Posts Tagged vice presidential debate

When we still had freedom, and monkeys

October 7, 2008 at 2:18 pm · Filed under Economy, Environment, Politics, domestic policy ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

At last Thursday night’s debate, Sarah Palin issued a dire warning about our way of life as we know it:

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

Hmm, what a coincidence that she would talk about “extinction” and tellin’ our kids and grandkids about what life used to be life.  1,700 conservation researchers met for the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Barcelona this week, and they delivered a similarly dire, if a bit more specific, warning:

The researchers concluded that 25 percent of the mammal species for which they had sufficient data are threatened with extinction, but Schipper added that the figure could be as high as 36 percent because information on some species is so scarce.

Land and marine mammals face different threats, the scientists said, and large mammals are more vulnerable than small ones. For land species, habitat loss and hunting represent the greatest danger, while marine mammals are more threatened by unintentional killing by pollution, ship strikes and being caught in fishing nets . . .

Primates face some of the most intense pressures: According to the survey, 79 percent of primates in South and Southeast Asia are facing extinction.

But Governor Palin gets it.

We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.

Well, sort of.

The chant is “drill, baby, drill.” And that’s what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into . . . And we’re building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline which is North America’s largest and most you expensive infrastructure project ever to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets . . . And East Coast politicians who don’t allow energy-producing states like Alaska to produce these, to tap into them, and instead we’re relying on foreign countries to produce for us.

You just don’t get a sense of urgency from either campaign about the state of the natural world around us.  And when they talk about it, they never talk about human development – no matter what kind of fuels it uses – and its nearly total encroachment of wildlife habitats.  The climate is in crisis; from the air we breathe, to the animals large and small, land and marine, that depend on complex, fragile econsystems that are experiencing a meltdown more dangerous and irrevocable than a handful of giant banks holding bad paper.

Where’s the climate bailout?  Where are the regulators?  Our forests and our oceans are over-leveraged and it is time to inject some liquidity into this market.

When I hear Sarah Palin boil it all down to buying less oil from ‘countries that don’t like us very much’ and more from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, I shudder.  I see myself reading to my disbelieving grandchildren about yesterday’s forests and up in the treetops, animals called monkeys used to swing.

But it doesn’t have to end that way – not yet.  The International Union for Conservation of Nature study came just before tonight’s townhall-style presidential debate.  Surely some audience member will ask the candidates to think about the planet, and all life on it, for just a moment?

The issue of humans and our interdepedence on this planet is still considered softball territory in the American political debate landscape.  (Gosh, China sure has an overpopulation problem!) But how seriously and in depth McCain and Obama take the question will tell us something about their commitment to the real transcendant threat of our times.

Both campaigns badly want to turn the page on the Bush administration.  Reinvigorating U.S. leadership on the climate crisis is an easy, and strategic way to truly do it, and show the world that America cooperates again.  Let’s hope someone asks the candidates.

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Scrappy Palin, serious Biden: they both won, sort of

October 3, 2008 at 2:13 pm · Filed under Economy, Politics, domestic policy, foreign affairs ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

You’ve got to love Peggy Noonan.  You can always count on this former Reagan speechwriter to tell it like it is.  And if you are a Democrat, you really need to read her stuff.  She keeps you grounded and honest.  And sometimes she even reassures you (she’s not exactly Palin’s biggest fan).  Plus, she’s funny:

Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat!

But seriously, Noonan’s commentary on last night’s debate hits most of the nails right on the head. No matter who you support in this election, it’s hard to argue with her analysis. 

She killed. She had him at “Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?” She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy . . .

As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there. This was classic “talk over the heads of the media straight to the people,” and it is a long time since I’ve seen it done so well, though so transparently. There were moments when she seemed to be doing an infomercial pitch for charm in politics. But it was an effective infomercial . . .

Joe Biden seems to have walked in thinking that she was an idiot and that he only had to patiently wait for this fact to reveal itself. This was a miscalculation. He showed great forbearance. Too much forbearance. She said of his intentions on Iraq, “Your plan is a white flag of surrender.” This deserved an indignant response, or at least a small bop on the head, from Mr. Biden, who has been for five years righter on Iraq than the Republican administration. He was instead mild.

The heart of her message was a complete populist pitch. “Joe Six-Pack” and “soccer moms” should unite to fight the tormentors who forced mortgages on us. She spoke of “Main Streeters like me.” A question is at what point shiny, happy populism becomes cheerful manipulation.

Palin’s shiny, happy populism overlooks a critical shortcoming of her ticket: there is no evidence that their policies would help mainstreeters.  Palin talks a great talk when there’s virtually no follow up from (filter between) the media.  How does their tax policy, which gives no tax break to 100 million middle “mainstreeters” but instead targets $4 billion in tax breaks to corporate America?  How is it helpful to mainstreet Americans with employer-based healthcare to lose their healthcare plan and get a $5,000 tax credit toward purchasing insurance that will surely cost double that amount out of pocket? Biden hit McCain and Palin on this point with perhaps the best zinger of the night: “So you’re going to have to place — replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company. I call that the “Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere.”

Had Joe Biden not been beaten into submission before the debate (“don’t come off too mean!”), he might have engaged Palin a bit more combatively than he did.  Palin came in with that advantage, and she worked it aggressively.  Still, while Palin won on appearance, Joe Biden won on substance. And this election, more than any in recent memory, demands substantive, reassuring leadership.  Joe Biden spent most of the night effectively articulately the Obama – Biden ticket’s policies.  When he hit back it was mostly aimed at John McCain.  Near the end of the debate, after Palin had used the word “maverick” so many times it made me cringe to hear it, Biden delivered a powerful indictment against the sunny maverick McCain image Palin continually invoked:

He’s been a maverick on some issues, but he has been no maverick on the things that matter to people’s lives.

He voted four out of five times for George Bush’s budget, which put us a half a trillion dollars in debt this year and over $3 trillion in debt since he’s got there.

He has not been a maverick in providing health care for people. He has voted against — he voted including another 3.6 million children in coverage of the existing health care plan, when he voted in the United States Senate.

He’s not been a maverick when it comes to education. He has not supported tax cuts and significant changes for people being able to send their kids to college.

He’s not been a maverick on the war. He’s not been a maverick on virtually anything that genuinely affects the things that people really talk about around their kitchen table.

Biden even made up ground on Palin’s home turf- her image as just an average mom with an average family to juggle.  He was proud and then vulnerable, recalling the days after his first wife and daughter died in a car crash (in which his two sons were critically injured):

But the notion that somehow, because I’m a man, I don’t know what it’s like to raise two kids alone, I don’t know what it’s like to have a child you’re not sure is going to — is going to make it — I understand.

All in all, Biden turned in a strong performance (aside from his excessive grinning at inopportune moments), perhaps stronger than we realize, given that so many of us went into this forgetting that Palin excels at debate, particularly a debate with such stringent rules on followup discussion (the sort of followup that Katie Couric was able to do in her interviews).  Again, Noonan is instructive:

[Palin] is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled—they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold, but her magnetism did. At one point she literally winked at the nation.

As for those pundits who said that Palin’s goal going into this was merely to survive gaffe-free, I disagree. Her goal was to bloody up the Democratic ticket, and in doing so win points for “feistiness”.  She threw some cute and some tough punches, but nothing that Biden didn’t counter. Palin reclaimed some of her dignity last night, and succeeded in slowing, but not stopping, her own campaign’s bleeding–you don’t pull out of Michigan unless you are in deeper trouble than one debate performance can fix.  The Couric, Gibson and even Hannity interviews did irreparable damage to both McCain and Palin that just can’t be fixed with a wink and a cutesy “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”  

Here’s some final analysis from NBC’s Political Director Chuck Todd (who has inherited Tim Russert’s white board):

Palin started strong and proved to be a folksy cliché machine, which probably came across as extremely charming. She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks.

She proved extremely adept at avoiding questions or topics she didn’t want to answer, which is the big difference in her fairly smooth performance tonight and her near-disastrous performances in those one-on-one interviews.

This debate may have a shelf life of about 24 hours, perhaps 48 hours and that’s about it. 

And he’s right.  If there’s no blood on the floor, the media will move right along.  Next story: the House votes on that bailout-rescue package today.  It’s going to be nailbiter.

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Palin v. Biden: pre-game analysis

October 2, 2008 at 3:45 pm · Filed under Politics, domestic policy ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Democrats, prepare yourselves: odds are high that Sarah Palin is going to charm America’s pants off tonight.  Why?  Because the campaign has been so pilloried for wrapping her in a protective cocoon, feeding her campaign talking points that, when she spits them back out, they sound not merely like platitudes, but like nonsense. There’s no time to actually learn the points behind the talking, and the campaign has learned that lesson after a week of humiliating Katie Couric coverage.  So the story now goes, they are going to free Sarah Palin.  She’s going to be herself, which is what scared Democrats when she first burst onto the scene a month ago.

Tonight, Sarah Barracuda is going up against the bloviator, as his critics call him.  Joe Biden has been in the Senate for more than 30 years.  He’s polished, articulate (ha, and clean too;o) and very knowledgeable on any policy Gwen Ifill might possibly throw at the candidates tonight.  But people won’t relate to him unless his demeanor and answers come off more blue collar than they do Washingtonian.  He has two famous weaknesses: the sound of his voice (he enjoys it too much), and his lack of an “inappropriate comment” filter.  And because of his heightened awareness of his rep as a gaffe-prone monologist, he could turn in a soft performance, or try bizarre self-deprecation, like saying Hillary Clinton would have been a better pick than him.  Still, Biden’s command of all of the issues of the day is reassuring to a panicky cash and credit-strapped electorate.

For her part, Palin is so well known for a sentence structure to nowhere that she has practically nowhere to go tonight but up.  If she turns in a shaky or poor performance tonight, McCain will have two choices: pack it in, or bring back Reverend Wright with a vengeance that may or may not backfire.  But I digress.

Palin was a small town mayor just 5 years ago, and that helps people to relate to her on a personal level.  Her manner of speaking, when it makes sense, is reassuring in its familiarity, if not its substance.  And, I assume Palin got the Barracuda nickname for a reason.  We’ve already seen on the campaign trail that she’s not afraid to hurl canned attack lines over enemy lines.  A Campaign aide claims that Palin is “in a fighting mood” after the criticism she’s received recently.  So, we can expect her to hammer Obama (may not be necessary  to bother with Biden, just as Biden has been advised to politely ignore Palin and hit McCain) and look and sound “fiesty”.  Amy Poehler nailed it in her last SNL skit (she played Katie Couric) when she asked Tina Fey’s Palin “It seems to me that when cornered, you become increasingly adorable. Is that fair to say?”

One of the biggest mistakes Palin keeps making, though, is that it takes her three tries to say, essentially, “I’m not an expert on that, but here’s my gut feeling.”  So, when asked by her press pool of 1, Katie Couric, what other Supreme Court decisions she disagreed with (besides Roe v. Wade), she said this:

Palin: Well, let’s see. There’s, of course in the great history of America there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but …

Couric: Can you think of any?

Palin: Well, I could think of … any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But, you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a vice president, if I’m so privileged to serve, wouldn’t be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today.

She should have said, on the first go, “You know, Katie, I’m not a Supreme Court scholar.  But what I will tell you is that if I should be in the position to nominate anyone to that highest court in this great country, I would be guided by the same principles I stand by on Roe v. Wade.  I’m going to want to see judges who will uphold states’ rights, and stick to the constitution.”  Had she admitted up front to Couric that she simply didn’t have a court case to name, she might have spared herself (and us) the agony.

Joe Biden, who gets so little attention these days, deserves credit for a polished interview with Katie “She’s Everywhere” Couric this week.  Compare Couric’s Q and A on Roe v. Wade with each of them.  Biden handles it delicately, but he’s very articulate (without being too high-minded) and resolutely invokes the critical principle behind the Court’s decision: the right to privacy.  When Couric asks Palin about if she believes in the right to privacy, on which Couric noted that ruling turned, you get the sense she didn’t already know, and didn’t connect the dots.  Instead, she just sort of kept reaching for home base . . . the talking point on states’ rights.

If Palin manages to get through this debate gaffe-free, it won’t be enough to win back the momentum for the McCain ticket.  The Couric interviews irreparably shook people’s confidence in Palin.  But this debate could at least stop the bleeding.

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Smearing Gwen Ifill – just in time

October 2, 2008 at 3:32 am · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

You’ve no doubt heard today that Gwen Ifill, the moderator for tonight’s vice presidential debate, is under heavy fire from conservative corners, nay conservative armies, because of her ‘obvious’ bias toward Senator Obama in the the presidential election.  This smear campaign against a solid journalist has come just in time to, as I like to say, ice the kicker- in this case, the moderator herself.  And even if Ifill doesn’t flinch tonight (which she won’t, because she’s a professional), this false controversy conveniently changes the narrative from will-Sarah-Palin-be-an-embarassment-to-her-ticket tonight, to if she is embarassing, it will be Gwen Ifill’s fault.

I’m going to start by pointing out the obvious: Ifill is black.  Yesterday I began to vaguely worry that some folks out there would begin to presume a color bias from Ifill, especially if she does her job well and Sarah Palin does hers poorly.

But Ifill has actually left the proof of her bias in plain sight: since last year, she has been working on and promoting a new book called – get this – “”The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”  Clearly, she’s in the tank.

I’m trying really hard to imagine if the roles were reversed. Unfortunately, all I can come up with is what if the moderator were Bill O’Reilly.  It’s just not the same thing, and is of course ridiculous (as would be liberal fave Keith Olbermann).  I can only hope I would be as fair as I expect people to be to Ifill.

Certainly the title itself, especially if you only hear “The Age of Obama” could lead you to imagine Ifill is expressing support for Mr. Obama.  Is she?  And there is the matter of if Obama actually wins . . . then a book about him and post-civil rights political leaders might actually sell better.  Yes, Ifill and her book will benefit from Obama’s election.  So the question is, is Ifill the sort of journalist who would throw a debate for a profit?

To his credit, John McCain is completely convinced that Ifill is an “honest, decent journalist” who will be “perfectly fair” to Palin and Biden.  But on second thought, “Does this help that she has written a book that is favorable to Obama?” he wondered.  ”Probably not.”  Luckily, Sarah Palin – the potential victim in Ifill’s crosshairs – is totally taking it on the chin.

You know, I’m not going to let it be a concern.  Let me just tell you that John McCain has been in an underdog position before, and this ticket, I think it is safe to say, is in an underdog position . . .

It’s motivating to me, even, to hear Gwen’s comments there because, again, it makes us work that much harder, and it provides even more fairness and objectivity and choices for the voters on November 4, if we try that much harder.

What comments exactly is Palin referring to, anyway?  Has she – or anyone out there – read any excerpts of the book?  What in it tells us that she is an advocate for Obama?  Perhaps a snippet from her August 21st TIME magazine article, (presumably a warm up for the book coming out in January) will bring Ifill’s obvious bias into focus:

Obama’s rise has demonstrated so far that a lot of that protest worked, and this latest wave of black politicians is living, breathing evidence of it. Only one generation removed from the protests their parents led, many are Ivy League graduates in their 30s, 40s and 50s who remember the 1960s–and even the 1970s–only from old video and the printed page.

But Obama is just one member of a generation of political leaders faced with a new task: honoring the contributions of their forebears without alienating the broader, multiracial audiences they need to win. I’ve spent part of the past year tracking dozens of these rising stars and have concluded that anyone who thinks Obama is unique is not paying attention. (emphasis added)

The Daily Kos – seemingly the first and only responder to the smearing of Gwen Ifill all over the internet yesterday – makes a crucial point here, lost in all of the conservative fury:

[Ifill] devotes the article to other black leaders, and specifically not to Obama.  Obama is the mere figurehead to a larger phenomenon in the African American community.  It is not an advocacy for Obama, just that the trend that he represents means a new era.

The McCain campaign, if this misplaced outrage weren’t so convenient, should put this tempest in a teapot to an unceremonious end.  If anyone on their team seriously thought she had a conflict of interest to serve as a debate moderator, why on earth did they agree to her??  Why didn’t they exercise their veto? (Tom Brokaw said recently that the McCain team originally vetoed any moderator from NBC)

It’s possible that Gwen Ifill loves Barack Obama and plans to swing the debate his way (via Joe Biden).  But it is also possible that Ifill, a top notch journalist with so respected a reputation that both sides agreed to her moderating the vice presidential debate tonight, has produced a work not about her idol Barack Obama, but in fact a book about post-civil rights black politicians – among whom she argues, Obama is not unique.  It’s even possible that the internet hissy fit over her book could now actually tilt Ifill’s performance – in favor of the McCain ticket – as moderator.  I guess it all depends on what kind of journalist Gwen Ifill really is.

Either way, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden won’t be the only ones under the microscope tonight.

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Does Obama have a lock on this thing now?

October 1, 2008 at 4:02 pm · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

With his surprisingly strong showings in Quinnipiac’s latest polls in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, Barack Obama’s prospects for winning this thing have never looked better.  Even if these three polls are extreme outliers (wait, Obama up by how many in Florida??), they do mirror the less dramatic shift we’ve seen in other polls in the last two weeks in not just these three states, but all of the ten most watched battlegrounds.

Obama’s uncomfortably tight mid-September leads in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico and Pennsylvania are now in the 4 – 10 point range.  Michigan, which had been a top target for the McCain campaign is looking like safe Obama country, he’s surging in Virginia to at least a real neck-and-neck tie (new polls show a < 2 point Obama edge), and, the Quinnipiac poll shows a burst of support for Obama in Ohio, a must-win for McCain.  Incredibly, Obama’s even putting North Carolina back in play.  (New NC polling also shows incumbent GOP senator Elizabeth Dole is now in serious trouble.)  And of course, no one mentions the perennial battleground state of Iowa, because, well, it practically in the “solid” Obama column this year.

As I have previously written, Obama’s path to electoral victory is much easier than McCain’s.  So long as he keeps Michigan and Pennsylvania (and, having already pocketed Iowa), and retains Minnesota and Wisconsin, then it’s just a matter of picking a couple of the remaining 6-8 swing states.  If McCain can’t pick off any of the four states I just mentioned, he needs to pretty much sweep the remaining swing states.  And now he is behind in almost all of them (I haven’t yet mentioned Nevada, which still slightly leans McCain, or New Hampshire, which has been leaning Obama).

Andrew Romano, over at Newsweek, puts this winning streak in perspective:

Does this mean that McCain is toast? Hardly. As September has shown, support for the candidates can fluctuate wildly in response to events, and there’s still time remaining on the clock for a comeback. Obama could still lose–easily. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the Arizona senator now faces a steeper climb than ever before–with fewer days left for climbing.  As the New Republic’s John Judis has pointed out, “since 1960, Gallup’s [Oct. 1] tracking poll registered the winner in the popular vote (including Al Gore in 2000), eleven of twelve times.” Usually the race narrows somewhat at the end, but “in six of th[o]se elections–1960, 1964, 1976, 1984, 1988 and 2000–the final margin was different from the Oct. 1 polling results by less than three percentage points.”

Which is why Obamans should be heartened by the latest stats from Gallup: Obama 50, McCain 42. On Election Day, the Bradley Effect–overstated support for black candidates–may cost Obama two or three points at the polls. Undersampled cell-phone voters and increased black and youth turnout may boost him by the same amount–or more. But either way, the fact remains: Obama merely needs to maintain altitude between now and Nov. 4. McCain needs to bring him down.

And how.  If the election were held today, the result would be 348 (Obama) -189 (McCain).  Yesterday, the map showed 301 – 237.  And two weeks ago, when McCain was riding a really long post-convention bump, it was still at 273 – 265 (in this scenario, New Hampshire could decide the election).

One very narrow path I see to McCain pulling off an upset is through Sarah Palin.  While all the other trending Democratic battleground states get bluer (Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, Michigan), Minnesota stubbornly remains on the fence.  Could Sarah Palin’s hockey mom vibe help McCain here?  I guess the post-Veep debate polls will tell.

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