Liveblogging the McCain / Obama Debate #3.

Politics — By Dustin R. Steeve on October 15, 2008 at 8:59 pm

6:01 PM – Contrary to what Charlie Gibson just said, McCain is not
double digets behind, he has actually gained ground and is only down by
5 according to Rassmuessen

6:04
PM – McCain: ‘We need to buy bad home mortgages.’  Obama: ‘We are
experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. 
There is not yet a rescue package for the Middle Class.  He wants to
end tax-breaks for companies shipping jobs overseas.  Provide a
Middle-Class tax cut for families making less than $200k.  We need to
invest in our education system.’  McCain: ‘Joe the plumber wants to buy
a business, but Sen. Obama wants to raise his tax bracket.’ 

Here’s
the Obama narrative: There is us (the middle class) and them (the
wealthy and big businesses).  Tax breaks either go to us or to them. 
We want it, they don’t need it, so we SHOULD get it.  Here’s the McCain
narrative: Why do we need to spread the wealth around (as Obama has
explicitly said)?  It is false to suggest that Joe the plumber needs to
fail in order for others to succeed.  Nobody likes taxes, lets not
raise taxes.  Busineses in America are paying the second highest tax
rate in the world.  Companies will go where they can create jobs.  Of
all times in America, we need to ENCOURAGE business and not condemn
them for their success. 

Senator
Obama has a lot of nerve bringing up Exxon Mobile’s $12 billion in
profits without having the intellectual integrity to admit that the
Federal Government made $33 billion in profits off of the same oil!

6:16
- Obama: ‘We need an ethic of responsibility.’  I agree with this. 
However, what the Senator will not tell you is that his McCain: We need
to have nuclear power.  We need to become energy independent.  Accross
the board spending freeze (hatchet) and then we will go through and
eliminate programs and save billions in defense spending.  Programs:
subsidies program for ethonal, eliminate the tarrif on sugar ethonal
subsidies.  We will cut out pork.  Obama: We do not need a spending
freeze, we need a scaple.  McCain: Senator Obama, I am not President
Bush.  You should have run 4 years ago.

6:26 – McCain: ‘It could
have been different and I regret some of the negative aspects of this
campaign.  Obama campaign has highest spending on negative campaigns
ever.’  Obama: ‘Americans do not perceive things that way.’  Wow, he
refused to repudiate Lewis and he used a clever diversion to dance
around the facts laid out by McCain.  McCain called it on it.  Senator
Obama still did not repudiate Senator Obama.  Instead, he once again
dodged.

Obama wins on cliches.  Obama: ‘People are tired of tit
for tat.’  That’s not the point senator.  Obama does pal around with
terrorists, William Ayres.  The arrogance of Senator Obama is
astounding.  It is noteworthy that Senator McCain was just in the news
for repudiating somebody who made extreme charges of Senator Obama at
one of McCain’s rallies.

Here’s the nature of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN:

Obama: ‘Mr. Ayers is a professor who will have nothing to
do with my presidency.’  ‘ACORN has nothing to do with us.’  Re:
Ayers… he launched your career Sen. Obama.  Re: ACORN, see the video
for yourself.  Also, his campaign gave them $230,000.  Senator McCain
just made these claims – good for him.

6:43 – Question about the
Vice-Presidents.  Joe Biden thinks that we and France chased Hezbollah
out of Lebanon.  He was the former foreign relations committee chair in
the Senate.  If he were not a few steps from being elected to the West
Wing, it would be laughable. Now it’s just pathetic.

6:46 – Going to climate change & foreign oil.

6:47
- McCain: ‘Build 45 nuclear power plants and we can eliminate middle
eastern and Venezuelan oil in 7-10 years.’  ‘Obama’s claim that he
would unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA will make Canada laugh as they
sell the oil

Obama: ‘10 years and we can not import from the
Middle East.  We need to expand domestic oil production.  Oil companies
need to use the 68 million acres they have leased.  We need to put our
resources in solar, wind, bio-diesle… we need to build highly fuel
efficient cars.’  Senator Obama may have some legitimate disagreements
with NAFTA, but people MUST realize that despite the possible
legitimacy of the claims, there are political realities that probably
prohibit the most ideal world. 

McCain is on fire.  

McCain: ‘The Columbian free trade agreement is a no-brainer’

Obama:
‘We have to consider human rights… sure there were protections for
labor leaders, but it was not enough.  Regarding automobiles, we need
to pressure our auto-making companies to make highly fuel efficient
cars.  We can get 5 million new jobs out of this.’  Senator Obama is
using rhetoric to create a false dichotomy between bringing aid to
labor in Columbia and making a free trade agreement with them. 
Columbia will be much more able to provide for their people (including
providing safety) if they have money and jobs.  If we are an important
presence in their country, a strong ally, we will be able to help them
in this cause. 

Obama does well to look into the camera. 

Obama: Healthcare solution: IT investments, preventative medicine, government sponsored healthcare. 

McCain:
Healthcare solution: Healthcare records online like the VA, more
community health centers, physical fitness and nutrition programs in
school, but also, and most important, a $5,000 refundable tax credit to
go buy your own insurance plan.  To Joe: If you have employees and
kids, Senator Obama will fine you if you do not adopt his healthcare
plan.  Senator Obama wants a single payer system where the government
controls things.

Obama: ‘Only big business who can afford to pay will have to buy healthcare for their employees.’  How is this defined? 

McCain:
‘95% of the people in America will benefit from my plan.  The average
cost of healthcare across America is $5,800.’  The fundamental
difference: Obama wants government to do the job, Senator McCain wants
you and I to do the job.

7:07 – Would you nominate people to the supreme court who disagree with you on Roe v. Wade.

McCain:
Brought up gang of 14.  ‘I voted for Brier and Ginsberg even though I
disagreed with them.  Senator Obama did not vote for Alito and Roberts
because they were quote conservative judges.  I would not apply a
litmus test.’

Obama: ‘No litmus test should be applied, most
importantly we need fair and just judges.  This is an important issue
and Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance.  Roe v. Wade was a good
decision.  I think abortion is a difficult, moral issue.  This issue
should not be subject to state referendum similar to how other rights
are not subject to state referendum.’  He just said that he wants
judges with a sense of what real world folks are going through.  This
fundamentally strikes against the role of the judiciary – what he is
describing is the constitution role of the Congress and the President. 
This is a shameful thing for a Harvard Law grad to say.  

McCain
brings up the born alive amendment.  The press has been running
interference for Obama on this issue.  Obama believes that any baby not
born or any baby deemed not viable by a doctor (upon birth) should
die.  Senator Obama – why ought not doctors attempt to save every born
life? 

Obama: ‘I will support a ban on late term abortions
as long as there is an exception for the mother’s health.’  I am sorry,
this angers me.  Obama just outright lied because he knows that the vast majority of Americans do not support partial birth abortion.  Here is what he said to planned parenthood.

7:16
- Obama: ‘We need to invest in early child education.  We need new
teachers, especially in Math and Science and give them higher pay. 
Also we should propose a $4,000 tuition credit for students in exchange
for community service.’  I just graduated from college.  I can attest
first hand that most really good students are too busy working
part-time jobs to pay rent and intern to advance their career to spend
yet more hours (on top of all of this and homework) to do community
service work (such as in the peace corps). 

McCain:
‘Throwing money at the problem is not the answer.  We need to encourage
programs like Teach for America.  We need to help get student loans
available, get them a payment schedule that they can meet, and adjust
loan availablity to inflation.’ 

7:20 – Back and forth about vouchers.

7:27 – Final Remarks.

McCain: The commitments we each made to you tonight will be based on
whether you can trust us or not.  Examine my record, examine my
proposals.  

Obama: America is going through tough times.  The policies of the
last eight years… worst economic crisis since the great depression. 
We need fundamental change.  We need to invest in tax cuts for the
Middle class, in healthcare, and in businesses who can create a new
energy economy.  These are the policies I have fought for my entire
career (all four years of it).

My Thoughts: McCain did very well.  He brought it to Obama.  Will it be enough?  Time will tell.

    13 Comments

  • Rob Ryan says:

    The Republican Outpost

  • Rob,
    I am curious to know why you felt compelled to make that observation.

  • Chris Oakes says:

    Dustin…
    It’s a good thing there will be no more debates – your analysis is horribly biased, and poorly written. You automatically assume most, or all, of McCain’s statements are true and right. I’m not an Obama supporter by any means, but if you think McCain “brought it”…well, let’s just say that’s a very interesting perspective. I wanted McCain to do well, and can only say that it felt like he barely survived. He certainly IMHO seems to feel much more at home on the campaign trail than at a roundtable discussion. Why is that?

  • Mike Toreno says:

    You:
    My Thoughts: McCain did very well. He brought it to Obama.
    Reality:
    CBS Poll: Uncommitted Voters Say Obama Won Final Debate
    You:
    EPIC FAIL

  • Boonton says:

    McCain brings up the born alive amendment. The press has been running interference for Obama on this issue. Obama believes that any baby not born or any baby deemed not viable by a doctor (upon birth) should die. Senator Obama – why ought not doctors attempt to save every born life?
    Talk about lies, Obama very clearly said that he believed doctors should try to save any baby born alive and said Il law already required that. You can argue that the law Obama voted against wasn’t posing a danger to Roe but he effectively did counter the assertion that he did not think infants born alive should be given medical treatment.
    Taxes – Joe the plumber was an interesting take (I’m going to assume he is real, no doubt the media will have found and interviewed him by this afternoon….if it turns out he was made up, though, it will be lights out for McCain). I didn’t really connect with why Joe couldn’t buy a business under Obama’s tax plans? Is he buying a business that will make more in profit than 98% of small businesses (most small businesses have little or no profits to tax because their owners work at the business and pay themselves a salary capable of wiping out most of the business’s taxable income)? Is he currently making more than $250,000 as a plumber (not likely but not impossible)?
    Taxes & Spending – This might be too much to ask for but I didn’t connect with any reason why we even have taxes. Obama has a bunch of tax cuts and spending proposals. McCan will eliminate the $2m for the planitarium to get a new overhead projector but have the Fed. gov’t buy out our mortgages. All this combined with the fact that Bush ran up trillions in debt when times were supposedly good! Unless we aspire for the US to become a Mexico in the next 50 years we are going to have to pay this off and it’s going to come from taxes. Neither side wants to be honest about this (or maybe I should say realistic, after all if we just borrowed $750B to bail out Wall Street I’m sure some are thinking why not just keep going).
    Education – Both sides presented a grab bag of things they like and support. Obama made the point that he had proposals that addressed education at all levels accross the US while hitting home with the argument that McCain’s proposal is limited to just Washington DC. He effectively depicted his side as broad based while depicting McCain’s side as only playing with the voucher hobby hoarse in DC while ignoring the rest of America. McCain muddled the response. If you’re going to go full force for vouchers then do so and ignore everything else. But if you’re going to muddle through the list of programs you like (i.e. Troops to Teachers etc.) then it’s going to bite that you’re program only applies to 2000 people in DC.

  • Rob Ryan says:

    “I am curious to know why you felt compelled to make that observation.”
    It is simply this: this site is more about right-wing politics than it is about an evangelical worldview. One of the great problems with the evangelical movement is that it has become inextricably linked to the republican party, nearly entirely on the basis of two issues: abortion and gay rights. But what about the poor? What about human rights? Too many evangelicals are very keen to have the government address moral issues in line with their beliefs. Maybe that is because denying choice to women and rights to gays doesn’t cost anything. When it comes to other social issues like helping those less fortunate, they think that should be done individually or by churches; suddenly, freedom becomes important.
    The sad thing is, you guys are led along by politicians who are far more concerned about taking care of the rich instead of establishing your religion to the extent you would like. Where is your “Marriage Protection” amendment? Where is your “culture of life? In the last forty years, all but twelve have seen a Republican administration in the White House. You are not going to get what you want, because too many of your fellow Americans do not want it. You were lucky in that you manged to get a very imbalanced Supreme Court relative to what Americans want, but that is about to change. You won’t get to shove your morals down the throats of your fellow Americans. The next two Supreme Court justices will be liberals, because the Republicans have made so much a mess of things that even our ignorant electorate has had enough. You’ll be right back where you started. So instead of leading the country to ruin by voting for politicians who cynically pander to what you think is right while getting everything else wrong, why don’t you opt out like the Amish? We’d be better off if you did.
    I was a Republican until they went overboard pandering to you guys. Now I prefer big government and kowtowing to minorities to your formerly respectable party. The association between your faith and right-wing politics is poisoning both.

  • qwertyuiop says:

    “Talk about lies, Obama very clearly said that he believed doctors should try to save any baby born alive and said Il law already required that.”
    I wonder how Obama would vote on a bill prohibiting slavery in Illinois if slavery was still common place. Would he openly oppose the bill or vote against it because an anti-slavery law was already in effect?
    Obama explained in 2001, and has never recanted, that he opposed the Illinois
    BAIPA because it declared a “previable fetus” to be a legal person – even though the bill only did so if the baby had achieved “complete expulsion or extraction from its mother.”
    The old Illinois law in question (720 ILCS 510.6) covered only situations where an abortionist declares before the abortion that there was “a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb.” Humans are often born alive a month or more before they reach the point where such “sustained survival” – that is, long-term survival – is likely or possible (which is often called the point of “viability”). The old Illinois law has no bearing on many of the induced-labor abortions about which the nurses testified before the committees in Congress and the Illinois state legislature, because many of them were performed on unborn humans who were capable of being born alive, and who often were born alive, but who were not old enough to have a “reasonable likelihood of sustained
    survival . . . outside the womb.” Even with respect to “viable” infants, the old law is ridden with loopholes. It does not apply except when the abortionist himself declares that there is “a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb.” This already-weak law was further weakened by a lengthy consent decree issued by a federal court in 1993, which among other things permanently prohibits authorities from enforcing the law’s definitions of “born alive,” “live born,” and “live birth.” On April 4, 2002, Obama spoke on the Illinois Senate floor against a bill (SB 1663 – which was not the BAIPA) that would have more strictly defined the circumstances under which the presence of a second physician (to care for a live-born baby) would be required; Obama argued that this would “burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion . . . it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births.”
    Two nurses from the hospital’s delivery ward, Jill Stanek and Allison Baker (who is no longer employed by the hospital), testified before the Subcommittee on the Constitution that physicians at Christ Hospital have performed numerous ‘induced labor’ or ‘live-birth’ abortions, a procedure in which physicians use drugs to induce premature labor and deliver unborn children, many of whom are still alive, and then simply allow those who are born alive to die. . . . According to the testimony of Mrs. Stanek and Mrs. Baker . . . physicians at Christ Hospital have used the procedure to abort healthy infants and infants with non-fatal deformities . . . Many of these babies have lived for hours after birth, with no efforts made to determine if any of them could have survived with appropriate medical assistance. The nurses also witnessed hospital staff taking many of these live-born babies into a ‘soiled utility room’ where the babies would remain until death.
    One example given by Mrs. Stanek was that an aborted baby “was left to die on the counter of the soiled Utility Room wrapped in a disposable towel. This baby was accidentally thrown in the garbage, and when they later were going through the trash to find the baby, the baby fell out of the
    towel and on to the floor.” Mrs. Baker testified that she “happened to walk into a ‘soiled utility room’ and saw, lying on the metal counter, a fetus, naked, exposed and breathing, moving its arms and legs.”
    “It is not uncommon for a live aborted babies to linger for an hour or two or even longer. At Christ Hospital one of these babies once lived for almost an entire eight-hour shift. Last year alone, of the 13 babies that I am aware of who were aborted at Christ Hospital, at least four lived between 1-1/2 to 3 hours, two boys and two girls.”

  • David N. says:

    Rob Ryan,
    According to most polls, somewhere around 40% of Americans identify themselves as “evangelical.” Not all identify with Conservatism, but most do. There are of course many other Christians in America who would not consider themselves evangelical that are also conservative. So it is hardly the case that some tiny minority of religious fundies has somehow hijacked American politics.
    You also make too many generalizations, to the point of simply being inaccurate. Almost no Christian that I know of (including Dustin and the other bloggers here) thinks that John McCain is an ideal candidate. He’s really just the lesser of two evils. The real issue here is not whether we evangelical Christians have been duped into blindly following Republican politicians wherever they lead us, but whether or not we think Barak Obama is seriously a better option than McCain. So you’re simply poking at straw men when you assume without good reason that Dustin only attacks Obama because he’s been duped by the right-wingers. He attacks Obama because he genuinely disagrees with his policies (or lack thereof) and honestly doesn’t think he’s qualified to lead the nation.
    And of course you use the tired canard that Republicans are only interested in making the rich richer and the poor poorer. I understand that it’s easier for you to oppose someone if you vilify them to the point of being almost less than human, but this is hardly fair. Most Republicans are just as concerned about creating a strong economy as are Democrats, they simply prefer creating jobs for the poor rather than giving them handouts. And before you blame the whole economic crisis on Bush, and make the leap that all Republican economic policy is to blame, remember that many Conservative commentators have been criticizing Bush’s economic plans for years (and of course, both parties share the blame for this current situation).
    Don’t get me wrong, I would prefer that I didn’t have to choose between helping the poor and saving the unborn. So even if I thought you were correct in your assessment of Republican economic policy, I wouldn’t be happy about my choices this election. The point is that when it comes to helping the poor and strengthening the economy, we both want the same end, we simply disagree on the means.
    By the way, I should point out that your rhetoric about being enslaved to the Republican party simply masks the fact that your alternative is to enslave ourselves to the Democratic party instead. But why should I have to give up being pro-life and defending traditional marriage if I want to help the poor? Again, I simply am forced to choose the lesser of two evils (all the while I will continue to give money to my church to help the poor).

  • smmtheory says:

    I was a Republican until they went overboard pandering to you guys.

    I’ve never been a Republican, and I’ve never been a Democrat, and I’ve never been a subscriber to any other political party. For some reason though, I just can’t quite wrap my mind around you being a moderate either, least-wise like the majority of Americans.

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