Saturday, October 04, 2008

One Thing That Still Stands Out

About last night's debate. The more I think about it, the more I think about it. It's nothing that Palin said, and that's just the point. She said nothing at one point where she should have put the hammer down. Who knows, maybe by that point she was tired of beating a dead jackass, but this was almost beyond the pale.

Biden made the statement that both he and Obama not only wanted to renegotiate mortgage payments, they wanted to renegotiate the actual original principals involved. You know, that would be the original price of a house, for example.

I think in the real world they refer to campaign promises like that as "vote buying".

Maybe Palin sensed she was walking into a trap and let it go, and maybe she was wise to do so. However you slice it, the GOP is in a real bind in this election. If they really let loose on the realities of the current housing/mortgage/Wass Street/ financial/banking/Bailout fiasco, they run the risk of looking like they are against the poor, the working class, and middle class, and also run the risk of being painted with that tried-and-true Democratic brush of racism.

It reminds me of an old Batman movie I saw once that was based on the old campy series from the sixties. One of Batman's villains-I think it was the Penguin-was running for mayor of Gotham City, against Batman. The villain did everything he could think of and pulled every trick in the book to win, while Batman insisted on running a positive campaign based solely on the issues. Batman stayed out of the gutter and above board, and acted in an honorable way in every respect. He even refused to kiss a woman's baby on the grounds that it was possible to spread germs and cause a cold. Of course, the woman was hurt and insulted. The polling showed Batman was headed for a certain defeat.

All turned out well in the end, of course, but I don't expect a story book ending to this election. In this election we have the "Old Bat Man" who just refuses to get down and dirty. He thinks he's above it, and I'm afraid his arrogance might well cost him the election. He doesn't seem to care.

6 comments:

Rufus said...

I guess I agree with you that they should let loose on this stuff. But, seriously, how do you square this idea that McCain is being too highminded with the fact that almost his entire media budget is now going to attack ads? I've watched dozens of them now. And dozens from Obama too. And Palin doesn't strike me as being afraid of slinging mud either. In fact, I've been dispirited by just how willing all of these people are to get "down and dirty" and sell out anything they might have once believed in to win.

Honestly, I'm not really part of the Republican "base", or the Democratic "base". Hell, I'm not even sure I'm going to vote this time out. And I have to say that some of the stuff you write about here is getting to be as bewildering to me as reading the stuff on Daily KOS. Maybe I'm just not part of the club. I think maybe true blue Republicans can see where McCain has been unwilling to throw punches, but to me, both McCain and Obama seem totally willing to stoop as low as they can go in order to win.

SecondComingOfBast said...

Rufus, is that the McCain campaign running those ads, or some third party like the Swift Boat Veterans in '04? I honestly don't know, because here in Kentucky neither campaign runs ads. McCain doesn't need to and Obama figures it wouldn't do him any good.

Still, I was referring more to the way McCain conducted himself in the debates, which a lot more people are paying attention to-at least this year-than most people do ads. I think most people after so long tend to tune them out anyway.

Still, you might have a point. I'm judging McCain by his campaign appearances as covered by what little press I've seen, and his debating style and tactics, while the ads have just been off my radar screen (and my television screen).

Rufus said...

I think people have seen enough ads, or things on the Internet, that they know all the "dirt" on both candidates. So I don't really think getting down and dirty will make any difference.

It's funny- I hear Democrats say that "Obama is too nice. He needs to attack more." And I hear Republicans say "McCain is too nice. He needs to attack more." But, when I talk to undecided voters, none of them are wishing that the candidates would attack each other more. They're pretty sick of that. It all tends to cancel each other out after a while.

McCain could easily win. All he has to do is buy five minute blocks of time on the major networks and lay out a clear, coherent vision of the future under his Presidency. And be specific! People are tired of hearing McCain say "I'll reform things. I'm a maverick." And they're tired of hearing Obama say, "Hope and change. Change and hope." They want specifics. Saying that you'll drill for oil or cut earmarks isn't enough. They want a vision of the country moving into the 21st century, which is clearly going to be different than the last century. If McCain can explain that, he won't even need to mention Obama to win.

SecondComingOfBast said...

Rufus-

Well, I guess the main area of confusion here is that I am talking about a specific issue, namely the current financial crisis. In the popular mind, this is a Republican fiasco, and John McCain, Sarah Palin, and for that matter the Republican Party in general is being incredibly lax in pointing out the very considerable contribution of the Democratic Party in helping create this phenomenon.

I would go so far as to say they are derelict, but by the same token, they doubtless feel they are in a bind, because they feel like if they point out the very real problems caused by Democratic policies, and elected officials (such as Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, incredibly enough) they are going to come across as uncaring and unfeeling towards the poor and racial minorities. But-

1. They have that rap against them anyway.

2. They are now poised to lose anyway.

Therefore, they might as well point all this out. It's not like they don't have their own faults regarding this mess, of course. They most certainly do. But my point is, they are allowing the Democrats to own and utilize this issue, when it should be just as much of a negative to them, at the very least, as it should be for McCain and the Republicans.

McCain needs to step up to the plate, and so does Palin and the other Republican House and Senate candidates and officials, instead of trusting right-wing blogs and radio to get the message out, which is a stupid strategy.

For one, no one listens to the right-wing blogs and radio but, of course, right-wingers. For another, the right-wing blogs and radio don't mention or at the very least minimize the very real contributions of the Republicans regarding this mess-which is precisely why no one else listens to them, by the way.

But see, this brings up yet another fact. In order to step up tothe plate and point out the Democratic Party deficit, it would require that the GOP candidates and officials step up to the plate and man up as to their own failings in regard to this mess, and that would require a painful admission on their part-deregulation is not always, if ever, a good thing. So they are in two binds, aren't they?

Hope that clears that up and you understand now what I mean by McCain "going negative". I wasn't inferring that he should just make personal attacks and do or say anything to win, and I hope that isn't what you thought I was saying.

Rufus said...

No, I didn't think you were saying all of that. What I'm getting at is that it's probably just better politics for them to say "This is how we're going to fix things" than to fix blame. Let Nancy Pelosi point the fingers- you must have noticed how ineffectual she seemed trying to blame the Republicans when everyone at home is thinking "Shut-up! How are you going to fix this now?" If the Republicans just step up and fix it, they'll look a lot better than the Democrats do.

But, really, the short answer is that it's not going to be fixed any time soon.

Also, I've read a lot about this in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and just been talking to relatives in the financial sector and friends in hard-hit areas (my mother's street has four foreclosures on it!), and my sense of this is that both Nancy Pelosi and Ann Coulter are really oversimplifying what's going on here. It's a lot more widespread, complicated, and actually a much bigger problem than the politicos are making it out to be. It's definitely not as simple as "it was deregulation" or "it was the CRA"- if it was, it would be a lot easier to fix! My mother's neighborhood is upper middle class, very white, and full of people with these sort of mortgages- and god knows why! And it's worth noting that many of the ones that aren't already in foreclosure have rates that are set to go up in the next few years. So, it's possible that the Republicans are keeping their mouths shut because they know more about this than we do.

However, just about every economist I've talked to has said that Alan Greenspan's flaming idiocy has been a huge factor in all of this. Someone might ask why that hasn't been talked about more in the media.

Also, the big issue that Republicans need to bring up ASAP is how much "deregulation" came when Bill Clinton gutted the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999- something every economist I've talked to has mentioned as being critical. But, since Phil Gramm sponsored that gutting, I'm guessing McCain's not going to mention it. Other Republicans should- the Democrats complain about deregulation when they've been just as important for that as the Republicans have. If they're right, Clinton's just as much to blame as anybody, and more than most.

The even shorter answer is that both Democrats and Republicans have likely screwed the pooch here and you're right that the blame should be more evenly spread than it is.

SecondComingOfBast said...

Exactly. And you're right about Clinton's contribution. He took a law started by Carter in his term, which wasn't a good law to begin with but wasn't that bad, and he turned it into a monster, where bankers could be sanctioned if they refused to provide loans to the "working poor", especially minorities.

Community activists were encouraged-hell, almost begged-to make complaints over perceived infractions, legitimate or otherwise. All so he could brag about the increase in home ownership among minorities and the poor.

But that's not the whole problem here, not by a long shot. I've been saying for some time now that if you have a home that you paid eighty thousand dollars for, and it suddenly is worth four times as much in a fairly short amount of time, something is very definitely not right. People acted like they thought they were buying a stairway to wealth instead of a home. How could they think that could last?

That's why people kept leveraging themselves out the wazoos, taking out mortgage after mortgage on their homes for all varieties of reasons, some good and some bad, but it was more like a drunken frat party that no one ever wants to end instead of serious business decisions and investments.

The bankers and mortgage companies saw a way to reap extravagant profits, and so they were of course on board. The feds are investigating now on the grounds that some of these people actually bribed credit raters to rate their bonds and other holdings at a much higher value than what they were worth, in order to encourage more investments in these useless pieces of paper.

Why did the politicians allow this to go on for so long? Because of course it fostered the illusion that we were in a whiz bang economy. Bullshit, we've had a plastic economy for years, and now reality has come knocking.

But hey, as long as those homes are appraised at three or four times or more their worth, that's all that much more communities rake in in the form of property taxes, right?

Still, at least some Republicans tried to put the brakes on. McCain says he did, I don't know, but according to what I've been able to discern, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd were the two ringleaders in preventing any reforms of especially Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and in the meantime I am hearing (beat in mind I haven't verified this independently yet) that Obama and his ACORN organization in Chicago were some of the main beneficiaries of the bad loans and other shady practices, and that he actually encouraged this scam and benefited from it.

I don't know what to think, but I'm sure it will all come out eventually. I just can't figure out why the Republicans are being so lax in not trying to at least spread some of the blame around. Who knows, maybe they are more culpable than they want people to know.

Whatever the case, the people need and deserve to know the whole story, regarding the fault of both sides. 700 billion dollars-actually more than 800 billion now-is a hell of a shitload of money. It brings a whole new meaning to "we're all in this together".