Some Suggestions
by Steve Soto
I've got a busy morning ahead of me, and will not have time to post much today, but in the aftermath of last night's debate, I wanted to put out several things:
As Chuck Todd noted, the town hall format didn’t help McCain after all. McCain simply does not wear well on TV, and you can only swallow so many "my friends" before you realize the man is trying to avoid saying anything specific except sending code that Obama is a scary black man.
For his part, Obama is simply trying to look the part in contrast to McCain and it's working. He is doing fine on the economy, but he needs to speak to those whose retirements have lost $2 trillion over the last month, and acknowledge that their retirement plans have now been set back and even ruined by Wall Street greed. Doing this would be a great transition into blasting McCain next week on his plans to privatize Social Security and cut Medicare. Obama needs to ask why McCain is so quick to waffle with answers about "working across the aisle" and commissions to study the matter, when in fact McCain has already come out for privatizing Social Security and cutting Medicare to pay for McCain's wars without end and making the Bush tax cuts permanent.
He should ask why it is always the middle class and retirees who are supposed to take cuts and make sacrifices to pay for upper income tax cuts and corporate welfare. This would be a good transition to remind voters that all of us, Main Street and Wall Street together, made money during the 1990's with the Clinton era level of taxation and regulation, so moving back to those days will not harm the golden goose.
Obama needs to push back against any GOP inference that the poor are to blame for this mess, and should point out that an unregulated Wall Street and Phil Gramm share much more of the blame for this than anyone else.
Obama could then ask "you remember Phil Gramm Senator McCain, don't you? He's your chief economic advisor who led us into this meltdown and caused all this hardship, yet he's your guru."
Although he also tagged McCain a little in pushing back on Fannie and Freddie, he needs to respond to McCain's yammering about Washington greed and corruption by asking why McCain's senior campaign managers were the same lobbyists taking thousands of dollars for steering Congress away from regulating the two mortgage giants any further.
He could also score points if he stated that before sending billions more to anyone on Wall Street, the federal government should be helping governments closer to Main Street avoid painful cuts that would only exacerbate things further. If we can bail out Corporate America, why are we not helping state governments get through the next 12-18 months?
On foreign affairs, Obama needs to do better on Russia, where his answer was inadequate. He can tie himself into what Henry Kissinger and George Shultz suggest, and deflect any further BS from McCain.