McCain Hands Election to Obama

Dick Morris has an article in Newsmax concerning the threat that ACORN poses to the Obama campaign. Well, I mean, if any other candidate had been involved in a corrupt organization engaging in election fraud in 11 states there would be alot of questions, but not so with Obama, and not so with this election. But much of the media's indifference to Obama's various corruption scandals, to include the Tony Rezko house purchase and his lying about his Indonesian upbringing, is due to John McCain's indifference to these character issues.

Matters are worse than that, though. McCain had three ways to beat Obama. First, he needed to distance himself from the Bush administration, especially on the economy. Second, he needed to come up with an alternative strategy to the bailout. Third, he needed to focus attention on Obama's sociopathic character.

Instead, of dumping Bush, McCain took the traditional party course and backed the bailout. Thus, he has allowed the Democrats to paint him as a second Bush administration. The falling stock market (which may turn around beginning next week but remains volatile around three weeks before the election, and may still be declining in early November) is a poison pill, and he has allowed himself to be associated with it. McCain was a fool to participate in the bailout negotiation and he was a fool to back the Bush administration.

McCain's criticism of President Bush would have been warranted, because Bush exercised dinosaur stupidity, stupidity beyond human comprehension, in allowing Paulson and his coterie of quacks to force discussion of the bailout now. Any decision of this kind can wait six weeks. Bush chose to destroy McCain's chances. He deserves a place in Republican hell.

Second, McCain had to devise an alternative solution to the banks' problems that was fair. Increasing the money supply by one third and providing a trillion dollar subsidy to Wall Street and commercial banks is not fair. The public doesn't like it, and McCain simply went along with the absurdly socialist bank-coddling by President Bush. Rather than come down on this folly, which is anathema to any real believer in free markets, McCain chose the uncreative course of supporting Bush in one of the most socialist policies since 1935. What happened to the Republicans as the "party of ideas"? Most of the ideas I've heard from Newt Gingrich and John McCain have sounded like re-baked Keynesian economics from the 1930s.

Third, McCain had to make Obama's character into an issue. As Morris points out in his article, ACORN is being raided by the FBI in 11 states; Obama, as general counsel, was intimately linked to ACORN; and Obama "has lately spent $800,000 of his campaign money to subsidize the group's activities" which have been literally criminal. This opens the door to calls for investigation of Obama's involvement and character issues. Moreover, "as Election Day approaches and early balloting proceeds in many states, ACORN's tactics will get more and more media attention."

Thus, despite a sociopathic character, which we have heard McCain praise, "Obama has lower negatives than McCain, and his unfavorable rating has not risen despite the avalanche of attack advertising to which he has been subjected...Possibly, voters are just inured to the attacks and disregard them. But more likely they are just distracted by the financial meltdown all around them."

The Republicans have decided to lose big. What happened to all those pundits back in August who were saying that their grandmother could beat Obama?

John McCain and the Republicans are giving this election away.