Posts Tagged George Will

John Quixote and his trusty Sancho Palin

October 10, 2008 at 2:58 am · Filed under Economy, Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Just in case John McCain’s flashy, nutty, new bailout plan doesn’t catch fire (and it most certainly won’t, even among his staunchest supporters), McCain and all his surrogates are trying desperately to sow last minute doubts about Obama’s character in voters’ minds.  This line of attack is all over the news, but to McCain supporters’ chagrin, it just doesn’t seem to be sticking to Obama.

The conservative columnist George Will, who now compares McCain – Palin to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, sums up why the attacks don’t stick:

But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts — telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seem surreal — or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

I just got my envelope in the mail today.  I’ve lost 15% of my 401 (K) savings in this last quarter. I don’t give a crap who these two candidates know, used to know or ever wanted to know.  I just want this economic meltdown to stop.  I’m freaked out.  I’m worried about the job market, the housing market, the (health) insurance market.  And I can pretty much guarantee the candidates that all voters want to hear from them is a convincing grasp of the problem and its solutions.

My guess is that team McCain will continue their irrelevant line of character attacks through Sunday, when the media will have tired of reporting on the character fight and will turn instead to McCain’s last-chance-debate narrative.  If, at that point, his poll numbers continue to slide or flag, he’ll abandon this too for some other shiny new tactic he hopes will save the sinking ship.

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“McCain Loses His Head”

September 24, 2008 at 1:14 am · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , ,

McCain Loses His Head

By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; A21
The Washington Post

[Excerpts of today’s commentary below.  The entire piece is here.]

“The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said without even looking around.”

— “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

To read the Journal’s details about the depths of McCain’s shallowness on the subject of Cox’s chairmanship, see “McCain’s Scapegoat” (Sept. 19) . . . 

In any case, McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people. McCain’s Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaigning . . . 

On “60 Minutes” Sunday evening, McCain, saying “this may sound a little unusual,” said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has “respect” and “prestige” and could “lend some bipartisanship.” Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
 

George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author.

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On Economy, John McCain channels George Constanza

September 19, 2008 at 11:23 pm · Filed under Economy, Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

How the presidential candidates response to real-life economic crisis is an excellent barometer for the kind of leadership we can expect from them if we elect them in November. 

So, Barack Obama stayed cool.  He has been measured, stern and, frankly nonpartisan in his response.  He has offered to “refrain from laying out a more detailed plan” to deal with the crisis until he has been fully briefed of the response being put together by Treasury Secretary Paulson, Fed Chairman Bernanke and congressional leaders, in an effort to keep highly-charged presidential politics from poisoning the well.  This is “not a time for fear, for panic,” he said today, but a time for “resolve and leadership.”  As I heard Pat Buchanan say tonight on MSNBC’s Race to the White House, Obama “realizes the near catastrophe” that could ensue if a swift and effective government response careens off course.  Buchanan went on to compliment Obama, whom he called a “quasi-statesman” in his handling of the crisis, and added that, having been dealt a good hand (in an accidental and unfortunate way) in the economic news this week, Obama has “played it exceedingly well.”

John McCain’s response to the news out of Wall Street has been slightly more excited:

 

 

McCain has gone from being “fundamentally a de-regulator” of private markets to lashing out against Wall Street, calling for heads to roll, creating new agencies, introducing crisis plans and taking ridiculously cheap potshots at Obama in a rush of negative ads.  On ABC’s This Week, the conservative George Will criticized McCain’s performance as “unpresidential” . . . “substituting vehemence for coherence.”  

This is not to say that the credit crisis is not to be taken very seriously.  But McCain’s political exercises– during a genuinely fragile time for the markets — are transparent and in poor taste. From an L.A. Times story:

McCain did not comment on the administration’s rescue plan Friday. Campaigning in Wisconsin and Minnesota, the GOP nominee instead devoted large sections of his comments to assailing Obama in increasingly personal terms.

McCain repeatedly questioned Obama’s ethics and accused him of putting his own interest ahead of the nation’s. And he issued dire warnings about the consequences of supporting the Democratic nominee. “A vote for Barack Obama will leave this country at risk during one of the most severe challenges to America’s economy since the Great Depression,” McCain told thousands of supporters at a rally in Blaine, Minn.

Obama, who has also grown increasingly combative, fired back at a rally in a sports arena in Coral Gables, Fla.

“This is a guy who spent nearly three decades in Washington, and after spending the entire campaign saying I haven’t been in Washington long enough, he apparently now is willing to assign me responsibility for all of Washington’s failures,” Obama said.

“I think it’s pretty clear that Sen. McCain’s a little panicked right now.”

I think so too.

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