I would like to hear more from John McCain talking about his family's legacy in defense of our country and the core values (integrity, duty, honor, courage). Explain what we need in troubled times is a steady, experienced hand. Over the past 8 years, we've seen the federal and trade deficit growing due to a lack of spending control and misguided political and legal stonewalling of domestic energy exploration and production. These problems are not going to be resolved by a uncontrolled Democratic Congress, which has never balanced a budget in the past 40 years and which is responsible for choking domestic energy exploration, not to mention putting in an inexperienced Democratic President whom has never taken a politically tough decision on any major legislation, whom votes in lockstep with his partisan majority position and whom has the most liberal voting record in the US Senate.
We have a clear choice: we have one candidate whom wants to stay the course on one of the top two highest corporate income tax brackets in the world, wants to punish the most successful job creators with punitive job and investment tax increases and wants to reward those whom pay little or no federal taxes by picking up the tab for some additional household expenses. The same candidate whom would gut military modernization efforts, had the "judgment" to oppose the surge effort in Iraq, even after it resulted in sharp drops of violence and has all but ignored the military leaders responsible for the surge, while continuing to call for a "new mission" of unconditional retreat from Iraq and voting against our current operations there. The Democratic candidate has expressed more interest in meeting the leaders of rogue nations (e.g., Ahmadinejad, Castro, Chavez) at the Presidential level than in meeting General Petraeus! A candidate whom will create a litmus test for judicial candidates on unenumerated "rights" in the Constitution, such as "privacy" (used to justify unrestricted abortion) and no doubt sympathetic to the recognition of "positive" rights (i.e., economic and/or social justice). A "bait-and-switch" candidate whom makes tax promises that he knows he can't keep, his "new math" of promising around $800B of new spending on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, without telling the American people where that $800B is coming from. The candidate who blames the current financial crisis on "deregulation", although he opposed reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which because of special privileges as a GSE exposed the federal government to about half the US mortgage market. A candidate, like Herbert Hoover, also looked to boost higher tax brackets in a recessionary time and made the situation even worse.
Or we have the real choice--a reformer who has a proven record of significant bipartisan action over the past 8 years, who has a track record of opposing and not requesting his own earmarks, whom has opposed expansions in entitlement spending (e.g., Medicare drug coverage) without proper funding, who has opposed spending in excess of federal revenues, whose expertise in foreign policy and the memory has the endorsements of 5 former Secretaries of State and over 100 retired generals and admirals. A straight talker whom doesn't try to be all things to all people.
We should not confuse the appearance of steadiness and composure under the TV lights in a 90-minute so-called Presidential debate or oratorical eloquence on the campaign trail as indicative of Presidential performance. We know the stuff John McCain is made of--someone whom refused an early release from a Vietnamese POW camp, because others before him would not be released first; someone whom fought for unpopular immigration reform and a surge policy which almost cost him his last shot at the Republican nomination, a price he said that he was willing to pay to do the right thing. Someone who opposed the President on allowing unconstrained government growth in spending and a huge increase to the national debt, inaction on climate change, virtually no change in manpower and strategy in over 3 years after the liberation of Iraq, no overhaul of obsoleted financial regulatory agencies, nothing to counter an out-of-control foreign trade deficit, including $500B to China, certain overstepping of the White House (signing statements of ignoring parts of signed bills, executive privilege, etc.), torture policy, etc., and who will bring a different approach, a no analysis-paralysis one to the White House.
The American voter has the opportunity to hire someone more prescient than either Bush or Obama on post-liberation Iraq and whom got it right the first time out regarding the Russian invasion of Georgia. Someone whom doesn't go around threatening our NAFTA trading partners and whom won't stonewall free-trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and other allies which would open their markets to more American goods and services. Someone, unlike Obama, whom doesn't cause controversies with traditional allies Pakistan and Israel and/or Palestinians with ill-considered statements.
Obama: Trying To Buy the Presidency
The Obama campaign announced last month they raised about $150M vs. McCain's roughly $85M publicly financed amount for the entire general campaign. The fact is that Obama made an early commitment to agree to public financing, which meant Obama would have received the same amount as McCain. Given McCain's reformist credentials, it would have been seen as somewhat hypocritical for him to backtrack off his trademark campaign finance reform.
That was before, of course, Obama turned out to be prodigious fundraiser. There is no doubt that Obama would have outraised McCain in a head-to-head, but what Obama did in backtracking his public promise (he also promised a number of joint townhalls on which he also reneged) is a question of integrity and also an internal consistency with his own pretension of being in favor of reform (in extension to Senate ethics and lobbyist reform). Using funding advantages to burn McCain in battleground states by up to 8-to-1 with negative, often deliberately misleading ads violates a sense of fair play (although Romney heavily outspent McCain in the early part of the Republican primary season which turned out to be mostly unsuccessful).
Obama has sought to rationalize his campaign on the grounds it was chiefly a large number of small amounts, the point being any such contribution is immaterial to impact a candidate's judgment on relevant issues. Scott Johnson, in the 10/27/08 New York Post, notes that $200M of the $600M the Obama campaign has raised comes in the amounts ( < $200) where disclosure of the contributor's identify is not required by the FEC , and the Obama campaign, unlike the McCain campaign, does not use a standard Address Verification System for credit card donations. In fact, one test against the Obama system successfully entered contributions from the same address under the names of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Bill Ayers, also one from John Gait (from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged) from 1957 [year Atlas Shruggedwas published] Ayn Rand Lane, Gaits Gulch, CO 99999, addresses such as "12345 No Way", and names like Della Ware, Joe Plumber, Idiot Savant, Ima BadDonation and Fake Donor. There are also concerns about illegal foreign contributions. [The Obama campaign claims it validates AFTER the fact of donation (which is sort of like Bill Clinton only confessing to the Lewinsky affair after the blue dress surfaced), but there's only one logical reason it hasn't been using a standard AVS system at the time of donation.]
I think one casualty of this election will be McCain-Feingold campaign reform. Essentially Obama's superior money has been used to saturate a number of red (GOP) and battleground states with anti-McCain ads, basically forcing McCain to withdraw from blue states that appeared to be viable in early September (e.g., Michigan, Wisconsin, and Oregon). McCain is now finding himself playing defense against several incursions into territory Bush held in 2004. I think the fact that any Republican is within 5 points (in some polls) of Obama given a hugely unpopular lame duck GOP President, probably the biggest financial tsunami since the Great Depression, and Obama's unprecedented ground operation and campaign donation system is extraordinary.
Supreme Court and Obama's Redistributive Agenda
On July 17, 2007, Barack Obama gave this puzzling job description for picking judges, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." As usual, Obama is not engaging in straight talk; what exactly does that mean? Why isn't he talking judicial philosophies, e.g., stare decisis, "living Constitution", judicial restraint? Why isn't he talking process vs. outcomes? The answer is implicit but obvious: Barack Obama is in favor of judicial activism and the so-called "living Constitution", of the kind that fabricated a right of a pregnant woman to abort in Roe v Wade.
In essence, what he's really referring to are positive rights, something I discuss at some length in my "American Conservatism and the 2008 Election" post. The basic idea is that citizens, because of certain personal characteristics and/or economic circumstances, lack the resources they need to fully pursue happiness in a free society; hence, government should, among other things, provide a social welfare net, establish a so-called "living wage", provide for free or guaranteed education, and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the old and disabled. This becomes clear in a recently surfaced 2001 radio interview with Obama: "[G]enerally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf." [Obama, there was a Democratic President in 1961 whom said, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what what you do for your country." Jack Kennedy in 1962 added some pro-investment tax breaks for business in 1962 and proposed reductions in the corporate tax cut and cut individual tax bracket rates, INCLUDING THE HIGHEST, in 1964. The deficit fell while federal revenues increased.]
The United States is founded on certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (The "pursuit of happiness" is abstract, but generally speaking, it includes the right to pursue a lawful livelihood and enjoy the fruits of one's labor, including the acquisition or transfer of property.) However, we have the supremacy of law, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments require due process in any deprivation of life, liberty, and property.
Obama, as I mentioned in an earlier post, mentions that the CEO-lowest/average-wage worker compensation gap. Obama sees this as a zero-sum game where lower-earning workers are cut out of a fair income at the expense of overpaid CEO's. This is just a matter of his incompetence on basic economics. In 2005, the minimum salary of a major league baseball player was $316K and the average was $2.6M. That means the average ballplayer on the bench made more than Barack Obama as US Senator. [Some might say that's justifiable because the average bench player had a more productive year than Barack Obama in the Senate.] But basically baseball attracts large crowds and lucrative TV contracts, and that results in healthy compensation. The point is, comparing the pay of politicians and baseball players is rather pointless; they operate in different markets. You can make the same argument about CEO's versus the "typical worker" in a company. A 2004 Hay survey found that American CEO's made about 63% more than their European counterparts. Whereas that's a significant difference, it seems to suggest that CEO pay has to do more with a competitive market for high-level, talented executives than "exploiting" workers. It makes no sense, in a competitive labor market, for a company to pay key employees, including rank-and-file workers, less than their competitors. Ben and Jerry's discovered they weren't able to hire a decent CEO to replace the founders under the existing artificial compensation multiplier cap.
Barack Obama is very clear: "[T]he Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society." It's very clear that he's sympathetic to that point of view: "I..can craft theoretical justifications for it, legally...come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts." But ultimately redistributive change must be carried through the Executive Branch of the government: "You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way...monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time."
All this is anathema to conservatives and most Americans. Basically Obama is prescribing a radically social liberalism agenda which constitutes an expanded footprint of government, not the limited government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Obviously there is some due process of property in terms of things like investment and estate taxes. But arguing that the rich grow at the expense of the poor is deceptive. WalMart, for instance, built a business by being an aggressive discounter of goods, using its volume buying to negotiate lower prices with suppliers. It creates wealth through sales volume.
Just a side note: Obama mocked McCain's criticism of his radical social liberalism, saying soon McCain will find out that Obama gave half of his own peanut butter sandwich to another kid in fourth grade and call the action redistributionist. Listen, Obama: what you described is charity, and McCain is for charity. What McCain is arguing is your confiscating half a sandwich that doesn't belong to you but somebody else and giving it to some kid whom didn't bring a sandwich to lunch because the latter didn't take advantage of the opportunity to make himself one before coming to school. (Maybe if he goes hungry one day, tomorrow he'll set his alarm clock earlier and make and bring lunch with him.)
Health Care: Our Approach for Tax Fairness and More Competition
John McCain's plan empowers taxpayers to buy plans they want--say, for example, high-deductible, lower-premium coverages (where insurance plays its true role against large losses and hence promotes individual cost-saving behavior for out-of-pocket health care expenses) or health plans without expensive add-ons or mandates (e.g., no-wait coverage) across state lines. In addition, his approach, unlike Obama, extends health care tax subsidies to all Americans, not just those working for companies currently sponsoring it and it does not threaten job-creating businesses which do not currently offer such benefits with tax penalties. I am simply mystified that McCain has seemingly cut no campaign commercials to counterbalance Obama's materially misleading ads which imply that employees under employer-sponsored plans will be worse off, tax-wise.
