OMG…Barack Obama is Boring
I’m consistently shocked that democratic candidates can’t debate and regularly get their shirts handed to them. This is especially shocking because they all went to schools where the debate team gets letter jackets.
In 2000, Al Gore went up against George Bush, who I affectionately call tweedle dum, and lost. Al was outsmarted by a man whose father was bred with a monkey named Barbara in a CIA experiment to make monkey-men.
Fast forward to 2004, the year John Kerry played t-ball and struck out swinging. I’ve never seen an election that was one candidates to lose and was lost as badly as John Kerry succeeded to do. Not only are you going up against tweedle dum, but tweedle dum has dragged us into an erroneous (remember the last time he mentioned WMDs) war that ultimately will be acknowledged as the most financially devastating nail in our swift fall from superpowerdom coffin.
Economic vibrancy, not nuclear warheads, is what determines a countries long term position in the world. And right now we’re flatlining. Our currency already tanked, a leading indicator that the rest of the world doesn’t think much of our prospects.
So here we are in 2008. I took a red eye from San Jose to NYC Thursday night, went straight to the office from the airport, and worked all day in my smelly clothes without a shower. All the while, I was looking forward to taking a shower, cooking dinner with Ayesha, drinking some wine, watching the debate, and most likely passing out on the couch.
To my dismay, Barack Obama, the electric candidate, the candidate of change, the man who inspires, was objectively boring.
Grandpa John gave young Barack a spanking. Not a whooping, but a firm spanking. As the debate wore on, McCain became more interesting and logical. I saw little of the annoying barking lap dog that bites at people’s ankles, which is my general perception of McCain.
I started to watch the debate like a boxing judge watches a boxing match - who got blows in with what sound bytes, were they big blows or jabs?
I witnessed an increasingly articulate man who patiently looked for his spots and was always on the offensive. He finished his punches and didn’t back down.
I don’t know what commentators like Paul Begala were watching when they claim that Obama won. I like Obama more than McCain and I still think he lost.
Obama’s biggest blow to McCain came with the following line:
John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003, and at the time when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong.
You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shiite and Sunni. And you were wrong.
After that, Obama got in a few more good jabs. But no big blows. He held back even when McCain’s chin was out.
For example, immediately after Obama’s big left hook, when McCain pulled out a politicians favorite tactic of completely misrepresenting their opponent and said (in summary) that “Obama didn’t support protective equipment for our troops”, essentially implying that another American, a presidential candidate, aspires to put troops in harms way and send them into battle with nothing more than squirt guns and power ranger outfits.
I absolutely despise when politicians do this. And if I were Obama, I would have used Jim Lehrer’s invitation for the candidates to talk to each other and ask each other questions to look McCain squarely in the eye, demand that he look me in the eye, and ask him point blank, “John McCain, are you telling the American people that I, or any other senator, democrat or republican, would consciously vote to not properly arm or protect our troops?”
Same goes for McCain’s constant refrain that “Barack Obama wants to raise your taxes”, despite the fact that Obama consistently says that he wants to lower them for everyone who isn’t rich and raise them for people who aren’t going broke anytime soon. Call McCain out right there at the podium.
Then go on the offensive. Ask McCain, as a financially astute man, how a country gets itself out of the largest debt in history by lowering taxes across the board. I’d love to reduce taxes to zero for everyone. So would everyone.
But reality says that, like an individual that borrows a lot from a bank for a new house, we have to pay the loan back. And right now the United States owes a lot of people a lot of money. Turning Obama’s desire to keep taxes a bit higher for the rich so he can reduce them for the poor into “you want to raise taxes for everyone” is a misrepresentation. And I would argue that John McCain’s plan to reduce taxed FOR EVERYONE is an economic impossibility. How do you pay down our enormous debt, continue to support a deficit stoking war, and reduce income for the government, all at the same time?
I’d offer McCain a napkin and a crayon to show us his math.
When McCain says our government is the biggest its ever been and Barack Obama wants to make government bigger I would say “hold on a second, wasn’t it under 8 years of George Bush and 6 years of Republican congress that our government grew to unprecedented levels?”
If I were Obama, I’d pick up on the bail out as an example of trickle down economics theory, and say “let’s tell republicans that we’re sick and tired of trickle down economic policies that promote the rich getting even richer in hopes that they’ll bless the rest of us by spending money to buy our small business products and services. We want trickle up economics, that put money in the pockets of the people who most need it, to spend it on essentials, and work their way up in the world.”
Finally, when McCain put his campaign “on hold” and rushed off to DC, didn’t he stop in NYC along the way to talk to Katy Couric and a Clinton Global Initiative audience? That doesn’t sound like rushing to me.
Unfortunately, Obama didn’t make any good points.
As time went on, McCain started to sound more eloquent, pulled better stories from his surprisingly sharp memory, and generally didn’t have to worry about any further Obama offensives. The most memorable McCain moment was when he rattled off conflicts from the mid 1980s to late 1990s and his position on standing up to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Back in 1983, when I was a brand-new United States congressman, the one — the person I admired the most and still admire the most, Ronald Reagan, wanted to send Marines into Lebanon.
And I saw that, and I saw the situation, and I stood up, and I voted against that, because I was afraid that they couldn’t make peace in a place where 300 or 400 or several hundred Marines would make a difference. Tragically, I was right: Nearly 300 Marines lost their lives in the bombing of the barracks.
And then we had Somalia — then we had the first Gulf War. I supported — I supported that.
I supported us going into Bosnia, when a number of my own party and colleagues was against that operation in Bosnia. That was the right thing to do, to stop genocide and to preserve what was necessary inside of Europe.
I supported what we did in Kosovo. I supported it because ethnic cleansing and genocide was taking place there.
And I have a record — and Somalia, I opposed that we should turn — turn the force in Somalia from a peacekeeping force into a peacemaking force, which they were not capable of.
So I have a record. I have a record of being involved in these national security issues, which involve the highest responsibility and the toughest decisions that any president can make, and that is to send our young men and women into harm’s way.
Fortunately, for the democrats, Sarah Palin, the woman my sister (does not) aspires to be like, has to get on a stage and talk intelligently. “Golly gee whillackers” folksiness doesn’t hide painfully dumb dumminessness. Is that a word? Gwen Ifill should ask Sarah Palin.
Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. His fetish is collecting business cards.
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