While conservatives are having heart attacks over the prospect of the government helping sick people, Barack Obama is cleaning up the mess left over by President Bush and the Republicans.
The contracting process in Washington is a disgrace, wasting billions of dollars every year. The war-profiteering in Iraq was particularly bad, and the process for building weapons systems is completely out of control.
With that backdrop, Obama announced that the old ways of doing business in Washington are over.
President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered an overhaul of the way the U.S. government awards contracts for private sector work, reversing a Bush administration policy that in some cases led to federal investigations of procurement practices and no-bid contracts.
Obama joined Republican Sen. John McCain, his presidential campaign rival, and other congressional figures to announce an executive memorandum that commits his administration to a new set of marching orders for awarding contracts. Obama said “the days of giving government contractors a blank check are over” and said changes could save up to $40 billion a year.
One area in particular that is targeted is no-bid contracts, which the administration is seeking to change so that there will be more competition for government-paid work.
“Even if these were the best of times, budget reform would be overdue in Washington,” Obama said.
Obama’s presidential memo changes government contracting procedures. It directs Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to work with Cabinet and agency officials to draft new contracting rules by the end of September. Those new rules, White House aides say, will make it more difficult for contractors to bilk taxpayers and make some half-trillion dollars in federal contracts each year more accessible to independent contractors.
“We will stop outsourcing services that should be performed by the government and open up the contracting process to small businesses,” he said. “We will end unnecessary no-bid and cost-plus contracts that run up a bill that is paid by the American people. And we will strengthen oversight to maximize transparency and accountability.”
The new administration argued that its Republican predecessor’s contract spending had doubled to more than $500 billion over the last eight years.
Having McCain join Obama on this is huge. He and Obama don’t get along on many issues, and McCain recently scolded Obama over his unwillingness to take on earmarks. But McCain has been a tireless advocate of cleaning up the mess in government contracting. Hopefully this signals true bi-partisan cooperation. It is much easier to afford necessary government programs when we don’t waste money.
I’m listening to Obama’s remarks as he closes his Fiscal Responsibility Summit, and it’s rather stunning to see an interactive session that includes the President, and other leaders of our government like John McCain and Steny Hoyer. It was particularly interesting to hear John McCain speak and be supportive of the Obama Administration’s goal to get control of the military procurement process.
When looking at the list of attendees, it seems clear that Obama is serious about his goal to address the serious fiscal issues facing this nation. We are wasting billions of dollars with an inefficient health care system and wasteful weapons programs.
There seems to be some consensus on the potential of cutting corporate tax rates in exchange for closing loopholes.
Coupled with Obama’s aggressive, and honest, budget proposal, this might help generate some serious momentum for fiscal discipline.
Sarah Palin was interviewed in connection with an upcoming documentary from a conservative filmmaker about the 2008 presidential campaign. Some on the right are obsessed with the notion that the media was unfair to Palin, even when considering that Palin refused to hold a single news conference to address all the media reports she found to be unfair.
Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) believes Caroline Kennedy is getting softer press treatment in her pursuit of the New York Senate seat than Palin did as the GOP vice presidential nominee because of Kennedy’s social class.
“I’ve been interested to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled and if she will be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope,” Palin told conservative filmmaker John Ziegler during an interview Monday for his upcoming documentary film, “How Obama Got Elected.” Excerpts from the interview were posted on YouTube Wednesday evening.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out and I think that as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be.”
Palin said she remains subject to unfair press coverage of her and her family.
“Is it political? Is it sexism?” she asked. “What is it that drives someone to believe the worst and perpetuate the worst in terms of gossip and lies?”
She observed that Katie Couric and Tina Fey have been “capitalizing on” and “exploiting” her.
“I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen,” she said. “And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. That’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society.”
Her discussion of Caroline Kennedy is ridiculous. Sarah Palin wanted to be Vice President, which would have put her one heartbeat away from the most powerful position on the planet. She was an unknown figure, and when given the opportunity to speak without notes, she came across as a bumbling fool. It’s only natural that she would have faced a media frenzy. That was the whole point behind her selection. John McCain needed to create a buzz, and she provided that buzz. She just didn’t have the ability to address the issues facing our nation in a coherent manner. That’s her fault and John McCain’s fault. She’s trying to blame the media, and she’s trying to avoid the real issues by discussing the media’s obsession with her family (they do that to everyone, including the Clintons and the Kennedys), but in the end she’s the one who blew it.
Caroline Kennedy might be appointed to the Senate. That is completely different from the Vice Presidency. There she will be one of 100 Senators. If Sarah Palin wanted to be a Senator, she would not face the same level of media scrutiny as she faced as John McCain’s running mate. Frankly, Sarah Palin, despite her obvious shortcomings, is herself qualified to be a Senator, just like Caroline Kennedy.
Of course, Sarah Palin and her supporters will never acknowledge that distinction. They play the victim card just as good as anyone on the left. First, everyone who questioned her was sexist. Now she’s bringing up class. Conservatives used to mock those on the left who wallowed in victim-style politics, and now they’re doing the same thing. It’s pathetic, and it just might keep them in the minority for years to come.
Some of the polls have tightened a little, but most are holding steady and we have some outliers showing a huge lead for Obama. The state polls also look great.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign has finally started to talk about the economy, but they can’t even get that right.
If McCain had not opposed the Bush tax cuts in the past, and if he was proposing a flat tax, he might have some credibility on this idiotic charges of “socialism.” One wonders whether he really is senile. Also, when you add in the economic genius of Sarah Palin (she must have shaken hands with Mitt Romney), your argument looks even more ridiculous, given that Sarah Palin raised taxes on the oil companies in Alaska in order to redistribute the tax dollars to all Alaskans in the form of a check.
Of course, she’s too stupid to understand the irony here, and McCain has no trouble repeating any charge trumped up by his idiotic advisors. So, they continue to stomp around the country calling Obama names and revealing themselves as utter fools.
This campaign is a disgrace. Many conservatives have already come to that conclusion. Others are so blinded by their own idiology that they drink up the silly name-calling, hoping for a dramatic comeback. Fortunately, their numbers seem to be shrinking.
John McCain’s campaign manager says he is reconsidering using Barack Obama’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright as a campaign issue during the election’s closing weeks.
In an appearance on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Davis said that circumstances had changed since John McCain initially and unilaterally took Obama’s former pastor off the table. The Arizona Republican, Davis argued, had been jilted by the remarks of Rep. John Lewis, who compared recent GOP crowds to segregationist George Wallace’s rallies. And, as such, the campaign was going to “rethink” what was in and out of political bounds.
“Look, John McCain has told us a long time ago before this campaign ever got started, back in May, I think, that from his perspective, he was not going to have his campaign actively involved in using Jeremiah Wright as a wedge in this campaign,” he said late last week. “Now since then, I must say, when Congressman Lewis calls John McCain and Sarah Palin and his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we’re all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time, you know, that you’ve got to rethink all these things. And so I think we’re in the process of looking at how we’re going to close this campaign. We’ve got 19 days, and we’re taking serious all these issues.”
John McCain’s campaign is already a joke, and he’s willingly tarnished his reputation with his campaign tactics. Colin Powell cited McCain’s tactics as one of the reasons he decided to support Obama.
Now McCain is ready to throw away what’s left of his integrity. At this late stage I suspect this desperate attack will backfire.
The McCain campaign can’t get anything right. They told they press that we would see a new economic proposal this week. Now McCain has abondoned those plans.
Presented with 30 options for new economic measures, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has – at least for now – chosen none of them.
His campaign had been planning to roll out new proposals this week that would be aimed at restoring confidence in financial markets and encouraging investors to return.
On Sunday, hours before attending a big strategy meeting at McCain campaign headquarters, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that McCain was planning “a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy, by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes.”
But when the meeting ended, so did plans for a new economy push. The campaign now says no new policy announcements are planned. Participants in the meeting refused to say what happened.
“We’re locked down,” said one official.
Politico reported McCain advisers’ descriptions of the plan in articles on Saturday and Sunday.
Jackie Calmes of The New York Times, who first reported the plan’s collapse on Sunday night, pointed to “internal confusion” about the matter.
This was inevitable after John McCain and Sarah Palin started ramping up the personal attacks.
The anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is acting to tamp it down. McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about Barack Obama’s character, he described the Democrat as a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”
A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.
McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, “The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight.” Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.
Is McCain sincere? Is he starting to see that he’s creating a mob mentality?
There are many Americans who have very legitimate disagreements with Obama. He’s a liberal. But we know that there are crazies on both sides of the political spectrum, and if you whip up fear and feed their anger at political rallies, you run the risk that the angry mob takes over your message.
Hopefully, McCain will recognize that he risks what’s left of his reputation if he doesn’t tamp down these personal attacks.
More Republicans are starting to turn away from John McCain.
He endorsed John McCain in the presidential primary, but now former Republican Gov. William Milliken is expressing doubts about his party’s nominee.
“He is not the McCain I endorsed,” said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. “He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question, ‘Who is John McCain?’ because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.
“I’m disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.”
Milliken, a lifelong Republican, is among some past leaders from the party’s moderate wing voicing reservations and, in some cases, opposition to McCain’s candidacy.
General Petraeus repeats what most respected foreign policy professionals believe – we have to be willing to talk to our enemies.
Petraeus also came out unambiguously in his talk at Heritage for opening communications with America’s adversaries, a position McCain is attacking Obama for endorsing. Citing his Iraq experience, Petraeus said, “You have to talk to enemies.” He added that it was necessary to have a particular goal for discussion and to perform advance work to understand the motivations of his interlocutors.
All that was the subject of one of the most contentious tussles between McCain and Obama in the first presidential debate, with Obama contending that his intent to negotiate with foreign adversaries without “precondition” did not mean that he would neglect diplomatic “preparation.”
McCain, apparently perceiving an opportunity for attack, Tuesday again used Obama’s comments to attack his judgment. “Sen. Obama, without precondition, wants to sit down and negotiate with them, without preconditions,” McCain said, referring to Iran.
Yet Petraeus emphasized throughout his lecture that reaching out to insurgent groups — some “with our blood on their hands,” he said — was necessary to the ultimate goal of turning them against irreconcilable enemies like Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Petraeus favorably cited the example of one of his British deputies, who in a previous assignment had to negotiate with Martin McGuiness of the Irish Republican Army, responsible for killing some of the British commander’s troops. The British officer, Petraeus said, occasionally wanted to “reach across the table” and choke his former adversary but understood that such negotiations were key to ending a war.
It was another easy victory tonight for Barack Obama over John McCain. He was more persuasive, and much more presidential. McCain is a grumpy old man.
So much for the anticipated personal attacks from McCain. It’s much harder to make these types of attacks when you have to face the person you’re smearing. McCain didn’t have the guts to try it.
We knew it was coming, but now that John McCain is plummeting in the polls, we’re seeing a renewed attack on Barack Obama and his “associations.”
It’s amazing that in these tough times John McCain is unable to engage in a principled debate on the economy. Commentators on this blog have put up conservative arguments, yet McCain seems to be completely unable to offer a coherent argument as to why he is the better choice when it comes to the economy. Sarah Palin can barely utter a coherent sentence at all. Instead, McCain sends out Palin to make personal attacks on Barack Obama. The strategy is clear – change the subject and hope that the fickle electorate will turn on Obama.
It doesn’t help, of course, that Obama has been calm and steady thoughout this crisis while McCain has acted like a desperate fool. It also doesn’t help that these disgraceful attacks will now give the press an excuse to look at John McCain’s past and Sarah Palin’s past. They each have their own questionable associations, and we will be hearing more about them.
We’re also seeing the fruits of McCain’s ugly campaign, as taunts like “kill him” and “sit down boy” come from their frenzied audiences. I guess this is what happens when you whip up fear and hatred.
Further, these allegations are not brought up in news conferences or in interviews, where McCain or Palin would be forced to answer tough questions about their allegations or about their own records. Palin has yet to conduct a single news conference. Yesterday, the press was also prevented from speaking with Palin supporters at a campaign event. Unbelievable.
Conservatives need to look in the mirror. Is this what you want from your candidates? Is winning at all costs worth it? Can you defend candidates who can’t even enunciate or defend conservative principles?
If this doesn’t work, this will be a fitting end to the Reagan conservative movement. By embracing a mediocre intellect like Sarah Palin, following the disaster of the George W. Bush presidency, conservatives will have proven that identity politics, cronyism and the politics of personal destruction have replaced conservative principles as the driving force of the movement. In many ways, today’s conservatives are the mirror opposite of Ronald Reagan, who relied on ideas and a sunny optimism to lead our country.
The Ohio polls are starting to break for Barack Obama. The latest polls from the Columbus Dispatch gives him a 7-point lead over John McCain.
Amid growing concerns about the economy, Ohio Democrats are coming home to Sen. Barack Obama, giving him a 7-point advantage in a new Dispatch Poll as the volatile presidential campaign swings into its final month.
The Illinois senator’s lead of 49 percent to 42 percent over Republican Sen. John McCain comes at an especially opportune time for Obama because thousands of Ohioans already are casting ballots in the state’s first presidential election allowing any registered voter to vote absentee. The new setup takes away some of the heft from the adage “the only poll that counts is the one on Election Day.”
Ohio is even more critical to McCain’s campaign this year since he pulled out of Michigan last week. Not only has no Republican ever won the presidency without carrying the Buckeye State, McCain almost has to run the 2004 electoral table to win, carrying every single state President Bush won four years ago, including Ohio.
Early voting is very important this year in Ohio. Obama’s campaign has a huge ground game in the state which should help with turnout.
It’s stunning that a candidate for high office can’t speak intelligently about the Supreme Court. In this clip, she can’t name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that she disagrees with.
It’s not necessary for a candidate to be able to recite the names of decisions. It is important, however, for a candidate to have a working knowledge of the issues that have faced the courts over the years. As a social conservative, she could have easily cited decisions regarding prayer in schools or affirmative action that have offended conservatives.
Instead, she rambled through a bunch of general statements that were barely more coherent than her statements regarding Russia and foreign policy.
Again, she’s not remotely qualifed for the Vice Presidency. It has nothing to do with her gender or her politics. She just can’t carry on a meaningful discussion of national issues. She has not held a single press conference, where reporters are usually much tougher than Katie Couric.
Experience and readiness are not confined to the bullet points on one’s resume. The ability to be engaged in the issues of our time is crucial. She fails this test spectacularly, and even conservatives are starting to take note.
John McCain does not have the temperment to be President, and he has selected a running mate who is not qualified to be Vice President.
Both candidates did well tonight. McCain’s campaign was imploding, and he needed to get back in the game tonight. He accomplished that, despite a slow start. Obama needed to demonstrate a working knowledge of foreign policy, and he accomplished that.
I think Obama did a little better. Both had good points on Iraq, and each was able to make their respective arguments. Given that McCain has the edge on experience and foreign policy, this is a win for Obama. Along those lines, here’s the best moment of the debate for Obama.
McCain did a good job of emphasizing his experience and knowledge of the issues, and he repeated over and over his argument that Obama did not understand the issues. That said, Obama was able to deflect those by being able to speak intelligently about the issues.
We’ll see how this plays out. McCain did not hide his utter contempt for Obama. McCain always hates his opponents, and he was barely able to even look at Obama. The grouchy candidate rarely wins, so this might hurt him. Obama, on the other hand, was confident and tough without being arrogant or antagonistic.
This past Sunday, George Will ridiculed John McCain on This Week for McCain’s foolish claim that he would fire the head of the SEC. He called McCain’s actions “unpresidential.”
Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.
Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”
George Will is a respected conservative, but he has never been a fan of John McCain. He has been especially critical of McCain for campaign finance reform, and he hasn’t been shy in the past about questioning McCain’s temperment. Nevertheless, he seemed willing to give McCain the benefit of the doubt – until now.
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.
It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
Will is arguing that John McCain is unfit to be president of the United States. Throw in Sarah Palin and you have the scariest ticket in American history, following perhaps the worst president of our lifetimes.
