US General Election: McCain vs. Obama

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Because, praise Jesus, the primaries are now over. Have at it.

 

You go, Bunny Boy! Thanks for starting this thread, another surefire winner in that the election is exactly 5 months away. Good God almighty, 5 bloody months more of this stuff? I can't take it, I really can't. But I suppose I must.

I like McCain -- his rep and record really speak to the kind of man he is. Or should I say was? As has been mentioned so many times before, he is not the same man he was several years ago. The question American voters who share my mindset need to ask themselves is "do I like McCain AS HE IS NOW?"

If the military instills honor in its members, McCain will do his damndest to make this a clean, Swiftboat-free campaign, with no insinuations that Barack is a Muslim Manchurian candidate or that Barack will soon make Das Kapital required reading in all fifth grade classrooms. I believe, however, that he might not be strong enough to get his cronies in the Republican party to cease their deceptive negative advertising. I'm a social conservative and therefore like the Republicans over the Democrats but their campaign tactics are reprehensible.

 

Sometimes military service does instill things like PTSD in former soldiers. Let's leave it at that McCain is marked by his service. Independent of that, he's also a somewhat volatile character.

I have never gotten over him singing 'Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran". Haha, very funny. Yes, there's campaign talk and all that but anyway. McCain has too many neo-con crazies on his troupe for me to feel comfortable about him, and his hawkish utterances of late don't help much in that regard. I fear that McCain will bring more of the same.

As for Swiftboat-free campaigning, don't get your hopes up. John McCain is getting much more than President Bush's endorsement and fundraising help for his campaign. He’s getting Bush's staff. Apparently Rove is an "Informal Adviser" to the McCain Campaign, together with basically Bush's old election team: Ken Mehlmann, who ran Bush’s 2004 campaign, Steve Schmidt, Bush’s attack dog in the 2004 election, and Mark McKinnon, Bush’s media strategist. A leopard cannot change its spots.

 

Two points here. The book titled "The Manchurian Candidate" involved a member of the military who was captured by the Chinese, totured and brainwashed to kill the president. John McCain was a member of the military, and was captured and tortured by the Vietnamese. I'm not sure that the moniker of "Manchurian Candidate" applies most aptly to Obama.

The Swiftboat attacks on John Kerry in 2004 were not organized by either George Bush or the Republican party per se. They were the work of political action groups called 527s that are technically run by private citizens. While they are often used to run smear campaigns against politicians, their work does fall under freedom of speech and they are legal.

 

I was going for the way the term is most commonly used by people I've heard, which is that of a candidate who seems like a perfectly normal individual who is secretly working for a hostile power or organization (whether voluntarily or otherwise.) The idea that Barack is actually a closet Muslim who will work from within America to bring the country down is not one I came up with, but one that I believe will be used on him, despite the repeated proof that he is not a sleeper agent for Al Quaeda.

I know that some groups will engage in smear activites without McCain's knowledge, but I hope that he will use whatever influence he has to tell those people he does not want their help unless their help is honest. He has that ability. I hope he has the chops.

The same thing can be said of Barack, though he has proved to me that he wants to run a pretty clean campaign.

 

McCain would accept support and help from Rove? From what I understand McCain are not very fond of Rove since Rove with staff supposedly started the rumours about McCain's interacial lovechild which partly cost Rove the 2000 Republican nomination.

The McCain anno 2000 and before seems to have been a fresh breeze among Republicans but now it seems he has conformed and although not apparently outright crazy or evil as many Republicans still pretty standard Bush/Cheney Republican.

Sadly I am still quite confident that McCain will carry the election, fear and insecurity are bigger motivators than hope and understanding.

 

LKD,
there is a remedy to your confusion about Manchurian candidates: Rent the DVD of both movies "The Manchurian Candidate", the one with Frank Sinatra and the other with Denzel Washington and watch them. That's a good idea anyway.

As for the Swiftboaters, they were not connected in any way to the GOP campaign. You know, the organisers of either only happened to know each others from years of purely accidental encounters at GOP fundraisers and meetings There is no there there. Look somewhere else for tacit cooperation.

Joa,
apparently McCain does.

 

Let me try this another way -- I have read several articles that discussed the efforts of some to paint Obama as "a Muslim Manchurian Candidate". Accurate or not, that's the way the term was used in the media. I've seen the remake, in that one the candidate was actually set up to become the President while being controlled through advanced brainwashing by a big corporation. Of course we all know that no one in either party is influenced at all by big business (I'll borrow Ragusa's eye wink for that one)

I am aware of the plot of both films and the book. I am not confused about that. I guess I was just confused about the way the term was used by the media -- I thought the term was being used more frequently than it obviously is.

Next question for this discussion: Obama is new, young and inexperienced. Is he ready to lead the country? Would he do a better job that McCain? I'm not sure, to be honest. I am a big fan of the value of experience but if the pundits are right I don't know if the country will be well served by a continuation of all of Bush's policies.

 

Barack Obama is 46 years old, has 12 years of experience as a legislator, and has many more years of experience as an organizer, attorney, and pedagogue. He is neither new, young, or inexperienced.

 

Fair enough, but he is being painted as relatively inexperienced. IIRC McCain has more experience than him. Whether that counts for a hill of beans is another question, of course.

 

Well, both McCain and Obama have exactly the same amount of experience holding executive office. Zero. Whether this means anything is yet another unanswerable (and, in my opinion, irrelevant) question.

 

Isn't Experienced a euphamism for Old?

And as for the campaign, McCain can try to play it clean, but can he control the pundits that try to support him from playing dirty? Someone that generally dislikes Obama or the Democrats could say whatever they pleased...

 

Can and likely will. McCain has taken the step of telling all his staff they can't participate in those action groups, though, and seems to be sticking to it.

I don't expect this election to be any cleaner than any other, but I also don't expect it to be that much dirtier than most others. The reason is that there's plenty of real items to attack people on. Obama's lack of experience, McCain's history of saber-rattling, Obama's whole church thing, the current Republican president, etc.

Personally, I don't trust either of them. I may just vote independant this year.

 

Gnarff,

Well, it isn't the pundits that I'm concerned with. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, et el., will always bash Democrats. The thing I'm more concerned with is the 527 groups. Ragusa is absolutely correct when he sarcasticly suggests that they have no connections with the GOP campaign. While they are private citizens, they are also extremely wealthy, major contributors to the GOP campaign. However, there are laws on the books that limit how much a person can donate to a campaign (to prevent elections from being bought). I think a private person is only allow to contribute something like $2000 per candidate, per race. So I think it would be possible to give McCain (or Obama) $2000 during the primary campaign, and then another $2000 for the general election.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately depending on your perspective), there is no way to stop these 527s from buying commerical time on major networks and smearing Obama. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were one such 527 that smeared Kerry in '04. While many dislike their tactics, it is completely legal to do what they do. Freedom of speech allows anyone to do what the 527s do. The difference is that most Americans don't even have $2000 to spend on a campaign, never mind hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend out of their own pockets to buy TV time.

 

aldeth, you don't remember the thread we had here just a while back talking about the questionable $2000 donations to hillary, even though they probably go to all the candidates? there was even one from a 2&a half year old giving her campaign the maximum $2000. So there are ways around any rule.

 

martaug: I didn't remember the exact amount, but I said I thought it was $2000. So I'm not sure what is different between what you said, and what I was suggesting. You're allowed to give $2000 directly the candidate. The commercials are purchased on their own dime and not in direct connection to the campaign. Maybe I wasn't clear, or I just don't understand what you're saying, because it sounds like we're saying the same thing.

Montressor: It's per adult person. I can give $2,000, and my wife can give another $2,000. My 9 month old son cannot. As to your second question, I have no idea.

 

But no, you can give much more ... if you only really (can and) want to! How was that with those fancy fundraiser dinners with $ 20.000 per seat, and where they then serve hot dogs? Indeed, $ 2000 for the campaign and $ 17.995 for the GOP, or a private subsidiary organising this purely non-political private event. Well, or roughly along that line:

Of course, giving to the campaign of John McCain, the GOP candidate, and to the GOP itself, are two totally distinct and separate things. One must not conflate those two, because legally the two are two entirely different entities

Sidenote: That would then probably explain why McCain endures Rove. Rove is GOP. McCain needs Rove, and both know it.

 

http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=43164
This is the thread i was talking about aldeth & yes your son could donate as they had children as young as 30months of age donating the maximum $2000 per person sum. There is no age limit on it at this time. Now this goes on in all parties republicans as well as democrats even though the main articles are about hillary.(my link is dead now but the first one is still working)

P.S. according to the main linked article the max is $2300 per person however all the other sources i have seen list $2000 so i'm not sure which is correct.

 

I highly doubt this sort of corruption is limited to the U.S. I'm sure every Western democracy has similar problems and I would venture to guess that any political system has corruption of some sort in it. I also don't think that in general Democrats are any less corrupt than Republicans, or vice versa.