The panel on This Week tears into McCain:
George Will: “The question is, who in this crisis looked more presidential, calm and un-flustered? It wasn’t John McCain who, as usual, substituting vehemence for coherence, said ‘let’s fire somebody.’ And picked one of the most experienced and conservative people in the administration, Chris Cox, and for no apparent reason.”
Sam Donaldson: “It was two days after the he said the fundamentals of the economy were strong. His talking points have gotten all mixed up. And I think the question of age is back on the table.”
(Via Huffington Post.)
Lest we forget that Obama, too, had no objection to Cox being fired.
Neither candidate has any plan to correct this situation. In fact, they’re both avoiding specifics at all costs right now.
I can’t think of any reason Obama should object to McCain’s fantasy of firing Cox. McCain’s irrelevant outburst is interesting only in that it reflects on McCain’s thought processes, or lack thereof.
But Obama said the same thing McCain did. Unless you classify an “outburst” as speaking with an angrier tone.
They didn’t say the same thing, or anything vaguely like the same thing.
McCain said, “The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president, and in my view has betrayed the public’s trust. If I were president today, I would fire him.”
McCain was apparently unaware that being appointed by the president is not the same as serving at the pleasure of the president, and that the president can’t actually fire the chairman of the SEC. Even more seriously, he made it clear that his approach, if he were the president, would be to find a scapegoat rather than a solution.
What Obama said was this: “In the next 47 days you can fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other-way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path. Don’t just get rid of one guy. Get rid of this administration. Get rid of this philosophy. Get rid of the do-nothing approach to our economic problem and put somebody in there who’s going to fight for you.”
In other words, we don’t need a scapegoat; we need a whole different approach from the Bush, McCain, Gramm & friends voodoo economics that has become Republican doctrine.
And they suggested reform in the place of the current system. They’re both pushing for exactly the same thing and both being extremely vague about it.
They’re both pushing for “exactly the same thing and being extremely vague about it”? I think your statement refutes itself.
You think wrong.
Both candidates pushing for “reform!” and “change!” and saying that “Things have to be done!” is vague and, subsequently, more of the same rhetoric.
Ah, but that’s not what you said.
If you look back through this blog, you’ll see that I’m not, by a long shot, a great admirer of Barack Obama, and I don’t want to put myself in the position of being some great defender of his, either. I have a lot of reservations about him. But I think in this as in almost every other case, Obama’s response, however vague, is more measured and more coherent than McCain’s. McCain has simply stopped making sense at all, and that’s something more serious than mere vagueness, and more dangerous than mere campaign rhetoric.
I said they’re both pushing for vague reforms. McCain wants to place Cuomo as the head of the SEC, which won’t do anything. Obama wants to send you a check, which also won’t do anything.
Look, Greenspan lowered the rates for way too long, which is partly what led to this crisis. Historically, government attempts to fix the economy always end up coming back to bite us.
Right now we’ll stop the bleeding with bail outs, but that’s going to mean that the government owns way too much capital in the markets and it’ll also set a precedent that tells businesses they don’t need to be responsible in their dealings because they’ll ultimately be bailed out.
The alternative is letting these companies bleed out and learn their lesson, but the downside is that the markets wouldn’t recover for a few years.
With the current bailout, we won’t see the end of this 700 billion until after the first administration.