At the start of the GE campaign, Team Obama (TO) declined the suggestion from Team McCain (TM) to have the candidates engage in a series of "town hall" style debates. Subsequent developments should cause TO to reconsider that decision.
As the AP, which is generally McCain-friendly, notes:
John McCain isn't mixing it up with the people much these days.
His strong suit and distinguishing characteristic — accessibility — is rarely on display in these buttoned-up weeks of the presidential election campaign, when worries about missteps or getting off the topic of the moment trump the freewheeling nature of the Arizona senator. That made his town-hall meeting Monday, first in nearly a month, all the more striking.
As others have noted here today, McCain did not exactly distinguish himself today on "Morning Joe," a forum that should be friendly for him. His recent appearance on "The View" also did not seem to go that well, either. TM has, as the AP put it, "bubble wrapped" him for a reason.
When your candidate is 72, he has a volatile temper, and his views are out of step w/ those of most Americans on a host of issues, logic dictates that you limit and control his public exposures. Logic further dictates that McCain's professed desire to increase his exposure in unscripted forums is, like most everything else in his campaign these days, fundamentally dishonest. Logic should, at this point, compel TO to conclusively demonstrate that dishonesty to the American public by calling McCain's bluff.
Today's Bob Herbert column shows the radical nature of McCain's proposed health care plan:
Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue to receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to cover the taxes on the value of their benefits.
While there might be less money in the paycheck, that would not be anything to worry about, according to Senator McCain. That’s because the government would be offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit — $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family — to be used "to help pay for your health care."
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The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)
While the Palin Phenomenon still appears to be controlling the electoral cycle, few, if any, still wavering voters know the first thing about what McCain wants to do to our health care system. Most Kossacks probably don't know that McCain proposes to tax employer-provided coverage as ordinary income. This radical proposal has gone widely unnoticed this far by the TM and by the broader public.
As I noted yesterday, McCain's long-standing support for SS privatization has received little attention. It has not received nearly the attention that it should be getting here in FL. McCain's significant lead here w/ voters >55 would shrink in a hurry if it did get such attention.
Given the ongoing meltdown on Wall Street, the respective candidates' differing approaches on financial matters deserves more attention, too. As today's NYT notes, McCain's views there are consistent w/ the views cited above:
But his record on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party’s embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline.
While Mr. McCain has cited the need for additional oversight when it comes to specific situations, like the mortgage problems behind the current shocks on Wall Street, he has consistently characterized himself as fundamentally a deregulator and he has no history prior to the presidential campaign of advocating steps to tighten standards on investment firms.
He has often taken his lead on financial issues from two outspoken advocates of free market approaches, former Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Individuals associated with Merrill Lynch, which sold itself to Bank of America in the market upheaval of the past weekend, have given his presidential campaign nearly $300,000, making them Mr. McCain’s largest contributor, collectively.
The "McCain is a moderate" meme is the biggest lie of all emanating from TM. The man is a dangerous radical who wants to give Wall Street more power over health care, over retirement, and over the economy as a whole at a time when public confidence in Wall Street is lower than it has been in decades. The last time that confidence in the Street was so low, FDR noted that Americans had learned that heedless self-interest was not only bad morals, it was bad economics, too. McCain, OTOH, thinks that we need more heedless self-interest, not less, at this point.
Obama could apply the disinfectant of sunlight to McCain's radical views by engaging in more public forums in addition to the 3 scheduled debates. Those 3 "debates" favor the short soundbite over detailed analysis, and they are not the kind of forums that will likely lend themselves to full exposure of the radical nature of McCain's views. Those debates, furthermore, are under the control of moderators who have, in the past, not shown themselves to be that effective at raising essential questions.
Obama's views, his judgment, and his temperament are far more in tune w/ those of most Americans than McCain's ever will be. He should, accordingly, seek to maximize his chances to display those differences to the public. The process would likely tax McCain's stamina, and it would force public attention back to the top of the respective ticket, which is where it belongs. McCain trailed when he was on his own before, so let's force himself to go back out on his own now.
When this topic was first broached about 3 months ago, TO faced a very different political landscape than it faces now. Changed circumstances should lead to changed strategies. The strategy of declining McCain's proposed town hall forums is one that should be reconsidered in response to the changed landscape.