Obama Campaign Rready to Step on the McCain Campaign's Throat

Is that actually from the Obama campaign?

 

The politics of hope? Hardly. Obama knows he's about to get exposed for his radical associations and his wife's racism.

McCain has been cleared of all wrongdoing in the Keating incident. Snobama, on the other hand, was directly responsible for partnering with ACORN to sue banks (using racial extortion) to encourage lending to subprime borrowers... and he showed zero leadership on the financial crisis. The guy is just in over his head and too inexperienced to lead our nation during these times. I don't trust him, and I'm a financial expert.

 

As a financial expert, what leadership has McCain shown in his 30+ years in office on the subject? Especially recently.

 

Already posted in another thread. Not from the Obama campaign.

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=154748&page=2

TJ, do you think people are stupid enough to believe McCain was cleared in the Keating mess just because you say he was?

 

Well, for starters he encouraged greater oversight of Fannie/Freddie a few years ago, only to have the Democrats in Congress say that they were on firm footing. OOPSIE.

Obama's only experience with the mortgage crisis is the house that a convicted felon and political fixer bought for him. Do you think he could roll that strategy out for all Americans? lol. Obama is just in over his head. Totally unqualified to lead.

 

Even McCain knows he was wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five#Relationships_of_senators_to_Keating

 

McCain already made a political mistake by not opposing the bailout and contrasting himself with Obama.

With this Keating video, the Obama campaign ties a legacy of cronyism, corruption, and responsibility for the current financial mess all in a nice little bow, tightly, around McCain's neck. It changes the narrative, forces McCain to own the currrent disaster, a month out from election day.

This is no longer counter-punching. This is an MMA knee to the head.

 

We are in the final period. It's crunch time. Obama going on offense now.

While McCain's guilt by association tactic tries to play the race card, Obama's counter connects McCain to the number one issue on most voter's mind right now... $$ and economy.

Brilliant!!

The movie will go online on Monday. Make sure to send link to everyone you know.

I am already on it.

 

McCain most certainly DID NOT make a mistake by not opposing the bailout. That is ludicrous. If he had opposed the bailout most of his party and nearly everyone else would have turned against him. Secondly, it took a few days but most people (especially those 40/50/60 somethings with 401Ks) finally realized what the bailout was all about (and how it personally affected them) and shifted from their knee-jerk opposition to supporting it. Obama would have clobbered McCain mercilessly until November 4th and the election would have turned into a complete blowout. McCain would prove beyond the shadow of any doubt that he is flaky, risky, unstable and unfit to be president. Even more than the decision to "suspend" his campaign, it would have been seen as an off-the-wall political stunt by McCain.

It's one thing to "contrast himself" with Obama. It's another to commit political suicide and completely blow the election for his party and guarantee they get historically pulverized. It would have been an act of insanity.

 

Here is another card Obama can play in the final days: The Phil Gramm card. I expect him to whack McCain at the debate with this at least once.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../10/05/AR2008100501816.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

A Pal Around McCain
By Harold Meyerson
Monday, October 6, 2008; A15

"There's no question that we have to change the subject here," a senior Republican operative told The Post's Michael D. Shear in a story published Saturday.

The "subject" in question is the economy and how to fix it. As Americans have taken their eye off the ball -- that is, off John McCain's sterling qualities of character and command -- by focusing on the economy, Barack Obama has surged into the lead nationally and in many key battleground states.

So long as the candidates talk about that pesky economy, McCain's handlers have realized, McCain will continue to swoon. Thus the campaign has announced that it will go on the attack again on the momentous topics of Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the onetime Weatherman who has been a University of Illinois education professor for nearly two decades.

Campaigning on Saturday in Colorado, Sarah Palin accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" by associating with Ayers, citing as her source a New York Times story from that morning. In fact, the story concluded that the Obama-Ayers "relationship" consisted of both men attending the board meetings of two Chicago organizations and that there had been no contact between the men, other than bumping into each other on the sidewalk (they live in the same neighborhood), since Obama went to the U.S. Senate in January 2005.

The story of Obama's interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago's civic establishment. In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by the Annenberg Foundation -- a group that distributes the wealth of the estate of Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon's ambassador to Britain. It was only then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago's education-policy elite. (Mayor Richard Daley, that known radical, told the Times that he had consulted Ayers on education issues for years.)

Go join your city's establishment, and see what it gets you.

But if the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates' associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain's own economic guru.

Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm's relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort. McCain has called Gramm one of his leading economic counselors and has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become McCain's Treasury secretary if he's elected.

If we are to believe his managers, McCain will charge into tomorrow night's debate seeking to "change the subject" from the economy to Obama's dangerous liaisons. It's not, however, likely to be a winning tactic. Obama will argue that in a time of deepening economic crisis, the public deserves a debate in which the candidates focus on their ideas for recovery rather than tendentious attacks on their rival's presumed associates. If pressed, though, he can mention that it is McCain's senior economic adviser who has diminished American solvency and power beyond the wildest dreams of anti-American terrorists.

meyersonh@washpost.com

 

It's about damn time the Keating Five came up. While McCain has thrown everything he can think of at Obama - not once but twice - and Hillary did before that, somehow nobody has managed to mention the biggest scandal of McCain's career. I guess Obama was going to let him off the hook on this until he started recycling old attacks at crunch time. Anyway, it's about damn time.

 

On topic, I will be watching this documentary tomorrow. That is a really well-done thirty second spot for it; I especially like framing McCain next to our former Senator "Nation of Whiners" Gramm, and the wipe between the dates connecting that scandal to today's mess.

I disagree. Off-topic, and I'm speaking only in political terms, not what's best for our economic future, but why then did the vast majority of Republicans in the House kill the first incarnation of the bill, and why did only 91 vote for it Friday? I think this discounts the very real outrage most Americans, per independent polling (I remember majorities as high as 60% opposed in the polls I saw), feel/felt toward the bailout. Wall Street gets theirs while, to use the once-more popular idiom, struggling mortgage-payers on Main Street get screwed.

First three polls I could find off Google, showing this bailout is widely unpopular:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

Politically speaking, I believe House Republicans were trying to force Democrats to own the bill, so they can use it against them in the upcoming election(s). Even if the bill passes, the economy is still going to tank. Newt Gingrich & Scarborough were advising this strategy for Republicans, before the vote.

If it's seen that Democrats own the bill, and McCain's opposition could have strengthened this perception, and the bill passes:

a) Republicans can right now argue that Democrats wasted 700 billion in taxpayer money to help their friends on Wall Street.
Two years from now, when Democrats control both houses:
b) If the bill is successful, and crisis is averted, the economy rebounds, the Republicans can argue there would never have been any crisis, and Democrats wasted 700 billion in taxpayer money to help their friends on Wall Street.
c) If the bill does not prevent a deepening recession, Republicans can argue that the 700 billion give-away to Wall Street was a boondoggle, and not responsive to the needs of the public at large.

Check this Washington Post article about the behind-the-scenes posturing between McCain and Obama over the bailout.

Either way, supporting the bill is, politically, a lose-lose, even if one believes it's necessary. Especially for this election, because no results from the bill will be verifiable in the upcoming month before voting day.

I think McCain should have taken the political gamble. He's down significantly in the last quarter. He has to throw a Hail Mary or two to have a chance. Distinguishing himself from Obama on this, while simultaneously taking the publically popular position, was, in my opinion, politcally the right call.

 

I think he's just been saving his best attacks for last to seal the deal. Show your cards early and there's still enough time to recover from it. Use it when the timing is just right and there's not enough time to defend.

 

Mystical McCain - With the ability to see into the future.

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this is the wrong move for obama. he'll invite more attacks regarding wright, ayers...

by going negative himself, mccain isn't gonna look bad when he goes negative also.

 

It is not the wrong move at all, watch the McCain campaign have to pause and explain the Keating incident.....this is 100% the right move.

And at the right time....doing it softly and letting the American people see....and think for themselves.

McCain has no chance.

DD