Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Sorry for the long posting break.

A few random thoughts:

1. If Obama wins, which it looks like he will, we should pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that ordinary, white Americans from all walks of life will have voted for a black man for president. They will deserve a lot of credit for their decency, their generosity, and for how far they / we have come.

2. McCain is going to be rightly praised for not allowing his campaign to get into the Jeremiah Wright crap. But he's going to be blamed for the Ayers / Hussein / etc. stuff. It's going to take some serious work in the Senate (maybe on immigration?) for McCain to atone.

3. The coming civil war within the GOP is going to be savage and protracted. If the Republican Party wants to be the party of intolerance, it's going to spend a lot of time in the wilderness of opposition. Eventually, some young leader will emerge who will reconstitute the party on the basis of strong defense, low taxes, and inclusiveness on immigration, etc. That person will be the next GOP president.

Labels: election, GOP, McCain, Obama

Per Politico:

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."

Al Gore, call your office.

Labels: McCain

Several friends have asked what I think of John McCain's choice of Gov. Palin as his running mate. Here goes...

1. She's objectively a bad choice to be a potential president. Being a good leader is about having a set of skills / attribues, including (but not limited to) communication, negotiation, information gathering, priority-setting, management, and having a vision. Some people are born with some talent in one or more of these categories, but most politicians spend a lot of time learning them.

Compare Palin to Obama (she certainly has): Obama isn't so experienced, as far as politicians go, but he's proven to be a remarkably quick study.

Being a state legislator and then a senator were his secondary school and university of politics, respectively. Competing against the Clintons (formidable foes) in the primary was his graduate school. The nomination is his diploma.

I don't think that Palin has had that kind of education yet. My guess is that she is smart and tenacious but raw and under-informed about key issues. Given the likelihood that she could be president if McCain wins (historically, the chances are approximately 1 in 3 or 1 in 4), I'm not happy with her selection.

McCain must know all of the above, so I think we are forced to conclude that McCain picked her because he thinks she can help him win, not because he thinks she would be a good president.

2. So let's evaluate the selection on the basis that McCain did: Will Palin help or hurt his chances?

I think the answer is that her chances need to be considered over time.

Right now, she is in the most dangerous part of the race. She's undefined for most voters. One or two more stories about her upbringing / family could define her as some kind of lunatic. One or two gaffes could make her into John Kerry. Biden could eviserate her in a debate ("I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy."), and thereby define her as Dan Quayle. Obama could decide to turn the advertising guns on her and try to define her in any number of unflattering ways (I think this last one is unlikely).

If she manages to make it through these next few weeks without getting nailed as a lunatic, gaffe-prone, a lightweight, or something else, then I think she has a reasonable chance to help him. She's attractive, she gives a good speech, she's willing (obviously) to be very, very negative in a way that some VP nominees (John Edwards, for example) are not, and she does seem to fire up the crazies on the far right.

Overall, I give her a D+ as a potential VP and an incomplete as part of the Republican ticket.

Labels: McCain, Obama, palin

Lost in all of the talk about Sarah Palin is the fact that being governor of Alaska is not like being governor of any other state in the country.

Alaska draws all of its revenue from the oil & gas industry, to the point where citizens don't need to pay taxes. In fact, each resident of Alaska receives an annual check from the government.

This allows the government of Alaska to avoid making painful choices about budgeting. It also means that the governor of Alaska is by definition the least qualified governor in the nation to assume national executive office.

Labels: McCain, palin

Great article, even better headline:

"Obama Overseas! In Presidential Mode! Back Home, It's McCain in a Golf Cart."

Labels: McCain, Obama

"Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring,” Mr. McCain said at a wind power plant in Oregon, a state that is expected to be a political battleground in the general election and where the environment is a central issue for voters. “We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great." - NY Times

Here's a link to an NPR report showing his predecessor's position(s) on the issues:
Candidate Bush on global warming

Are Republicans credible on this issue?

Labels: Bush, global warming, McCain

Let's get this out of the way first: I think McCain is a decent human being, which makes him some kind of moral superman compared to most politicians.

McCain is undeniably physically courageous. He mostly behaves with an admirable level of personal integrity (at least, excluding the Keating Five scandal and his recently exposed relationships with, respectively, a female lobbyist and an Arizona property developer). He is very pro-Israel, which I think most Jews appreciate.

Despite all of the above, I think his administration would be awful for America, and here's why: Just because McCain is decent and moral and willing to buck the (occasionally insane) orthodoxy of his party doesn't mean his staffers will be.

Let me give you an example that makes me worry. I worked on one of Gov. George Pataki's reelection campaigns in New York some years ago. As most will remember, Pataki was (is?) a moderate, at least as far as Republicans go. So you'd think that Pataki's staffers would be middle-of-the-road, New England, moderate Republicans.

Not so. One of them, having moved to New York from the Upper Midwest to work on the campaign, actually advised his wife not to leave the apartment. He also made sure to bring his and her pistols when he moved east of the Hudson River. You can imagine his views on things like abortion, etc.

What does this have to do with McCain? A lot.

A McCain Administration would be staffed by Republicans. Most of them would, of course, be alumni of the Bush Administration. The Deputy Under-Secretary for Housing and Urban Development under Bush would probably be the Under-Secretary under McCain, and so on up and down the line.

Why is this a problem? Because the Bush Administration has broken all previous records for managerial incompetence and corruption. In every department, from Homeland Security (remember FEMA during Katrina?) to Justice (waterboarding, anybody?) to, wait for it, Housing and Urban Development (the secretary just resigned in disgrace), the Bushies have combined ideological extremism with managerial mediocrity or worse.

So you may think that, in voting for McCain, you'd get a nice, center-right administration. But you'd likely be getting the same kind of losers, morons, and crooks who staff the present, soon-to-be-not-widely-missed Bush Administration.

Labels: Bush, McCain, politics

Here's a quote from John McCain's communications director about the NY Times article alleging McCain had an inappropriate relationship with a lobbyist:

"It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit and run smear campaign," communications director Jill Hazelbaker said in a prepared statement sent about an hour after the Times posted their story online. "John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election."

I actually like McCain, but good old Jill may be over-stating her case a bit. Here's the relevant section from McCain's Wikipedia entry:

"McCain's upwards political trajectory was jolted when he became enmeshed in the Keating Five scandal of the 1980s... Between 1982 and 1987, McCain received approximately $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. In addition, McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family and baby-sitter made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet...

Eventually [Keating's] real estate venture failed, leaving many broke. Federal regulators ultimately filed a $1.1 billion civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating, accusing him of siphoning Lincoln's deposits to his family and into political campaigns. The five senators came under investigation for attempting to influence the regulators. In the end, none of the senators were convicted of any crime, although McCain was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating."

Labels: McCain, ny times