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McCain adverteert: bijna alle cijfers fout
- Immigratie is niet meer het grote onderwerp dat het was. McCain neemt in dat debat (net als Bush) een gematigde positie in tegenover partijgenoten die de grens willen sluiten en illegalen het land uitzetten.
- Om die reden maken zowel hij als Obama een kans op de stemmen van latino’s, zoals gisteren bleek op een bijeenkomst van hispanics in Washington. Fragmenten van Obama’s speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM6q-E4rThA
- De ontwikkeling heeft ook tot gevolg dat de kandidaten veel werk maken van de latino’s in het altijd belangrijke Florida. Maar voor McCain is dat een beetje onhandig uitgepakt:
- Hij adverteert op Spaanstalige radiostations in zuidelijk Florida met de grote voordelen die een nieuw vrijhandelsverdrag met Colombia voor de economie van de staat zou hebben. Obama is tegen dat verdrag.
- Maar uit dit onderzoekje naar de feiten die McCain in de advertentie presenteert, blijkt dat zijn team zich niet erg heeft bekommerd om de juistheid van de gegevens:
- ,,(…) every number in the ad is wrong, except one (…). And even that number is rounded upward so generously as to flunk third-grade arithmetic.”
Abonneer je 
woensdag 9 juli 2008, 12:58 uur
dat McCain zich niet bekommert om de feiten bleek al uit de blunders in de Doctor No ad.het gaat nu alleen om de anders zoveel mogelijk imago schade te berokkenen. De republikeinen proberen Obama al een poosje als extreem linkse senator af te schilderen.
Dat klopt overigens helemaal niet volgens een interessante lijst (klik hier) die het stemgedrag van alle senatoren volgt. Obama blijkt dan een gematigde democraat te zijn en McCain juist een behoorlijk rechtse kandidaat te zijn.
woensdag 9 juli 2008, 15:22 uur
@Jan: Wat een interessante link! Heb je trouwens ook gezien dat het voor 2005 wel een beetje anders ligt. Obama was dat jaar geranked als de meest progresieve senator en McCain is veel minder conservatief. Zou dit de invloed van de verkiezingen zijn?
donderdag 10 juli 2008, 00:00 uur
Hi…I only send the interesting ones….!!!!
OBAMA WOULD, IN FACT, GOVERN FROM THE LEFT
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on July 8, 2008.
The list of issues on which Barack Obama has flipped now that the primaries are over is long and growing rapidly.
• He says he believes in a Second Amendment right to bear arms.
• He now opposes late-term abortion.
• He suddenly is a devotee of using faith-based institutions to deliver public services.
• He now says that he won’t raise Social Security taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. In the primary, he said he’d eliminate the threshold entirely, including on people making as little as $100,000.
• He recently opposed the Fairness Doctrine for talk radio.
• Now he says he’s going to consult with the military before pulling out of Iraq.
But so extensive a list of flip-flops, all in the past few weeks, begs the basic question: Was he lying before when he was a liberal, or is he prevaricating now?
Even if Obama means what he is saying as he moves to the center trying to win the general election, the fact is that he will be forced to move very far to the left should he become president, forced by the liberals in his own party.
If Obama wins, it’s more than likely that he will take office with a Congress filled with Democrats and liberals. Most probably, the Senate will have at least 55 Democrats (including pickups in Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, New Hampshire and Alaska). And there might be as many as 62 (possible Democratic pickups include Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, Kentucky, Texas, Kansas and North Carolina). The House will, of course, be solidly in Democratic control.
Faced with the same situation in 1993, as he took office as president, Bill Clinton found no alternative but to move dramatically to the left, shelving for the moment his promises of a middle-class tax cut and welfare reform. He had no choice. The Democratic majorities in both Houses served him with notice: Either you stay within the caucus and not cross the aisle in search of support for centrist policies, or we will do unto you what we did to Jimmy Carter when Tip O’Neill turned on him and made his life miserable. Clinton was forced to emphasize healthcare reform over welfare changes and to go with a liberal economic stimulus package capped by big tax increases. The liberal stain sank so deeply into the fabric of his presidency that it caused him to lose Congress in 1994, and almost to lose the 1996 election.
It will be the same with Obama. On all of his basic issues, the Democrats in Congress will hold his feet to the fire and make him govern to the left. On his signature issue of Iraq, he may find himself with a war already won, a democracy already stable and a problem already solved. Nevertheless, he will be forced to rip the scab from the wound and set it bleeding again by bringing our troops home prematurely. His healthcare proposals will be forced far to the left until they amount to a government takeover of the healthcare system. Obama will not be able to govern from the center. His party won’t let him do it.
Ultimately, Bill Clinton’s congressional supporters became his jailers and he morphed from their leader into their hostage. Dependent on every last Democrat to pass legislation in the House and to prevail over a filibuster in the Senate, he found himself pushed further and further to the left until, he told me, “I don’t even recognize myself.” He had to lade his economic and anti-crime package with pork to satisfy urban congressmen and to win their support of a bill that included a federal death penalty.
Obama will not be able to help himself. The Democratic majority in Congress won’t settle for triangulation. They will make the Obama of November into a liar and the Obama of the primaries into an honest man.
donderdag 10 juli 2008, 05:47 uur
Boeiend betoog, dat van Joan (@3). Sterkt me in mijn al in het begin van dit blog uitgesproken overtuiging dat met windvaan Obama “change” in Washington hoe dan ook een illusie zal blijken te zijn. Sterker nog: met een non-conformistische McCain zou de wereld er straks mogelijk een heel stuk veiliger en toekomstbestendiger uit kunnen zien.
donderdag 10 juli 2008, 11:24 uur
Oh ja, McCain is ab-so-luut geen windvaan (zie link hierboven). Hier een ander stuk, uit de LA Times (al wat ouder). Een veiliger wereld met Mac… je moet er maar opkomen.
Do we really need another T.R.?
YOU CAN READ 1,000 profiles of GOP presidential front-runner John McCain without encountering a single paragraph examining his core ideological philosophy. His career is filled with such distracting drama — torture at the Hanoi Hilton, noisy conversion to the campaign-finance-reform faith, political suicide on the Straight Talk Express — that by the time you’re done with the highlights, and perhaps a few “maverick” anecdotes, time’s up.
People are forever filling in the blanks with their own political fantasies. Third party candidate! John Kerry running mate! Far-right warmonger! Republican In Name Only! But with the announcement that the popular Arizona senator has formed his presidential exploratory committee, it’s time for our long national guessing game to end.
Sifting through McCain’s four bestselling books and nearly three decades of work on Capitol Hill, a distinct approach toward governance begins to emerge. And it’s one that the electorate ought to be particularly worried about right now. McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the U.S. government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He’ll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats’ nanny-state regulations with the GOP’s red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism. And he’s trying to accomplish this, in part, for reasons of self-realization.
The first clue to McCain’s philosophy lies in two seemingly irrelevant items of gossip: His father was a drunk, and his second wife battled addiction to pain pills. Neither would be worth mentioning except for the fact that McCain’s books and speeches are shot through with the language and sentiment of 12-step recovery, especially Steps 1 (admitting the problem) and 2 (investing faith in a “Power greater than ourselves”).
Like many alcoholics who haven’t quite made it to Step 6 (becoming “entirely ready” to have these defects removed), McCain is disarmingly talented at admitting his narcissistic flaws. In his 2002 book “Worth the Fighting For,” the senator is constantly confessing his problems of “selfishness,” “immaturity,” “ambition” and especially “temper,” though he also makes clear that his outbreaks of anger can be justifiable and even laudable when channeled into “a cause greater than self-interest.”
“A rebel without a cause is just a punk,” he explains. “Whatever you’re called — rebel, unorthodox, nonconformist, radical — it’s all self-indulgence without a good cause to give your life meaning.”
What is this higher power that ennobles McCain’s crankiness? Just as it is for many soldiers, it’s the belief that Americans “were meant to transform history” and that sublimating the individual in the service of that “common national cause” is the wellspring of honor and purpose. (But unlike most soldiers, McCain has been in a position to prod and even compel civilians to join his cause.)
Liberals and conservatives alike fail to truly reflect his views, McCain writes, because “neither emphasizes the obligations of a free people to the nation.” His main governmental inspiration is Teddy Roosevelt, the “Eastern swell who became a man of the people,” whose great accomplishment was “to summon the American people to greatness.” In Roosevelt’s code, McCain writes approvingly, it was “absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.” This is an essentially militaristic view of citizenship, one that explains many of McCain’s departures from partisan orthodoxy. Unlike traditional Republicans, he will gladly butt into the affairs of private industry if he perceives them to be undermining Americans’ faith in government; unlike Democrats, he thinks the executive branch generally needs more power, not less.
“Our greatness,” he wrote in “Worth the Fighting For,” “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions.” So, because steroids might be damaging the faith of young baseball fans, drug testing becomes a “transcendent issue,” requiring threats of federal intervention unless pro sports leagues shape up. Hollywood’s voluntary movie-rating system? A “smoke screen to provide cover for immoral and unconscionable business practices.” Ultimate Fighting on Indian reservations? “Barbaric” and worthy of government pressure on cable TV companies. Negative political ads by citizen groups? They “do little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue” and so must be banned for 60 days before an election if they mention a candidate by name.
If his issues line up with yours, and if you’re not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he’ll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable. Nowhere is that more evident than in his ideas about the Iraq war.
McCain has been banging the drum from nearly Day One to put more boots on the ground in Iraq. “There are a lot of things that we can do to salvage this,” he said on “Meet the Press” on Nov. 12, “but they all require the presence of additional troops.” McCain is more inclined to start wars and increase troop levels than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He has supported every U.S. military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon’s failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of “rogue state rollback.” He’s a fan of Roosevelt’s Monroe-Doctrine-on-steroids stick-wielding in Latin America. And — like Bush — he thinks too much multilateralism can screw up a perfectly good war.
The price of all this war-making, in money and manpower, would be staggering; it’s hard to imagine without a draft (McCain has long been a fan of mandatory national service, at the least). But the costs to his political ambitions may even be greater. The nation is in no mood for the war we’ve got now, let alone a doubling-down on Iraq and ramped-up unilateralist tough talk in the Middle East. The trend lines of public opinion on these counts are not pointing in McCain’s direction.
One of the many charming confessions in “Worth the Fighting For” is McCain’s complaint that the man he replaced in the Senate — Republican icon Barry Goldwater — was “never as affectionate as I would have liked.” Small wonder.
Goldwater, a man who seemed to emanate from Arizona’s dust, was the paragon of limited government, believing to his core that the feds shouldn’t tell you how to run a business or whom you can sleep with. McCain, on the other hand, is a third-generation D.C. insider who carpetbagged his way into office, believing to his core that “national pride will not survive the people’s contempt for government.” On Nov. 7, those conflicting worldviews collided when Arizonans voted on whether to outlaw gay marriage. McCain campaigned in favor of the ban, in the name of “preserving the sanctity” of heterosexual unions. His exhortations went down to surprising defeat. Not, one suspects, for the last time.
donderdag 10 juli 2008, 12:14 uur
Hoei! Obama gedwongen ‘links’ te regeren, wat een nachtmerrie-scenario: Schaft hij de doodstraf af, verbiedt hij vrij wapenbezit, zorgt hij voor meer diplomatie, internationale milieuverdragen, recht op abortus, homohuwelijk, meer inkomstenbelasting, een betaalbare ziekteverzekering! Het lijkt g.v.d. het atheistische Nederland wel!
donderdag 10 juli 2008, 14:54 uur
Het Flip Floppen in de VS is toch een mooi verschijnsel, vooral als je je realiseert dat de campagne al gauw 2 jaar duurt.
In Irak gaat het nu een stuk beter dan 2 jaar geleden, niet vreemd dat je dan je mening bijstelt.
Ik denk ook niet dat Obama had kunnen voorspellen dat hij zoveel geld kon ophalen.
Voortschrijdend inzicht en flexibiliteit zijn belangrijke kwaliteiten voor een leider. Het had Irak kunnen voorkomen.
donderdag 10 juli 2008, 20:50 uur
@ 5
McCain is more inclined to start wars and increase troop levels than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He has supported every U.S. military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon’s failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of “rogue state rollback.”
Dat is ten minste informatie waar je wat aan hebt.
Stel Mac wordt gekozen omdat Irak is gestabiliseerd; de Saddam getrouwe Sunnieten haten de idioten van Alqaida inmiddels meer dan de Amerikanen (geef ze eens ongelijk). En Mac claimt de overwinning, en het Amerikaanse volk stinkt er weer eens in, dan kunnen we nog wat verwachten van deze vriendelijke oude baas met zijn korte lontje. Obama begon me een beetje tegen te staan met zijn vrome reclamespotjes, maar nu weet ik weer waar hij het voor doet: om de rechtse idioten uit het Witte Huis te houden.