Analyzing Obama and Mccain’s 2nd Debate: ABC

Analyzing Obama and McCain’s 2nd Debate: ABC

McCain probably killed himself for the last time in this debate. After tomorrow, he will no longer be relevant.

So, we’ve now come to the second presidential debate, or more accurately, the debate between the 2 presidential candidates. How did it go? Who won?

In this debate, it seemed as if Obama, who is now almost assured of winning 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, barring an absolute collapse and McCain were their own “attack dogs”. What? That’s right. Sarah Palin wasn’t in the building for this. McCain started off by welcoming Obama: “It’s nice to be with you at a town-hall meeting”. If this sounds sarcastic, it is. McCain used this introduction to ridicule Obama for rejecting his proposal of a series of town hall meetings where audience members could address the two presidential nominees.

Content-wise, McCain started off by talking about the weak, ailing and still-jittery housing market: “Let people be able to make those (monthly mortgage) payments and stay in those homes. Is it expensive? Yes. But until we stabilize (the housing market), we’re never going to be able to turn around and fix jobs. We got to bring trust and confidence back to America and I know how to do that”. Again, McCain is going down that precarious path of using his Congressional experience to attack Obama (“I know how to do that”) and thus far, it hasn’t worked.

McCain also slammed Obama for receiving a substantial amount of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Obama received $126349, including $120349 from employees and $6000 from Political Action Committees or PACs while McCain has received $21550 from employees, but nothing from PACs: Obama has received the second highest amount from lobbyists behind only Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd), the mortgage brokers many believed started the subprime mess that forced many people to be evicted from their homes while their ex-executives got million-dollar retirement/severance packages: “The real catalyst was Fannie and Freddie. They’re the ones who were the encouragement of Sen. Obama and his cronies that went out and made all these risky loans, gave them to all these people who couldn’t pay back. There were some of us who stood up and said (that) we need to enact legislation. There were some of us who stood up against this. There were others who took a hike”. So, McCain is blaming Obama for the second-worst economic collapse ever, but what solutions does McCain have? This is still unclear.

Obama’s response: “I’ve got to correct McCain’s history, not surprisingly. Deregulation of the financial system. McCain, as recently as March, bragged about the fact that he’s a deregulator. Two years ago, I said (that) there was a subprime crisis (that) we had to deal with. I wrote to (Treasury Secretary Hank) Paulson and (Fed chief Ben) Bernanke and told them (that) it’s something we need to deal with. I never promoted Fannie Mae”. In this rebuttal, Obama not only rebuffed McCain’s claim. Obama also accused McCain for deregulating during a time of such economic uncertainty, calamity and crisis, a time when government intervention is necessary. Surely, Obama is once again mocking McCain’s statement from some time ago that “The fundamentals of our economy are still strong”.

Then, Obama changed tactics by speaking directly to a member of the audience at Bowling Green University, Oliver Clark who asked about the $700 billion Wall Street bailout: “You’re not interested in politicians pointing fingers. You’re interested in the impact on you. This is not the end, this is the beginning of the process”. This is probably also a response to McCain’s accusation that Obama was playing politics when McCain abruptly suspended his campaign to return to Capitol Hill in order to ensure that the revised version of the bailout was passed.

The next question from moderator Tom Brokaw was: Will the economy get worse before it gets better? Obama replied that “I am confident about the American economy, but we are going to have to have leadership from Washington”. Obama’s rhetoric/implication: Leadership must come from a new leader in the White House and not from a continuation of “Bushconomics” which Obama claims McCain supports so strongly.

Next issue: How can we handle Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons and a country which is extremely unstable right now with the u9npopular Musharraf gone and uncertainty surrounding his replacement, Asif Ali Zadari? “I’m not going to telegraph my punches, which is what Sen. Obama did”, alluding to Teddy Roosevelt’s quote (“talk softly, but carry a big stick”).

Obama scoffed: “This is a guy who sang “bomb, bomb, Iran” and (who called for) the annihilation (destruction) of North Korea - that I don’t think is an example of speaking softly”. Boy, did McCain lose big on this one: even Bush (yes, Bush) didn’t attack Iran or North Korea militarily, at least not yet. The reasons are obvious. If Iranian oil was taken off the market, we’d probably be dealing with oil prices around $130 or $140 a barrel and North Korea is too diplomatically isolated to be much of a threat.