fair to ask Senator McCain whether he still considers himself a conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealot. Or whether he’s seen the light."

Gripping reading, I'm sure you'll agree. The fact of the matter is, he's spot on in everything he says. Here's what Mr. Herbert thought of the Vice-Presidential debate. This appeared in October 03, 2008's issue of the Times, under the headline "Palin's Alternate Universe"

"Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years.

We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality:

“Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.”

Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.

In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”

What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”

Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?

Here’s Ms. Palin during the debate: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”

If Governor Palin didn’t like a question, or didn’t know the answer, she responded as though some other question had been asked. She made no bones about this, saying early in the debate: “I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear.”

The problem with Ms. Palin’s candidacy is that John McCain might actually win this election, and then if something terrible happened, the country could be left with little more than an exclamation point as president.

After Ms. Palin had woven one of her particularly impenetrable linguistic webs, Joe Biden turned to the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill, and said: “Gwen, I don’t know where to start.”

Of course he didn’t know where to start because Ms. Palin’s words don’t mean anything. She’s all punctuation.

This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.”

The morning after the debate, the Labor Department announced that the employment situation in the U.S. had deteriorated even more than experts had expected. The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August.

Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks.

Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.

But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ ”

How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”

John McCain has spent most of his adult life speaking of his love for his country. Maybe he sees something in Sarah Palin that most Americans do not. Maybe he is aware of qualities that lead him to believe she’d be as steady as Franklin Roosevelt in guiding the U.S. through a prolonged economic downturn. Maybe she’d be as wise and prudent in a national emergency as John Kennedy was during the Cuban missile crisis.

Maybe Senator McCain has reason to believe that it would not be the most colossal of errors to put Ms. Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.

He’s got just four weeks to share that insight with the rest of us."

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright