McCain takes 5-point lead over Obama

[Beet]

That much has been made abundantly clear, but then there's the question of Obama being any better.

There's no possible way I would consider McCain better on the economy...if Obama wasn't advocating raising taxes on the rich in the middle of an economic downturn.  We have enough trouble with investment dollars sitting on the sidelines as it is.

The point in 2008 should be who's fault is it that the economy is in the middle of an economic downturn? The incumbent president, as far as I'm aware, isn't a Democrat

Clearly, that base low-life John McCain's character assassinations on Obama are paying off

More of the failed same John McVain? Erm, no thanks. The GOP nominee must be held accountable for what Bush less than stellar record

Dave

No, that should not be the point. And it's always just as amusing to hear you call him a "base low-life"...because of his character assasination! Lol.

If the American people are clever enough to realize that the incumbent, term-limited president is irrelevant to the election at hand I'd be encouraged. 

Well, he leaves a substantial legacy of both policy and politics which, while not decisive, form the context of the next Presidency. That said, if McCain were a real moderate (as opposed to just a "maverick") in any of the three major areas of policy (social, economic, or foreign) I would give him another look.

[Beet]

That much has been made abundantly clear, but then there's the question of Obama being any better.

There's no possible way I would consider McCain better on the economy...if Obama wasn't advocating raising taxes on the rich in the middle of an economic downturn.  We have enough trouble with investment dollars sitting on the sidelines as it is.

The point in 2008 should be who's fault is it that the economy is in the middle of an economic downturn? The incumbent president, as far as I'm aware, isn't a Democrat

Clearly, that base low-life John McCain's character assassinations on Obama are paying off

More of the failed same John McVain? Erm, no thanks. The GOP nominee must be held accountable for what Bush less than stellar record

Dave

No, that should not be the point. And it's always just as amusing to hear you call him a "base low-life"...because of his character assasination! Lol.

If the American people are clever enough to realize that the incumbent, term-limited president is irrelevant to the election at hand I'd be encouraged. 

Well, he leaves a substantial legacy of both policy and politics which, while not decisive, form the context of the next Presidency. That said, if McCain were a real moderate (as opposed to just a "maverick") in any of the three major areas of policy (social, economic, or foreign) I would give him another look.

Unless any of the candidates is a "successor" to the incumbent he has no relevance. The idea that people should vote for the Democratic candidate just because Bush was bad is ridiculous. And Dave, like everyone else, would call it out as ridiculous if it had been an impopular Democratic president stepping down.

Of course the incumbent has relevance, through his or her actions. McCain is a "successor" to Bush in many ways: despite McCain's one or two 'maverick' positions, they agree, for the most part, on foreign policy, economic policy, and social policy. Did McCain not campaign for Bush in 2004? Did he not say he was proud of it? Do his foreign policy views not have a heavily aggressive, neoconservative bent? Does he not support the Bush tax cuts and extending them? Does he not now court the support of the religious right?

Sadly, politicians do not tend to shift as much as the facts on the ground do. Many liberals in 1960 were still liberals in 1975 (to their credit, some were not) even though it meant something very different to be a liberal in 1975 than in 1960. McCain is one of those that stays on the right even when that means going further to the right than he was at a certain point in his past. That is expected of him, since the GOP must represent the right-of-center no matter what the status quo is, but that does not mean the voters should not take into account how things have changed in the past eight years.

Suppose you opposed Bush's tax cut plan in 2000 and supported McCain. By 2008, you still oppose Bush's tax cut plan, but now McCain supports it because it has become status quo. Or suppose you supported the war in Iraq in 2003, but expected a commitment of no more than 5 years and also supported diplomacy with Iran. By 2008, you still think the war was a good idea and 5 years are up; and you still support diplomacy with Iran. It is your hypothetical positions that are consistent here, not the politician's.

[Beet]

Suppose you opposed Bush's tax cut plan in 2000 and supported McCain. By 2008, you still oppose Bush's tax cut plan, but now McCain supports it because it has become status quo. Or suppose you supported the war in Iraq in 2003, but expected a commitment of no more than 5 years and also supported diplomacy with Iran. By 2008, you still think the war was a good idea and 5 years are up; and you still support diplomacy with Iran. It is your hypothetical positions that are consistent here, not the politician's.

I opposed the Bush tax cut plan in 2000 but support keeping it now because, again, I do not believe in raising taxes in bad economic times.  Certainly, the right economic policy for now will not be the same as the right economic policy for eight years ago.

I was just using that as an example to illustrate the general point that an incumbent's actions make a difference, since politicians (and sometimes voters, such as yourself) base their position-taking on the status quo, and an 8-year incumbent will heavily influence what that status quo is. If the incumbent's policies have been unsuccessful, and the next candidate is promising to continue many of the same policies, then the predecessor's lack of success is quite relevant.

For example, if the Bush era's low tax rates have gotten us to this economic point, what does it say about Bush's tax structure as far as helping the economy?

[Beet]

I'm not sure what you're arguing. I understand that many people (myself included) would have been happy to see McCain tell Bush and the Religious Right go  themselves and then proceeded to win the nomination and the presidency. If it were a movie, that might happen, to the sound of sentimental music, intervowen with clips from his toughest moments. But this is not a movie, it's a real world. What did you expect? We all know that McCain does not like Bush and will not continue his policies in a lot of areas.

Let's look at some areas.
McCain supports Bush on taxes; the entire revenue side of the fiscal/economic equation.
McCain opposes any move toward universal health care coverage.
McCain voted against the SCHIP reauthorization bill, which 18 Republican Senators voted for.
McCain supports teaching of intelligent design in public schools.
McCain has talked about a long term, permanent presence in Iraq.
McCain championed campaign finance reform but supports justices who will basically gut those reforms.
McCain's plan to kick Russia out of the G-8 is not only impractical but would basically start another Cold War.
McCain says he's against reckless spending but his fiscal plan has a $5 trillion hole.
McCain's campaign seems to be staffed with many of the same people and seems to be running the same kind of campaign that Bush ran. 

Sure there are some differences.

He has a GHG limit in his environmental plan (but not the credits for windmills whose images he used in his ads).

But as we've seen with Bush, laws can be subverted or significantly reduced through the use of signing statements, poor regulatory enforcement, and judicial interpretation. Even the facts that are necessary to have a worthwhile debate on the subject are now being suppressed as today's story out of the EPA shows:

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Now you can say, well McCain is different, he won't do that, etc. etc., but how do you know? The reality is that Republican administrators will enforce those laws as weakly as possible, Republican judges will interpret environmental laws in ways favorable to business, and a Republican President has less incentive to enforce a law that goes against his political base.

McCain is entrapped in that system, just and he would be as President just as much as he is now running for President and just as he was last year running for the nomination, if not more. Bush too ran as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative" who would do things differently. But it did not turn out that way because of conservative hubris.

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If McCain dislikes the religious right, why does he keep pandering to them? According to an Op-Ed published on the Miami Herald blog-

"Since the campaign began, McCain has deemed gay couples unfit to be adoptive parents, and declared that openly gay people in the military would put our national security “at grave risk”. Recently, McCain switched from supporting a federalist approach to define marriage, to actively endorsing an anti-gay amendment to California’s state Constitution, and he described a scenario where he might flip from his past opposition to a national Constitutional amendment prohibiting gay unions. Gay former Congressman Jim Kolbe’s praise of McCain for being “straightforward and consistent” has become laughable.

The most lasting and devastating damage McCain could bring to gay Americans would come via his imprint on the United States Supreme Court. At a recent forum, McCain said he would never have nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, or John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. These four jurists happen to be ones who found it unconstitutional for any state to criminalize sexual relations between consenting adults. For his part, Obama cited Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as Justices he would not have nominated. They are the Court’s two jurists most disdainful of any legal recognition for gay Americans, and support the rights of states to criminalize gay men and women for having sex."

It may be true that McCain dislikes the religious right, and they dislike him. He does seem to have a real proclivity toward independence and taking maverick positions at times. But McCain's independence is neutralized for all practical and effective purposes under the weight of the need to represent his base.

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It is not as if Bush ran as a traditional conservative in 2000. His father was not known as a doctrinaire conservative and he claimed to be a "compassionate conservative," somehow fundamentally modifying conservatism. We now know that was but a campaign slogan, but it was believable at the time.

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I disagree. The only real change in American politics comes through elections. It doesn't come through approval ratings. The latter are just statistics. If approval ratings don't translate into votes, why should the government take your "approval" or non-approval seriously?

After every American election there are post-mortems and interpretations that emerge and fundamentally alter the future direction of U.S. politics. Take a moment to imagine what the post-mortems and interpretations would be after a McCain victory in 2008. Yes, there will be some talk about how the Republicans did a good job by nominating someone with a maverick reputation, etc.

But the most cutting commentary will be directed at the Democrats. The Democrats, it will be said, failed to understand the basic nature of the electorate. "America is a center-right country" as ADHuke says. Therefore, government must be center-right. Politicians must be center-right. Whatever failings Bush perpetuated, a real turn away from Bush's policies, his political coalitions, and his governing philosophy will fall by the wayside toward the "new wisdom" about the "basic center-right America" and how Democrats must emulate it to win. In short, Bush's political and policy positions will be permanently entrenched in the conventional wisdom of both parties. I don't think he could ask for any more vindication than that, and I think it would be an utter and absolute disaster for this country.

[Beet]

That much has been made abundantly clear, but then there's the question of Obama being any better.

There's no possible way I would consider McCain better on the economy...if Obama wasn't advocating raising taxes on the rich in the middle of an economic downturn.  We have enough trouble with investment dollars sitting on the sidelines as it is.

To be frank with the current deficit and current account deficit figures, and McCain's nearly deranged fiscal promises to cut taxes or give gazzillion dollar balances to any group I would consider Obama better even if he was promoting a 35% Capital Gains tax and I am a day trader. McCain  would be a continuation of the supply side economics that agree rapidly turning us into an economic basket case.

The markets are smarter than high schoolers, they respond to sane fiscal policies altogether more than the micro incentives if they are surrounded by nonsenical policy. That's why Clinton's tax increase in 1993 set off the largest economic expansion in history, and Bush's have driven the economy further into collapse. Clinton's showed the grown-ups were in charge, Bush's that ideological children with no sense were. McCain for his part understood that at the time. He's just "forgotten" it. If he remembered that opposition I might be able to force myself to vote for him over Obama. Now I can't understand how anyone who cares about the country or economy could.

As for investment dollars, the opposite is actually the problem. The bear stearns bailout, and controls on short selling is forcing billions into worthless financial stocks. The government has created a massive bubble and the best performing stocks of the last month all have negative equity and should not exist as companies. But because there are rules in place making it impossible for them to fail, everyone is dumping Microsoft to buy Washington Mutual. Watch, all the administration has done with its bailouts is create a much more massive bubble that is going to burst this fall. They should have taken over Bear Stearns and Fannie Mae. It would have been bad for the economy in the same sense taking over Northern Rock was for the Brits, but every major British bank is turning a profit this year because they got the message that their shareholders and execs would be ruined if a they didn't cvlean up their act. And their property collapse was worse than ours. Instead here we have given billions of dollars to the same executives that caused this mess. It would be a good thing if we cooled off buying of worthless stocks, and quite frankly McCain is just going to create more bubbles.

Ah, yes, higher taxer are better taxes as they somehow magically increase propserity.  Imagine how well off we could be if we simply doubled taxes.

Now, there are those who might suggest that we might want to contain expenditures, but that is a concept which escape liberals.  However, the truth is that the economic expansion we had in the mid though late nineties was because Congress (in a rare example of integrity) kept the growth of expenditures down.

Also, there we a number of reforms in government programs in the mid nineties (which liberals would like to forget, or at least not mention) which helped the economy.

A thoughtful fiscal policy (dealing with expenditures as well as revenues), coupled with a prudent monetary policy, and integrated with a reasonable regulatory policy can help us achieve properity.
Simply imposing tax increases, is, well, dumb.

Yes, because "containing expenditures" worked so well during the Great Depression...

If the economy were really going into a recession next year you will be not be seeing any tax hikes that could be perceived to exacerbate that, no matter who is President. Both parties were rushing to push money back into the hands of consumers this spring, and they're perfectly content to run up deficits during hard times to support stimulate the economy when it's in trouble.

The real question is whether economists will at some point begin to see a recession as a necessary evil to kill inflationary expectations, as they did in the early 1980s.

[Beet]

Beet,

that's a damn long post. I'm not gonna answer all of those points tonight. I trust that you can appreciate that. I'll just say that generally I don't blame McCain morally that much for giving himself a serious chance at his party's nomination and I don't consider the moves he made to get that to be very significant of his real views. He doesn't believe in reckless tax cuts, he believes in responsible environmental policies, he's not a religious conservative, etc.

Here are projected government finances:



Here is what McCain about taxes, 4 days after this report:
"And I think that what we need is more tax cuts. We need to make Bush tax cuts permanent. We need to get rid of the AMT. We need to cut corporate taxes."
He also proposed to make it harder to raise taxes: It should require a 3/5 majority vote in Congress to raise taxes.

3/5 in the House is 261 votes. Needless to say, this would effectively kill any ability by Congress to raise revenue unless the Congressional leaders of both parties agree. We are already seeing in California what happens when this kind of restriction is imposed at the state level- gridlock.

http://www.ontheissues.org/Economic/John_McCain_Tax_Reform.htm

Looking at the chart, McCain's proposed cuts, and his proposed increase in the bar to raise revenue, how can you say it is not reckless?

Note, McCain also called himself a "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution".

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How exactly is the McCain brand of Republicanism so different than the Bush brand? Yes, McCain has played up his maverick credentials, but look at where they actually differ. McCain's few real maverick positions (on campaign finance, immigration, global warming) are (a) going to be gutted by the justices he supports, (b) the same position as Bush's, and (c) only widely scientifically accepted, including by the Bush administration itself.

None of these are incompatibile with being a conservative Republican. McCain, who votes in Bush's support 90% of the time, has an 82 lifetime rating from the ACU, and was one of the 10 most conservative Senators in the Senate for the last 3 Congresses, is a maverick, but not a moderate. "McCain's direction" is not that different from "Bush's direction."

And I dispute that a McCain loss would not move the Republican party in a moderate direction- it would do a lot more than a McCain win. As I've said before, a Republican loss would force them to find a broader coalition of support, and for really the first time since the 1980s. That would do a lot more to move them in a moderate direction than anything else.

I don't deny that Obama is 'liberal' on most traditional issues. But it was John Edwards who was the extremist, hard line candidate in the primaries. After he flamed out, the activists turned to Obama mostly because they hated all things Clinton. And there are a few telling exceptions. He doesn't support mandates on health insurance- and he does support continuing Bush's religious charities program.

But Obama has mostly run a procedural campaign- whether you believe in it or not is up to you, but there is a premise. The political polarization in America has been driven for three decades in large part by the demonization of each side by the other. Each side has been dominated by special interest groups led by extremist leaders who would not even think of talking to each other, and the party leaders have been pushed to emulate them. When one side 'takes control' even by the slimmest of margins, they try to push through the most extreme version of their agenda with no voice for the minority, and when the other side takes control vice versa. There is very little shared space, shared values, in the discussion- regardless of whether we have divided or unified government.

This has turned a lot of people off to politics. The language and values Obama is using and the coalition he is trying to build are premised on the notion of ending this kind of procedural phenomena, that even though he takes mostly liberal positions, his implementation of these positions will be less extreme and dogmatic because it will not be driven by an unthinking hostility to the other side. Behind it all is a desire to put the Boomer polarization that started in the '60s behind us (and yes as Obama has admitted that means putting some of his own ghosts and acquaintances firmly in the past). A victory for this kind of politics will do more than anything else toward moderating the tone of our politics without necessarily assuming that the centrist position is always correct or incorrect. Again, you may agree or disagree of whether this is possible, but that is the promise. And he seems very serious (and consistent) about this, given his attendance at Saddleback, his spending in states like Montana and North Carolina, his reluctance to launch negative ads, some of his strategies, and his language.

But if you are concerned with the center as a whole (as am I), what ultimately matters more is the center in the country as a whole than within each party itself. After 8 years of a conservative Republican President, what would it say about the center of the country as a whole to have a Democratic one? In the long run it would hold up a lot better than if one conservative Republican followed another.