McCain/Palin v. Obama/Biden

[Arbitrary]

After following these threads I've been convinced by both sides and therefore I don't really like any of my options. I'm kinda opposite Astro in that I'm kinda meh about the candidates but really dislike Palin.

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by Zora

Sounds like this post from DailyKos might fit you and some other conservatives who support Obama. I know many of you despise that "bastard child of the liberal media," as I once heard someone refer to it. I don't go to DailyKos often myself, but a link to this post was e-mailed to me and I think it's expressed well.

Daily Kos: We Are Out Here- Updated

So not ONLY do you cite a link post to DailyKOS as some kind of evidence for anything (the same DailyKOS that Obama has been distancing himself from because of their rabid idiocy) you also expect us to duplicate your failure of judgment in believing ONE post in the same hack factory that's embarassed Obama more than anything else?

Even if that person WAS a real ex-republican---which is unlikely---(first hint is when he barks about RACIST republicans btw, republicans are genuinely proud of our black leaders and routinely compare Colin Powell vs. Al Sharpton or Thomas Sowell vs. Jesse Jackson), the fact is that it's a shallow attempt to push back against the TSUNAMI of Clintonite defectors turning against the DNC in their millions:

Oh, but Khorum, that's just ONE of Clinton's DNC Delegates (she was actually joined by several superdelegates when they refused to vote for Obama on the DNC and had their delegate status revoked). Sorry but Hillary Clinton's entire netroots community, the whole PUMA PAC and every 527 who filed as clinton supporters are now actively campaigning against Obama.

Some PUMA-associated PACs are even running independent ads of their own in the critical battleground markets with some hard-hitting negative ads that not even the swiftboaters would have touched upon:

Hell, the the whole Hillary Clinton blogosphere has turned on the DNC and recent swings of the women's vote is evident of this, and now they're even producing a full length documentary called HYPE: The Obama Effect:

The PUMA democrats have been on CNN, FOX and all the major networks and you give us what.... a POST FROM DAILY KOS?

[Erumaron]

Originally Posted by Khorum

Stuff

The content of his DailyKOS post is pretty solid, who cares where it came from. It's low on mud slinging and states a lot of the "why" he's for and against the candidates. The paragraph about why he is for Obama alone is why almost any left leaning/for Obama person out there scoffs at the experience argument.

[Lleauaric~EW]

Bloomberg.com: Politics

The Republican Convention Bounce is over. The race is slowly but surely going back to where it was.

This whole frantic 2 weeks of big dice rolls and intensely negative campaigning was designed to break through and give McCain a good lead. The Republicans realize this as is as good as its going to get for them. They failed. Obama was able to contain the damage, and the race is now trending back to where it was before.

There is a good reason for this. The republican lead was built on nothing. It was all hype and mirrors. The realities of this race are inevitable. The McCain camp cannot sustain the constant negative attacks without permanent damage to the candidate and allowing Obama to play to his strength, promising a new kind of politics. The catch is that negative campaigning is all the McCain camp can do, they get killed when the talk goes to issues.

[dak]

YouTube - John McCain Announces Presidential Bid On Letterman Show

Very fitting, forgot how he announced his candidacy.

[Gilgamel]

Originally Posted by Lleauaric~EW

Bloomberg.com: Politics

The Republican Convention Bounce is over. The race is slowly but surely going back to where it was.

This whole frantic 2 weeks of big dice rolls and intensely negative campaigning was designed to break through and give McCain a good lead. The Republicans realize this as is as good as its going to get for them. They failed. Obama was able to contain the damage, and the race is now trending back to where it was before.

There is a good reason for this. The republican lead was built on nothing. It was all hype and mirrors. The realities of this race are inevitable. The McCain camp cannot sustain the constant negative attacks without permanent damage to the candidate and allowing Obama to play to his strength, promising a new kind of politics. The catch is that negative campaigning is all the McCain camp can do, they get killed when the talk goes to issues.

That's some high quality analysis. Why doesn't he just put his hands over his ears and go "lalalallalalaallalala this isn't happening."

Will the bounce recede? Maybe. But this campaign has been fundamentally changed.

[Lleauaric~EW]

I really am loathe to use sports analogies, but....

You used up your trick play, and had some momentum. But there is too much time on the clock and the core problems of your team are still there.

You cant sustain negative campaigning without it backfiring. Period. Its good for short quick bursts, but over a long period of time, it starts to define the purveyor. (Especially when over and over again he is being called straight up a liar, often to his face, on national television, by multiple people.)

Bush ran a fucking awesome, textbook campaign in 2000. It was perfect. They looked at the map, and surgically dissected it. They didn't have to really go that negative against Gore, because he allowed the Clinton negatives to become him, while drawing none of their benefit. Bush didnt really go negative in 2000, and people were voting FOR him.

2004 was different. An incumbent president barely fights off a VERY flawed candidate. Bush went very negative, BUT, they were always able to make it seem like it wasnt coming from them. They knew, they understood, that you cannot get your hands dirty in this stuff.

McCain? No, think MACBETH, scrubbing to remove the stain of blood from guilty hands. Out, out damned spot!

What McCain is doing now is UNSUSTAINABLE. It was designed to give a quick, massive boost and get Obama playing catch up for 45 days.

It failed. Obama has more money, a better grassroots, a stronger brand (republican brand is dog shit atm), and massive advantages on the issues.

What does McCain have? trick plays and big gambles.

Good luck.

[Erumaron]

[Gilgamel]

Ouch.


"Mr. McCain will lower taxes. Mr. Obama will raise them, especially on small businesses. To understand why, you need to know something about the "infamous" top 1% of income tax filers: In order to avoid high corporate tax rates and the double taxation of dividends, small business owners have increasingly filed as individuals rather than corporations. When Democrats talk about soaking the rich, it isn't the Rockefellers they're talking about; it's the companies where most Americans work. Three out of four individual income tax filers in the top 1% are, in fact, small businesses.

In the name of taxing the rich, Mr. Obama would raise the marginal tax rates to over 50% on millions of small businesses that provide 75% of all new jobs in America. Investors and corporations will also pay higher taxes under the Obama program, but, as the Michigan-Ohio-Illinois experience painfully demonstrates, workers ultimately pay for higher taxes in lower wages and fewer jobs.

Mr. Obama would spend all the savings from walking out of Iraq to expand the government. Mr. McCain would reserve all the savings from our success in Iraq to shrink the deficit, as part of a credible and internally consistent program to balance the budget by the end of his first term. Mr. Obama's program offers no hope, or even a promise, of ever achieving a balanced budget."

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

If You Like Michigan's Economy,
You'll Love Obama's
By PHIL GRAMM and MIKE SOLON
September 13, 2008; Page A13
Despite the federal government's growing economic dominance, individual states still exercise substantial freedom in pursuing their own economic fortune -- or misfortune. As a result, the states provide a laboratory for testing various policies.

In this election year, the experience of the states gives us some ability to look at the economic policies of the two presidential candidates in action. If a program is not playing in Peoria, it probably won't work elsewhere. Americans have voted with their feet by moving to states with greater opportunities, but federal adoption of failed state programs would take away our ability to walk away from bad government.

Growth in jobs, income and population are proof that a state is prospering. But figuring out why one state does well while another struggles requires in-depth analysis. In an effort to explain differences in performance, think tanks have generated state-based economic freedom indices modeled on the World Economic Freedom Index published by The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation.

A TAX TO GRIND

Personal-income growth suffers when states adopt a tax-and-spend approach to fiscal policy. (Read more.)
The Competitiveness Index created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) identifies "16 policy variables that have a proven impact on the migration of capital -- both investment capital and human capital -- into and out of states." Its analysis shows that "generally speaking, states that spend less, especially on income transfer programs, and states that tax less, particularly on productive activities such as working or investing, experience higher growth rates than states that tax and spend more."

Ranking states by domestic migration, per-capita income growth and employment growth, ALEC found that from 1996 through 2006, Texas, Florida and Arizona were the three most successful states. Illinois, Ohio and Michigan were the three least successful.

The rewards for success were huge. Texas gained 1.7 million net new jobs, Florida gained 1.4 million and Arizona gained 600,000. While the U.S. average job growth percentage was 9.9%, Texas, Florida and Arizona had job growth of 18.5%, 21.4% and 28.9%, respectively.

Remarkably, a third of all the jobs in the U.S. in the last 10 years were created in these three states. While the population of the three highest-performing states grew twice as fast as the national average, per-capita real income still grew by $6,563 or 21.4% in Texas, Florida and Arizona. That's a $26,252 increase for a typical family of four.

By comparison, Illinois gained only 122,000 jobs, Ohio lost 62,900 and Michigan lost 318,000. Population growth in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois was only 4.2%, a third the national average, and real income per capita rose by only $3,466, just 58% of the national average. Workers in the three least successful states had to contend with a quarter-million fewer jobs rather than taking their pick of the 3.7 million new jobs that were available in the three fastest-growing states.

In Michigan, the average family of four had to make ends meet without an extra $8,672 had their state matched the real income growth of the three most successful states. Families in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois struggled not because they didn't work hard enough, long enough or smart enough. They struggled because too many of their elected leaders represented special interests rather than their interests.

What explains this relative performance over the last 10 years? The simple answer is that governance, taxes and regulatory policy matter. The playing field among the states was not flat. Business conditions were better in the successful states than in the lagging ones. Capital and labor gravitated to where the burdens were smaller and the opportunities greater.

It costs state taxpayers far less to succeed than to fail. In the three most successful states, state spending averaged $5,519 per capita. In the three least successful states, state spending averaged $6,484 per capita. Per capita taxes were $7,063 versus $8,342.

There also appears to be a clear difference between union interests and the worker interests. Texas, Florida and Arizona are right-to-work states, while Michigan, Ohio and Illinois are not. Michigan, Ohio and Illinois impose significantly higher minimum wages than Texas, Florida and Arizona. Yet with all the proclaimed benefits of unionism and higher minimum wages, Texas, Florida and Arizona workers saw their real income grow more than twice as fast as workers in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Incredibly, the business climate in Michigan is now so unfavorable that it has overwhelmed the considerable comparative advantage in auto production that Michigan spent a century building up. No one should let Michigan politicians blame their problems solely on the decline of the U.S. auto industry. Yes, Michigan lost 83,000 auto manufacturing jobs during the past decade and a half, but more than 91,000 new auto manufacturing jobs sprung up in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Texas.

So what do the state laboratories tell us about the potential success of the economic programs presented by Barack Obama and John McCain?

Mr. McCain will lower taxes. Mr. Obama will raise them, especially on small businesses. To understand why, you need to know something about the "infamous" top 1% of income tax filers: In order to avoid high corporate tax rates and the double taxation of dividends, small business owners have increasingly filed as individuals rather than corporations. When Democrats talk about soaking the rich, it isn't the Rockefellers they're talking about; it's the companies where most Americans work. Three out of four individual income tax filers in the top 1% are, in fact, small businesses.

In the name of taxing the rich, Mr. Obama would raise the marginal tax rates to over 50% on millions of small businesses that provide 75% of all new jobs in America. Investors and corporations will also pay higher taxes under the Obama program, but, as the Michigan-Ohio-Illinois experience painfully demonstrates, workers ultimately pay for higher taxes in lower wages and fewer jobs.

Mr. Obama would spend all the savings from walking out of Iraq to expand the government. Mr. McCain would reserve all the savings from our success in Iraq to shrink the deficit, as part of a credible and internally consistent program to balance the budget by the end of his first term. Mr. Obama's program offers no hope, or even a promise, of ever achieving a balanced budget.

Mr. Obama would stimulate the economy by increasing federal spending. Mr. McCain would stimulate the economy by cutting the corporate tax rate. Mr. Obama would expand unionism by denying workers the right to a secret ballot on the decision to form a union, and would dramatically increase the minimum wage. Mr. Obama would also expand the role of government in the economy, and stop reforms in areas like tort abuse.

The states have already tested the McCain and Obama programs, and the results are clear. We now face a national choice to determine if everything that has failed the families of Michigan, Ohio and Illinois will be imposed on a grander scale across the nation. In an appropriate twist of fate, Michigan and Ohio, the two states that have suffered the most from the policies that Mr. Obama proposes, have it within their power not only to reverse their own misfortunes but to spare the nation from a similar fate.

Mr. Gramm is a former Republican senator from Texas. Mr. Solon founded the consulting firm Capitol Logistics.

[Arbitrary]

"Mr. Obama would spend all the savings from walking out of Iraq to expand the government. Mr. McCain would reserve all the savings from our success in Iraq to shrink the deficit..."

Oh come the fuck on. You can't pivot that fast.

[Gilgamel]

It's Phil Gramm, of course he's gonna spin a little bit. But the important stuff is about who the top 1% is actual made of. Tax the rich indeed.

[Zitar]

Shocking a piece written by PHIL GRAMM is negative towards Obama.

[Zippygoose]

Or, you know...they could just not file as individuals?

[Arbitrary]

It's not a great thing to say on the campaign trail but we definitely need to lower our corporate tax rate and then rework subsidies to encourage companies to stay in this country.

[Lleauaric~EW]

Phil Gramm is a whiner.