As I lay sprawled on my couch, watching the Mythbusters blow shit up and trying to digest a carb-heavy dinner the size of a human head I got to thinking. Prior to being elected, Obama had exactly zero leadership experience and maybe a year or two of legislative experience. Most of his adult life was spent as a community organizer (which kind of makes my skin crawl just to type, but I digress). Essentially what he did (if I understand it right) was drive around and/or make phone calls to people in an effort to stir them up so they'd write angry letters to the mayor or their legislator to try and get them to take action. Now Obama IS the "mayor" and he has no idea how to do that. The best he can do is fly around and appear on television, in an effort to get people to write angry letters and make phone calls to the President to try and get him to take action. Given that Obama IS the President to call this a mite schizophrenic is an understatement. It's a bit like that scene in "Blazin' Saddles," where Sheriff Bart holds himself hostage to escape the angry townspeople. This, I think, is the cruz of the Obama Presidency. My point is, someone with 78 years as a politician should've seen this way back in 2008. And someone with that kind of experience who wanted to be President should've been eloquent enough to communicate it. So how the fuck did the GOP elect that potatohead, McCain. I mean fuck, the Democrats were able to spin Palin as unqualified to be President and she wasn't even RUNNING for President. Why wasn't McCain able to point out that Obama (who has far less leadership experience than Palin), on the top of the ticket, lacked the requisite skills?
becaue McCain was the worst presidential candidate in modern times. he was a hot head who tried to make nice. If he'd gone negative early and picked a strong VP like Romney or even Rudy, he woulda had a chance. but he was trying to capture the Right, who was GOING TO VOTE FOR HIM ANYWAY and it blew up in his face.
He certainly wasn't the best candidate, but he's not even slightly in the same league as John Kerry, Mike Dukakis or Walter Mondale. Not by a loooooong shot.
Not true. A lot of us who consider ourselves politically "right" were not going to vote for him. In my case, the choice of Sarah Palin as VP did not make me vote for him even so, but was not a negative factor. (Though I would not want her as president, I knew something most other Americans, especially those on the Left, apparently do not: There is very little chance these days of a VP becoming President in a hurry, and other than that, VP's do next to nothing.) So it actually was a pretty savvy move. McCain actually got ahead of Obama in the polls, even though he had nothing going for him. If the economic crash hadn't happened then, we might have President McCain right now. In which case, we wouldn't be much better off, because he was useless. Which is why I wouldn't vote for him. (I already wasn't going to, but when he voted in favor of the bailout, that meant there was no possible chance I would do so. At that point, I considered him and Obama to be about equally bad.)
I can't agree with that. Think about it. No Obamacare and there's no way he would have drove the debt up as fast and hard as The Obama. Sure, he may have voted for the one bailout, but he I can't believe he would have continued to do so. Can you see him agreeing to a 150 billion bailout of union pensions?
It was lose/lose. You know, when faced with the choice between a pile of turds and a bushel of rotting apples, you might take the latter just to get rid of the shit. The problem is that you're still left with rotting apples, and before too long, they're going to smell just like the shit you got rid of. This has been the nature of American politics for at least 2 decades. Instead of being able to elect someone to the position who would be the best person for the job, we end up sending the one that doesn't smell as bad. While you might be right about the particulars, Async isn't wrong about the "big picture".
Jamey pretty much nailed it. The deficit wouldn't have been quite as bad with McCain, but it still would have been record high; I have no doubt about that at all. The only serious difference is that the political left would have found that totally unacceptable, dangerous, inexcusable and outrageous, instead of explaining to us how it isn't actually all that bad and isn't hurting anything. Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatanamo, the Patriot Act, and all the rest would continue about the same. Sometimes, it takes a real bad jolt to wake people up. Barry Goldwater got wiped out electorally in 1964, but 16 years later, after four years of near-disaster under Carter, Reagan won about as big as Goldwater had lost. Reagan owed a good part of his initial success to Carter. (He earned his second term, though, by his performance during his first term.) In the same way, after 40 years of the Democrats always dominating Congress, the first two years of the Clinton administration actually caused people to vote in a Republican majority in both houses--bringing on 6 years of the best government the country had had in a long time. Today, after 8 years of Bush and getting near 2 years of Obama, people are sending a strong message to those running for office: "We are sick of business-as-usual politics. The Democrats are useless, but the 2000 to 2008 Republicans are about equally useless." McCain would have been a disaster for America by the very fact of people not having seen how bad Obama is. He would have been bad enough that even a lot of us who consider ourselves more or less conservative would have been denouncing him very publicly, but the American people would be saying, "We need Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton" instead of "We need a fundamental change in the way we are governed." McCain would not have been good enough to get anything positive done, which would have been at least as bad as Obama's dismal performance, if not worse, in the long run.
The deficit almost certainly would have been much worse under a President McCain, even if it might not have been quite as high. It's not just the amount you borrow that's a problem; the interest rate on what you borrow is a part of the problem as as well. The right has been clamoring for an increase in the fed funds rate for a while now, in an act of full blown inflation paranoia in the face of record setting low inflation rates for the post-War era. Under a president McCain and the resulting Fed chair who's much crazier than Ben Bernanke, the fed funds rate and the long term interest rates that are responsive to it would likely be 200 basis points or more above where they are today. Borrowing $1.4 trillion at 3.25% interest is not inherently problematic; if the economy recovers, nominal GDP will be well over 3.25% annually--say 2% inflation plus 2-3% real growth--so the interest on the money borrowed will not add to the structural debt and will most likely be able to be paid relatively painlessly out of increased revenues tied to the growth rate. Borrowing $1.2 trillion at 5.25% interest, however, is a real problem. Compounded annually, you're paying back more money after ten years than you are on $1.4 trillion at 3.25% interest, you're getting $200 billion less of stimulus and resulting economic growth, and the chances of creating a structural debt problem go way up even if you think the stimulative effects of the spending are minimal.
There were a couple reasons I couldn't vote for McCain. 1) McCain-Feingold. Happily, I think the Supreme Court just through out a big, stupid chunk of it, but the fact we were stuck with it for this long and it has McCain's name on it was a big strike against him. 2) He kept saying stupid things. Just about the time I'd get set to hold my nose and vote for him, he'd say something harebrained like going on about Global Warming and how it needed regulation to fix it. And the fact that Dubya and his team kicked the shit out of him so abjectly that he had Hanoi Hilton flashbacks made me believe that he didn't have what it took to be President and the way he fell apart against Obama, who isn't qualified to be the assistant manager at a Burger King let alone President of the United States, confirmed it.
It's not that people vote for who they think is best qualified, They vote for the most popular. McCain should have pick Codi Rice for his running mate. That way when the lefties attacked, he could have accused them of being not only sexist, but racist as well.
Picking someone from Bush's inner circle might be the only way McCain could have made a more politically suicidal pick than his actual pick of Sarah Palin.
I'm not so sure. That may have been the way things appeared in 2008, because of the "rockstar" marketing of which Obama availed himself. If the Republicans could have found a candidate who was dynamic, charismatic and intelligent, the popularity element might not have been so effective. Instead, they ran McCain who, when it comes to personality, makes Al Gore look like Dean Martin.
Actually, I like a quote from The West Wing that touches on this: I'm tired of trying to decide between the lesser of who cares?
I figure the republicans knew they would be toast regardless of who they nominated, so why not let a democrat screw things up a little more so they wouldn't seem so bad next time.
With the media driving up every candidates Hershey highway to find every hidden roid, it's no wonder no one good or with a brain wants to run.
If it was up to the leadership, sure that might be what happened, but McCain was nominated by the voters and they aren't that crafty.
