No, I really wanted a video;)

I will admit (in fact I have) that I was impressed with her at the beginning . . . she faltered as she went on. Not for her positions, or intelligence, or the facts, but, Cretin, maybe it WAS the folksiness, which I think is genuine with her and I can’t fault her for that. Yes, Biden eventually won the debate hands down, but at the beginning at least she seemed better under scrutiny than she did with Katie Couric (how could she have seemed worse?), and Biden sounded like standard Washington.

Yes, it SHOULD be all about the issues, but it isn’t and we have to pay attention to the presence people present on camera. Did you see Peggy Noonan on “The Daily Show” this week? She made a wonderful observation that people have so little faith in government (especially due to the Bush administration), that there’s a gut reaction to be attract to someone who’s an outsider — and nobody is more of an outsider than Palin. She’s TOO much of an outsider, of course – - she doesn’t seem to know what she needs to know and she doesn’t have the ability to instill confidence when she’s out of her depth, but it’s a reasonable explanation for why people respond to her. People forget that even many Republicans are sick of the Bush administration, even if they’re willing to continue his policies.

This is all so crazy. Just a few more weeks . . .

I guess it doesn’t matter.

Hi Paul,

Just one more request (aside from the video)… I’d love some posts that are pro-Obama… I’m a negative person myself, but I’d love to really understand what it is that people admire in him. Is his understanding of the economy and foreign affairs that got you and your readers interested in him and supporting him? When did you and/or your readers feel like he was the person most qualified to be President? I’m not trying to be snide. I’m pretty sure I won’t vote for Obama but I’d love to understand the other side better.

Being a citizen has certainly increased my stake in this election and could go some way to explaining why I get so wound up by it all. Or maybe it’s just my personality.

I do think though, that even if I lived in Britain, there would be a lot more at stake for me in the American election than there would be in a Brown/Cameron election. I can’t imagine even wanting to go out to vote in the next UK election, there is so little riding on it.

US policy impacts every person on the planet. A McCain administration means more war, only token efforts at combating climate change, more antagonism towards Russia and China and hence more chance of WW3, continued disrespect from around the world, a possible global depression as McCain’s insistence that markets can regulate themselves continues to fail and the chance of his idiot side-kick, Palin, becoming the most powerful person in the world. I think this stuff should wind up any sane person.

My anger in the above post was directed towards PBS, the only channel I can actually watch over here without veins popping in the side of my head. I understand that half the electorate are semi-retarded, but that doesn’t mean the pundits should score the candidates based on how they came across to retarded people.

PBS should be the one place where they judge the debate based on how well the candidates did with the issues. Sure, they can mention that the redneck contingent may have liked Palin’s hokiness, but don’t start saying she was in any way equal to Biden. That is just nonsense. For the retard take we have Fox news.

I guess I still have some old-fashioned notion from the BBC that television should be about educating and improving its audience, not just pandering to the lowest common denominator amongst them. Isn’t this the point of PBS? Or shouldn’t it be? Britain has its share of retards to be sure, but I can’t see the BBC judging candidates based on how well they came across to some plebs in Scunthorpe (or some such godforsaken place).

I read this post before the first presidential debate and loved it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-young/friday-debate-results-rev_b_128498.html

This VP debate in particular brings me back to four years ago when Cretin and I sat on our same Ikea sofa watching the Presidential debates between Bush and Kerry. As someone just said about last night’s debate, it was like watching one person in a Vice Presidential debate and another person in a middle school debate — and then the post-debate PBS (PBS!) commentators basically seemed to be saying, “Well, Bush didn’t make a complete arse of himself, bless him!” And look where we are now.

Come on, Mark Shields, she may not have made the kind of gaffe that was expected of her, but not a single thing coming out of her mouth made any damn sense to me.

Obama and Palin both lack the experience of McCain and Biden. Here is the big difference I see between them: Obama knows what he doesn’t know. Palin doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Obama listens to advisors and asks questions, and makes reasonable decisions based on sound advice. He’s smart, and while McCain was scratching his ass, trying to figure what this new-fangled thing called the internet was, Obama, as Chris Rock put it, “a black man that nobody’d heard of” was using the internet to put together an incredible campaign and support base. I expect him to govern the way he has campaigned — smart, cautioned, efficient, 21st century.

And, I’m middle class, a working mother who can’t afford childcare, I’ve got a husband who has been laid off since June, and all three of us may lose our health insurance in less than a month. I want the hedge fund managers who are pricing me out of my own neighborhood to pay their fair share of the tax burden, I want more federal support of Universal pre-K starting at age 3, I want basic universal health coverage, and I want investment in green energy technology. I don’t know if Obama/Biden can deliver on all those things– they most likely can’t — but I know for certain that McCain/Palin are not going to help people like me out. So fuck ‘em.

If I sound pissed it’s because I need to be doing fucking laundry on my one day off before I pick up my son, instead of writing this stupid post. Please stop with the Palin clips, Paul — Cretin can’t stop commenting and he just sucks me in…

Thanks Ermiyas, that was indeed a good article. I just hope those who need to read it and understand it are capable of doing so.

I am compiling a list of reasons why I’m voting for Obama, Ali . . . can you give me a list of reasons why you’re voting for McCain? (Like you, I want to understand the other side better)

Paul, I want to thank you for providing a very cool hangout and a place to exchange ideas. I was struck by a comment you made above:

“How does it feel to know that you are now a member of a country that admires leaders who know nothing about the economy and foreign affairs?”

I’m wondering if you’ll still feel that way when you learn that Biden spoke a litany of lies and misstatements last night. By current counts it’s in the several dozen.

Here are just a few that I think challenge the notion that Biden was in command of the facts, and that Biden is knowledgeable by some greater measure than Palin, and for that matter that Biden is even half honest. Credit goes to Jim Gehaghty of the National Review. And naturally I’d love to see if anyone has a list like this for Palin:

TAX VOTE: Biden said McCain voted “the exact same way” as Obama to increase taxes on Americans earning just $42,000, but McCain did not vote that way.

(CJ): Was Biden lying, or just wrong? Either way, this is a gross mistatement, its a fundamental difference. Obama voted on a bill that would increase taxes on individuals earning as little as $42k per year. And Biden attempted to argue that McCain did as well. Wrong.

AHMEDINIJAD MEETING: Joe Biden lied when he said that Barack Obama never said that he would sit down unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran. Barack Obama did say specifically, and Joe Biden attacked him for it.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT: Biden’s statement that McCain voted against the Violence Against Women Act is accurate. But as Robert Byers notes, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Morrison, the Court ruled that much of Biden’s law was an unconstitutional power grab by Congress of rights reserved to the states. Nobody voted against the WAWA because they support violence against women; they objected over constiutional concerns that a Supreme Court majority validated.

(CJ): So Biden who is supposedly a skilled lawyer is proud to have voted for a law that was ultimately deemed unconstitutional?

WEST BANK ELECTIONS: Biden: President Bush insisted on elections in the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, ‘Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.’”

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler notes that “Obama had been a senator for only a few days when the election took place, but if he made such statements, they did not appear in news reports or transcripts that are contained in the Nexis or Factiva databases.”

(CJ): So here Biden is attributing an outspoken position to Obama that he apparently never made.

PAKISTANI WEAPONS: “Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean.”

(CJ): This strikes me as important. Since Pakistan does not have any missile technology capable of reaching across the ~2,000 miles that is between it and Israel. Unless they were to put them on a boat and ship them there (fat chance), but then any country can do that. Current limitations on Pakistan missile distance is 1K miles. Unless Biden is accidentally leaking classified information, he gaffed in a serious way. (I’m paraphrasing Geraghty here for brevity).

IRAQ-AFGHANISTAN SPENDING: Biden said that the U.S. spends more in Iraq in one month than it has in Afghanistan in six or seven years. That figure is off by 2000 percent.

- Is Biden just not aware of the facts, or is he expecting everyone to simply believe whatever he says, including yet another gross exaggeration. Do words matter? Obama said they did.

THE CONSTITUTION: Biden: “Vice President Cheney’s been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history. He has — he has — the idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the executive — he works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.”

As noted by the McCain Camp, Article I of the Constitution does not, in fact, define the role of the Vice President of the United States. It defines the role of the legislative branch, otherwise known as the branch in which Joe Biden has served for the last 36 years.

(CJ): Again, Biden is supposed to know this stuff cold. He has had 30 years. This is a fundamental policy issue on the matter of Vice Presidential authority, and he appears to have botched it.

Cretin, what are you waiting for? Are you still waiting for my list of reasons that I no longer am a Democrat? If so I will work on that tonight. But while I do, please take the time to read that list of Biden lies/misstatements/gaffes. I am eager to hear your thoughts. Perhaps you will concede that some of them, or their aggregate, is a serious matter.

Here’s the list for Palin, just to be fair:

Palin got her numbers wrong on troop levels when she said “and with the surge that has worked, we’re now down to pre-surge numbers in Iraq.”

The surge was announced in January 2007, at which point there were 132,000 troops in Iraq, according to the Brookings Institute Iraq Index. As of September 2008, that number was 146,000. President Bush recently announced that another 8,000 would be coming home by February of next year. But even then, there still would be 6,000 more troops in Iraq than there were when the surge began.

Palin repeated a false claim about Barack Obama’s tax proposal:

Palin: Barack Obama even supported increasing taxes as late as last year for those families making only $42,000 a year. That’s a lot of middle income average American families to increase taxes on them. I think that is the way to kill jobs and to continue to harm our economy.

Obama did not in fact vote to increase taxes on “families” making as little as $42,000 per year. What Obama actually voted for was a budget resolution that called for returning the 25 percent tax bracket to its pre-Bush tax cut level of 28 percent. That could have affected an individual with no children making as little as $42,000. But a couple would have had to earn $83,000 to be affected and a family of four at least $90,000. The resolution would not have raised taxes on its own, without additional legislation, and, as we’ve noted before, there is no such tax increase in Obama’s tax plan. (The vote took place on March 14 of this year, not last year as Palin said.)

Palin also repeated the exaggeration that Obama voted 94 times to increase taxes. That number includes seven votes that would have lowered taxes for many, while raising them on corporations or affluent individuals; 23 votes that were against tax cuts; and 17 that came on just 7 different bills. She also claimed that Biden and Obama voted for “the largest tax increase in history.” Palin is referring here to the Democrats’ 2008 budget proposal, which would indeed have resulted in about $217 billion in higher taxes over two years. That’s a significant increase. But measured as a percentage of the nation’s economic output, or gross domestic product, the yardstick that most economists prefer, the 2008 budget proposal would have been the third-largest since 1968, and it’s not even in the top 10 since 1940.

Palin claimed that McCain’s health care plan would be “budget-neutral,” costing the government nothing.

Palin: He’s proposing a $5,000 tax credit for families so that they can get out there and they can purchase their own health care coverage. That’s a smart thing to do. That’s budget neutral. That doesn’t cost the government anything … a $5,000 health care credit through our income tax, that’s budget neutral.

The McCain campaign hasn’t released an estimate of how much the plan would cost, but independent experts contradict Palin’s claim of a cost-free program.

The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that McCain’s plan, which at its peak would cover 5 million of the uninsured, would increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion over 10 years. Obama’s plan, which would cover 34 million of the uninsured, would cost $1.6 trillion over that time period.

The nonpartisan U.S. Budget Watch’s fiscal voter guide estimates that McCain’s tax credit would increase the deficit by somewhere between $288 billion to $364 billion by the year 2013, and that making employer health benefits taxable would bring in between $201 billion to $274 billion in revenue. That nets out to a shortfall of somewhere between $14 billion to $163 billion – for that year alone.

Palin also said that Obama’s plan would be “universal government run” health care and that health care would be “taken over by the feds.” That’s not the case at all. As we’ve said before, Obama’s plan would not replace or remove private insurance, or require people to enroll in a public plan. It would increase the offerings of publicly funded health care

Palin repeated a falsehood that the McCain campaign has peddled, off and on, for some time:

Palin: But when you talk about Barack’s plan to tax increase affecting only those making $250,000 a year or more, you’re forgetting millions of small businesses that are going to fit into that category. So they’re going to be the ones paying higher taxes thus resulting in fewer jobs being created and less productivity.

It’s simply untrue that “millions” of small business owners will pay higher federal income taxes under Obama’s proposal. According to an analysis by the independent Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, several hundred thousand small business owners, at most, would have incomes high enough to be affected by the higher rates on income, capital gains and dividends that Obama proposes. That counts as “small business owners” even those who merely have some sideline income from such endeavors as freelance writing, speaking or running rental properties, and who get the bulk of their income from employment elsewhere.

Biden and Palin got into a tussle about military recommendations in Afghanistan:

Biden: The fact is that our commanding general in Afghanistan said today that a surge – the surge principles used in Iraq will not – well, let me say this again now – our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan, not Joe Biden, our commanding general in Afghanistan. He said we need more troops. We need government-building. We need to spend more money on the infrastructure in Afghanistan.

Palin: Well, first, McClellan did not say definitively the surge principles would not work in Afghanistan. Certainly, accounting for different conditions in that different country and conditions are certainly different. We have NATO allies helping us for one, and even the geographic differences are huge but the counterinsurgency principles could work in Afghanistan. McClellan didn’t say anything opposite of that. The counterinsurgency strategy going into Afghanistan, clearing, holding, rebuilding, the civil society and the infrastructure can work in Afghanistan.

Point Biden. To start, Palin got newly appointed Gen. David D. McKiernan’s name wrong when she called him McClellan. And, more important, Gen. McKiernan clearly did say that surge principles would not work in Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported:

Washington Post: “The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’ ” McKiernan stressed, saying that what is required is a “sustained commitment” to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.

However, it is worth noting that McKiernan also said that Afghanistan would need an infusion of American troops “as quickly as possible.”

Palin said that Obama had accused American troops of doing nothing but killing civilians, a claim she called “reckless” and “untrue.”

Palin: Now, Barack Obama had said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians. And such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.

Obama did say that troops in Afghanistan were killing civilians. Here’s the whole quote, from a campaign stop in New Hampshire:

Obama (August 2007): We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.

The Associated Press fact-checked this one, and found that in fact U.S troops were killing more civilians at the time than insurgents: “As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can’t be attributed to one party.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai had expressed concern about these civilian killings, a concern President Bush said he shared.

Whether Obama said that this was “all we’re doing” is debatable. He said that we need to have enough troops so that we’re “not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians,” but did not say that troops are doing nothing else.

Palin said that McCain had sounded the alarm on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago.

Palin: We need to look back, even two years ago, and we need to be appreciative of John McCain’s call for reform with Fannie Mae, with Freddie Mac, with the mortgage-lenders, too, who were starting to really kind of rear that head of abuse.

Palin is referring to a bill that would have increased oversight on Fannie and Freddie. In our recent article about assigning blame for the crisis, we found that by the time McCain added his name to the bill as a cosponsor, the collapse was well underway. Home prices began falling only two months later. Our colleagues at PolitiFact also questioned this claim.

Palin said, “We’re circulating about $700 billion a year into foreign countries” for imported oil, repeating an outdated figure often used by McCain. At oil prices current as of Sept. 30, imports are running at a rate of about $493 billion per year.

Palin threw out an old canard when she criticized Obama for voting for the 2005 energy bill and said, “that’s what gave those oil companies those big tax breaks.” It’s a false attack Sen. Hillary Clinton used against Obama in the primary, and McCain himself has hurled. It’s true that the bill gave some tax breaks to oil companies, but it also took away others. And according to the Congressional Research Service, the bill created a slight net increase in taxes for the oil industry.

All the links to back it up are at http://www.factcheck.org, a NON-PARTISAN site (National REVIEW? Like you wouldn’t scoff is an Obama supporter presented facts from moveon.org???)

And yes, they also list some of the things you pointed out about Biden.