Presidential election may be up for grabs
- Thread starter a_majoor
- Start date
It seems to me that executive level experience is just one factor. Having reviewed the careers of the men who have held the job during my lifetime, executive level experience is not an indicator of success in the oval office. To wit:
Roosevelt - assistant secretary of the navy, governor of New York,
Truman - senator,
Eisenhower - supreme allied commander in Europe,
Kennedy - senator,
Johnson - representative,
Nixon - vice president for Eisenhower,
Ford - representative,
Carter - governor of Georgia,
Reagan - governor of California,
Bush 41 - represntative, head of the CIA,
Clinton - governor of Arkansas, and
Bush 43 - governor of Texas.
You can juggle names all you wish into lists of successful, unsuccessfuls and also rans, but it appears to me that there are other qualities required to thrive in the political culture in Washington. The ability to herd cats comes to mind.
Roosevelt - assistant secretary of the navy, governor of New York,
Truman - senator,
Eisenhower - supreme allied commander in Europe,
Kennedy - senator,
Johnson - representative,
Nixon - vice president for Eisenhower,
Ford - representative,
Carter - governor of Georgia,
Reagan - governor of California,
Bush 41 - represntative, head of the CIA,
Clinton - governor of Arkansas, and
Bush 43 - governor of Texas.
You can juggle names all you wish into lists of successful, unsuccessfuls and also rans, but it appears to me that there are other qualities required to thrive in the political culture in Washington. The ability to herd cats comes to mind.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 24, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Last Call for Change We Can Believe In
By FRANK RICH
AS the real campaign at last begins in Denver this week, this much is certain: It’s time for Barack Obama to dispatch “Change We Can Believe In” to a dignified death.
This isn’t because — OMG! — Obama’s narrow three- to four-percentage-point lead of recent weeks dropped to a statistically indistinguishable one- to three-point margin during his week of vacation. It’s because zero hour is here. As the presidential race finally gains the country’s full attention, the strategy that vanquished Hillary Clinton must be rebooted to take out John McCain.
“Change We Can Believe In” was brilliantly calculated for a Democratic familial brawl where every candidate was promising nearly identical change from George Bush. It branded Obama as the sole contender with the un-Beltway biography, credibility and political talent to link the promise of change to the nation’s onrushing generational turnover in all its cultural (and, yes, racial) manifestations. McCain should be a far easier mark than Clinton if Obama retools his act.
What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.
What Obama also should have learned by now is that the press is not his friend. Of course, he gets more ink and airtime than McCain; he’s sexier news. But as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs documented in its study of six weeks of TV news reports this summer, Obama’s coverage was 28 percent positive, 72 percent negative. (For McCain, the split was 43/57.) Even McCain’s most blatant confusions, memory lapses and outright lies still barely cause a ripple, whether he’s railing against a piece of pork he in fact voted for, as he did at the Saddleback Church pseudodebate last weekend, or falsifying crucial details of his marital history in his memoirs, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered in court records last month.
What should Obama do now? As premature panic floods through certain liberal precincts, there’s no shortage of advice: more meat to his economic plan, more passion in his stump delivery, less defensiveness in response to attacks and, as is now happening, sharper darts at a McCain lifestyle so extravagant that we are only beginning to learn where all the beer bullion is buried.
But Obama is never going to be a John Edwards-style populist barnburner. (Edwards wasn’t persuasive either, by the way.) Nor will wonkish laundry lists of policy details work any better for him than they did for Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. Obama has those details to spare, in any case, while McCain, who didn’t even include an education policy on his Web site during primary season, is still winging it. As David Leonhardt observes in his New York Times Magazine cover article on “Obamanomics” today, Obama’s real problem is not a lack of detail but his inability to sell policy with “an effective story.”
That story is there to be told, but it has to be a story that is more about America and the future and less about Obama and his past. After all these months, most Americans, for better or worse, know who Obama is. So much so that he seems to have fought off the relentless right-wing onslaught to demonize him as an elitist alien. Asked in last week’s New York Times/CBS News poll if each candidate shares their values, registered voters gave Obama and McCain an identical 63 percent. Asked if each candidate “cares about the needs and problems of people like yourself,” Obama beat McCain by 37 to 23 percent. Is the candidate “someone you can relate to”? Obama: 55 percent, McCain: 41. Even before McCain told Politico that he relies on the help to count up the houses he owns, he was the candidate seen as the out-of-step elitist.
So while Obama can continue to try to reassure resistant Clinton loyalists in Appalachia that he’s not a bogeyman from Madrassaland, he must also move on to the bigger picture for everyone else. He must rekindle the “fierce urgency of now” — but not, as he did in the primaries, merely to evoke uplifting echoes of the civil-rights struggle or the need for withdrawal from Iraq.
Most Americans, unlike the press, are not obsessed by race. (Those whites who are obsessed by race will not vote for Obama no matter what he or anyone else has to say about it.) And most Americans have turned their backs on the Iraq war, no matter how much McCain keeps bellowing about “victory.” The Bush White House is now poised to alight with the Iraqi government on a withdrawal timetable far closer to Obama’s 16 months than McCain’s vague promise of a 2013 endgame. As Gen. David Petraeus returns home, McCain increasingly resembles those mad Japanese soldiers who remained at war on remote Pacific islands years after Hiroshima.
Economic anxiety is the new terrorism. This is why the most relevant snapshot of voters’ concerns was not to be found at Saddleback Church but at the Olympics last Saturday. For all the political press’s hype, only some 5.5 million viewers tuned in to the Rev. Rick Warren’s show in Orange County, Calif. Roughly three-quarters of them were over 50 — in other words, the McCain base. By contrast, a diverse audience of 32 million Americans tuned in to Beijing that night to watch Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal.
This was a rare feel-good moment for a depressed country. But the unsettling subtext of the Olympics has been as resonant for Americans as the Phelps triumph. You couldn’t watch NBC’s weeks of coverage without feeling bombarded by an ascendant China whose superior cache of gold medals and dazzling management of the Games became a proxy for its spectacular commercial and cultural prowess in the new century. Even before the Olympics began, a July CNN poll found that 70 percent of Americans fear China’s economic might — about as many as find America on the wrong track. Americans watching the Olympics could not escape the reality that China in particular and Asia in general will continue to outpace our country in growth while we remain mired in stagnancy and debt (much of it held by China).
How we dig out of this quagmire is the American story that Obama must tell. It is not a story of endless conflicts abroad but a potentially inspiring tale of serious economic, educational, energy and health-care mobilization at home. We don’t have the time or resources to go off on more quixotic military missions or to indulge in culture wars. (In China, they’re too busy exploiting scientific advances for competitive advantage to reopen settled debates about Darwin.) Americans must band together for change before the new century leaves us completely behind. The Obama campaign actually has plans, however imperfect or provisional, to set us on that path; the McCain campaign offers only disposable Band-Aids typified by the “drill now” mantra that even McCain says will only have a “psychological” effect on gas prices.
Even as it points to America’s future, the Obama campaign also has the duty to fill in its opponent’s past. McCain’s attacks on Obama have worked: in last week’s Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, Obama’s favorable rating declined from 59 to 48 percent and his negative rating rose from 27 to 35. Yet McCain still has a lower positive rating (46 percent) and higher negative rating (38) than Obama. McCain is not nearly as popular among Americans, it turns out, as he is among his journalistic camp followers. Should voters actually get to know him, he has nowhere to go but down.
The argument against Obama’s “going negative” is that it undermines his message of “transcendent politics” and will make him look like an “angry black man.” But pacifistic politics is an oxymoron, and Obama is constitutionally incapable of coming off angrier than McCain. A few more fisticuffs from the former law professor (and many more from his running mate and other surrogates) can only help make him look less skinny (metaphorically if not literally). Obama should go after McCain’s supposedly biggest asset — experience — much as McCain went after Obama’s crowd-drawing celebrity.
It is, after all, not mere happenstance that so many conservative pundits — Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Ramesh Ponnuru — have, to McCain’s irritation, proposed that he “patriotically” declare in advance that he will selflessly serve only a single term. Whatever their lofty stated reasons for promoting this stunt, their underlying message is clear: They recognize in their heart of hearts that the shelf life of McCain’s experience has already reached its expiration date.
Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?
R.I.P., “Change We Can Believe In.” The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It’s Too Late.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/opinion/24rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
August 24, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Last Call for Change We Can Believe In
By FRANK RICH
AS the real campaign at last begins in Denver this week, this much is certain: It’s time for Barack Obama to dispatch “Change We Can Believe In” to a dignified death.
This isn’t because — OMG! — Obama’s narrow three- to four-percentage-point lead of recent weeks dropped to a statistically indistinguishable one- to three-point margin during his week of vacation. It’s because zero hour is here. As the presidential race finally gains the country’s full attention, the strategy that vanquished Hillary Clinton must be rebooted to take out John McCain.
“Change We Can Believe In” was brilliantly calculated for a Democratic familial brawl where every candidate was promising nearly identical change from George Bush. It branded Obama as the sole contender with the un-Beltway biography, credibility and political talent to link the promise of change to the nation’s onrushing generational turnover in all its cultural (and, yes, racial) manifestations. McCain should be a far easier mark than Clinton if Obama retools his act.
What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.
What Obama also should have learned by now is that the press is not his friend. Of course, he gets more ink and airtime than McCain; he’s sexier news. But as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs documented in its study of six weeks of TV news reports this summer, Obama’s coverage was 28 percent positive, 72 percent negative. (For McCain, the split was 43/57.) Even McCain’s most blatant confusions, memory lapses and outright lies still barely cause a ripple, whether he’s railing against a piece of pork he in fact voted for, as he did at the Saddleback Church pseudodebate last weekend, or falsifying crucial details of his marital history in his memoirs, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered in court records last month.
What should Obama do now? As premature panic floods through certain liberal precincts, there’s no shortage of advice: more meat to his economic plan, more passion in his stump delivery, less defensiveness in response to attacks and, as is now happening, sharper darts at a McCain lifestyle so extravagant that we are only beginning to learn where all the beer bullion is buried.
But Obama is never going to be a John Edwards-style populist barnburner. (Edwards wasn’t persuasive either, by the way.) Nor will wonkish laundry lists of policy details work any better for him than they did for Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. Obama has those details to spare, in any case, while McCain, who didn’t even include an education policy on his Web site during primary season, is still winging it. As David Leonhardt observes in his New York Times Magazine cover article on “Obamanomics” today, Obama’s real problem is not a lack of detail but his inability to sell policy with “an effective story.”
That story is there to be told, but it has to be a story that is more about America and the future and less about Obama and his past. After all these months, most Americans, for better or worse, know who Obama is. So much so that he seems to have fought off the relentless right-wing onslaught to demonize him as an elitist alien. Asked in last week’s New York Times/CBS News poll if each candidate shares their values, registered voters gave Obama and McCain an identical 63 percent. Asked if each candidate “cares about the needs and problems of people like yourself,” Obama beat McCain by 37 to 23 percent. Is the candidate “someone you can relate to”? Obama: 55 percent, McCain: 41. Even before McCain told Politico that he relies on the help to count up the houses he owns, he was the candidate seen as the out-of-step elitist.
So while Obama can continue to try to reassure resistant Clinton loyalists in Appalachia that he’s not a bogeyman from Madrassaland, he must also move on to the bigger picture for everyone else. He must rekindle the “fierce urgency of now” — but not, as he did in the primaries, merely to evoke uplifting echoes of the civil-rights struggle or the need for withdrawal from Iraq.
Most Americans, unlike the press, are not obsessed by race. (Those whites who are obsessed by race will not vote for Obama no matter what he or anyone else has to say about it.) And most Americans have turned their backs on the Iraq war, no matter how much McCain keeps bellowing about “victory.” The Bush White House is now poised to alight with the Iraqi government on a withdrawal timetable far closer to Obama’s 16 months than McCain’s vague promise of a 2013 endgame. As Gen. David Petraeus returns home, McCain increasingly resembles those mad Japanese soldiers who remained at war on remote Pacific islands years after Hiroshima.
Economic anxiety is the new terrorism. This is why the most relevant snapshot of voters’ concerns was not to be found at Saddleback Church but at the Olympics last Saturday. For all the political press’s hype, only some 5.5 million viewers tuned in to the Rev. Rick Warren’s show in Orange County, Calif. Roughly three-quarters of them were over 50 — in other words, the McCain base. By contrast, a diverse audience of 32 million Americans tuned in to Beijing that night to watch Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal.
This was a rare feel-good moment for a depressed country. But the unsettling subtext of the Olympics has been as resonant for Americans as the Phelps triumph. You couldn’t watch NBC’s weeks of coverage without feeling bombarded by an ascendant China whose superior cache of gold medals and dazzling management of the Games became a proxy for its spectacular commercial and cultural prowess in the new century. Even before the Olympics began, a July CNN poll found that 70 percent of Americans fear China’s economic might — about as many as find America on the wrong track. Americans watching the Olympics could not escape the reality that China in particular and Asia in general will continue to outpace our country in growth while we remain mired in stagnancy and debt (much of it held by China).
How we dig out of this quagmire is the American story that Obama must tell. It is not a story of endless conflicts abroad but a potentially inspiring tale of serious economic, educational, energy and health-care mobilization at home. We don’t have the time or resources to go off on more quixotic military missions or to indulge in culture wars. (In China, they’re too busy exploiting scientific advances for competitive advantage to reopen settled debates about Darwin.) Americans must band together for change before the new century leaves us completely behind. The Obama campaign actually has plans, however imperfect or provisional, to set us on that path; the McCain campaign offers only disposable Band-Aids typified by the “drill now” mantra that even McCain says will only have a “psychological” effect on gas prices.
Even as it points to America’s future, the Obama campaign also has the duty to fill in its opponent’s past. McCain’s attacks on Obama have worked: in last week’s Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, Obama’s favorable rating declined from 59 to 48 percent and his negative rating rose from 27 to 35. Yet McCain still has a lower positive rating (46 percent) and higher negative rating (38) than Obama. McCain is not nearly as popular among Americans, it turns out, as he is among his journalistic camp followers. Should voters actually get to know him, he has nowhere to go but down.
The argument against Obama’s “going negative” is that it undermines his message of “transcendent politics” and will make him look like an “angry black man.” But pacifistic politics is an oxymoron, and Obama is constitutionally incapable of coming off angrier than McCain. A few more fisticuffs from the former law professor (and many more from his running mate and other surrogates) can only help make him look less skinny (metaphorically if not literally). Obama should go after McCain’s supposedly biggest asset — experience — much as McCain went after Obama’s crowd-drawing celebrity.
It is, after all, not mere happenstance that so many conservative pundits — Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Ramesh Ponnuru — have, to McCain’s irritation, proposed that he “patriotically” declare in advance that he will selflessly serve only a single term. Whatever their lofty stated reasons for promoting this stunt, their underlying message is clear: They recognize in their heart of hearts that the shelf life of McCain’s experience has already reached its expiration date.
Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?
R.I.P., “Change We Can Believe In.” The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It’s Too Late.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/opinion/24rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
- Reaction score
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Sure. But, I don't see McCain, aside from his fight with Big Tobacco, having a lot of domestic experience. He is more of a foreign policy guy, which is good, but I think he is vulnerable on domestic issues, like the economy. McCain is also not very decisive. He could have picked his VP months ago and certainly before Obama, but he waits to see who the other guy picks. I think that contradicted assertions that he is decisive and more able to respond than Obama. I think a President needs to act and not to react.
Agreed. My point was that Senator McCain and Obama have pretty much the same experience, but in different fields.
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So just because McCain is older that makes him more qualified? I question this. McCain is not the self-made man that Obama is. He was fortunate to come from a wealthy family. His father and grandfather were both Admirals in the U.S Navy. He married rich too. As Ross Perot who had been supporting McCains's first wife and his family during McCain's imprisonment noted, "After he came home, he walked with a limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain, his current wife] and the rest is history." What I am trying to say is that few of McCain's accomplishments are his . While I realize that he was tortured in the Hanoi Hilton, so too, were many many others. I think there is a willingness by the media to question if he was the right stuff. Many on here applaud his military background. However, this alone does not qualify him for President-though it seems that it is his only qualification.
I question just how well off his father was. While there may well have been some family money, when the senator was born, his father was a junior officer who had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1931 and was based in the Panama Canal Zone. His father commanded a submarine on operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Theatres during the Second World War, which made him perhaps a commander by the end of the war.
Senator McCain's father might have made flag grade before the son was selected for Annapolis, but that still hardly makes him a rich man, except for whatever family money there was. As an aside, it is interesting that during his incarceration, his father was the four star commander of all the US forces in the Pacific Theatre, which included responsibility for the Vietnam War.
Being rich should not disqualify one automatically. JFK's father was extremely wealthy, albeit from dubious pursuits, and no one held that against the president.
Senator McCain's father might have made flag grade before the son was selected for Annapolis, but that still hardly makes him a rich man, except for whatever family money there was. As an aside, it is interesting that during his incarceration, his father was the four star commander of all the US forces in the Pacific Theatre, which included responsibility for the Vietnam War.
Being rich should not disqualify one automatically. JFK's father was extremely wealthy, albeit from dubious pursuits, and no one held that against the president.
- Reaction score
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- Points
- 530
His age means that he has experienced more of life than Obama has.Before he entered politics McCain served in the Navy retiring as a fourstriper in 81 after 21 years of servide.Before retiring he was notified that he would be selected for Rear Admiral but he declined as he was determined to run for congress. I think that outweighs any experience Obama has.
- Reaction score
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- Points
- 530
Obama is hardly a pauper with a networth of around $2 million. Obama's annual income as Senator is $165,200 and his wife makes $317,000 so they are hardly poor.McCain has his retired pay/disability pay and his salary of $165,200 .The real wealth is in his wife's name alone.Politics in the US is a great way to make money just look at the Clintons.Bill never made more than $35,000 before he became President. Now with his speaking fee's the Clintons are doing quite well.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0712/gallery.candidates.moneymag/index.html
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0712/gallery.candidates.moneymag/index.html
A
aesop081
Guest
stegner said:
This proves that Obama is more suited for POTUS how ?
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Many would argue Kennedy was a great president. He didn't work for his money either. That fortune was originally built on slavery and bootlegging IIRC.
It's a stupid criteria to base an informed opinion on of who to vote for.
It's a stupid criteria to base an informed opinion on of who to vote for.
stegner said:
A
aesop081
Guest
stegner said:
Seems to me like he's a shining example of the american dream......
Served his country. Went from fighter pilot to POW. Rose to high rank , became as US senator and now candidate for POTUS.
BTW, the new american way of getting rich is to sue somebody, get with the times. ;D
- Reaction score
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tomahawk6 said:
Indeed. China has pulled off a fantastic showcase with the 2008 Olympics, and seeded a certain perception among a relatively uncritical viewing audience as to China's modernity and power. Senator Obama seems to have "bought into" that vision of China, with a rather uncritical endorsement of China's modernization program and an implicit suggestion that the United States should be more like China in that speech.
Eliminating the arguments about the ramshackle and inconsistent nature of China's total infrastructure outside of the southern coast and the Olympic showcases (see the Chinese Superthread); we still have the arguments of command economy vs free market economy. Is Senator Obama suggesting that he will make the "trains run on time" with his seeming preference for command economies?
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Some proof of this would be nice. Otherwise it sounds suspiciously like the ole Republican vitriolic standard that the Democrats are really commies. How does Obama demonstrate a preference for the command economy? If we want to get really nasty about who is actually a commie we could ask why McCain chose to remain in a POW camp for five years when he was offered frequent attempts to leave. There are all those propaganda tapes that McCain made with the North Vietnamese. These guys are like Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, so perhaps they too should be given the benefit of the doubt that the ant-Kerry group was: http://www.youtube.com/user/VETSAGAINSTMCCAIN In sum, maybe it's best if we don't refer to Obama as a commie.
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STEGNER, Lt.Comdr. McCain stayed in the Hanoi Hilton because
he did not wish to let down his comrades,something you as a
civilian student would never understand.
Regards
he did not wish to let down his comrades,something you as a
civilian student would never understand.
Regards
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