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Also in Election 2008
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Sarah Palin's post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week's vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she "won," as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race -- about "the future," as Palin kept saying Thursday night -- and the only person who doesn't seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
To understand the meaning of Palin's "victory," it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.
McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama's twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can't make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?
Not without an economic message. McCain's most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork -- by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget -- doesn't bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill's $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.
The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain's health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate's health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too "unclear" to determine McCain's cancer prognosis.
There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were "pretty comprehensive" and wrote on his CNN blog that he was "pretty convinced there was no 'smoking gun' about the senator's health." (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain's mental health.)
That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he's repeating his "Miss Congeniality" joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time ("The fundamentals of our economy are strong") or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain's "dismaying temperament," as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance -- a replay of Al Gore's sarcastic sighing in 2000 -- didn't make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.
See more stories tagged with: election 2008, sarah palin
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Recently an insurance company nearly wind up....
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A bank is nearly bankrupt......filing chapter 11 protection.
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How it affect you? Did you buy insurance? Did you buy mini note or bonds?
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Who fault?
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They bailout trouble finance company, but they will not bail out your credit card bills……And the bill out of company is still not enough yet…….Should they have use the bail out $$ to pump into all different industries……You got no choice, and no point pointing finger but you can prevent similar things from happen again……
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The top management of the Public listed company ( belong to "public" ) salary should be tied a portion of it to the shares price ( IPO or ave 5 years ).... so when the shares price drop, it don't just penalise the investors, but those who don't take care of the company.....If this rule is pass on, without any need of further regulation, all industries ( as long as it is public listed ) will be self regulated......because the top management will be concern about their own pay check…… And they are still spend big money on hotel stay and luxury function……..
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Meanwhile if company was being acquired, there will be a great movement in terms of staff……eventually staff suffer also.
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So Bail out already happen, So the next question is, what regulation are they going to implement, so as to prevent similar things to happen………
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Are you a partisan?
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Whenever anywhere, anytime, there is election campaign.....We can use this to question your candidate there….. if you agree on my point, please share with many people as possible.... Finance and Media are the two only industries can shaken politics ( Maybe Hackers can ), please help to highlight also...
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