Posted on 10/15/2008 12:32:22 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Republican John McCain has a third and final chance to debate his way back into contention when he faces his hard-charging White House rival Barack Obama in New York later Wednesday.
...At the weekend, McCain promised to Virginia supporters he would "whip" his Democratic opponent's "you know what" during the evening debate starting at 0100 GMT at Hofstra University on Long Island.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Assuming that there is going to be a Shock and Awe assault by surrogates and 527s after the debate, McCain only needs to draw even, and because of that it will be a like the 1st and 2nd debate like performance.
However I would like to see some fire, to show voters that McCain is passionate and will fight for them. The good thing is that after the first 2 debates expectations are really low.
No, no, I don’t want a nuclear attack either. Like I said, it will look weird (and desperate). You outlined a good strategy. Show the fatal flaws in the Obama plan and then say in a positive way how you will go. Let’s hope the 3rd time is the charm.
I can only hope that he gets into the same mode he got when his campaign was written off back in the primaries. People may forget that he was DONE back then.
I'm hoping this situation with the polls focuses him. He can be a decent speaker if he doesn't seem like he's about to break out in flop sweat or start with the cranky old man thing.
He's capable of pulling this out. I just think he needs someone to tell it like it is to him. Because for all the denial of polls and the folks who seem to think McCain can be Reagan 2, things don't look great. If McCain believes that, he might finally get into the swing.
Thankfully, McCain didn’t say he’d “whip him like he owned him”.
Moreover, it misunderstands the dynamic of appealing to moderates. It does not have to do with striking hard on the issues nor does it have to do attacking the inadequacies of the opponent. These things do not turn off the mushy middle nearly as much as an unpleasant demeanor. This was Reagan's secret and the lesson we should take from him.
Finally, all candidates must make the affirmative case. Going negative alone is never enough.
Here is my post from some time ago which sets forth the contrary view:
John McCain simply does not understand the nature of a candidate's compact with his constituents.
First principle: the conservative movement, indeed the Republican Party, owes John McCain no loyalty whatsoever. Yet McCain solicits our loyalty and our support, our money and our votes. What does he owe us in return?
The facile response to be expected from most candidates is that the candidate owes his constituents only that he be honest, industrious and to exercise his best judgment if his supporters' votes put in office. But the problem with John McCain is that we conservatives have no trust in his political judgment. Most of us have no doubt that he would be honest but we are very concerned that he will not adhere to the conservative values he embraces now to get our votes. We admire greatly his physical courage and understand his moral courage. I for one accept as true his account of his epiphany in his cell after brutal torture which brought him to understand: " I was no longer my own man, I was my country's". So we conservatives accept his patriotism and his honesty, but we remain concerned about his conservative moorings. Frankly, we're afraid that John McCain, like George Bush, once elected will slip his moorings and sail away from conservative principles on his own compass.
We conservatives are not supporting John McCain out of his fealty to his conservatism or to his Republicanism nor even to him personally- as much as we admire his character. We are doing so out of fear, fear that his opponent, will pervert the Constitution and subvert the Republic. We question Obama's loyalty to America, we suspect his proclivity to act in concert with thugs, both domestic and foreign, who gain political ends through violence. We are afraid of his racism. We are justifiably frightened that when he makes summits with despots without preconditions he really means he will sell us out. We believe he will sell out its country because we know that he attempted to sell out our soldiers in Iraq on his visit there by underlining the ongoing bilateral negotiations for the return of our soldiers home. We fear for our children if a financial tsunami breaks over us. Fear that they will have their birthright stolen from them and never be able to become what they might have been in a free, capitalist, system because the American dream will have been stolen from us by a demagogue who would manipulate the masses vulnerable in the misery of the worldwide depression. In short, most of us who support John McCain do so because the stakes in this election have literally never been greater for America, at least not since 1864.
The undeniable evidence in this campaign shows that facts have simply ceased to matter because the media either will not report them or report them in a backhanded way that redounds against any Obama opponent. We Freepers have tried to break through the media wall and alert the still persuadable middle third of the electorate that the cumulative evidence of Obama's radicalism means that our fears are at least plausible and prudent and not, as the mainstream media would have it, paranoid, delusional, or even racist. We have tried to convince the world that there is very little upside to Obama and the downside is so terrible that to accept the very real risk to our country and our children is madness. Alas, we failed to break through the media's Iron Curtain.
Growing more desperate as we read the polls, we exhorted John McCain to go on the attack, believing that it was only the candidate himself who could get around the media and alert the dwindling number of persuadables to the real and present danger presented by the growing likelihood of an Obama victory. Some of us understood the dilemma that you as a candidate were in. We recognized what your pollsters no doubt have been telling you, that the image of George Bush and the whole Republican brand has become poison and must be shed from your campaign. It is important to understand, though, that this situation was the direct and proximate result of an inexplicable and inexcusable failure of the Bush administration to defend either itself or Republican/conservative principles. When political scientists write the history of this 2008 campaign, they are likely to conclude that it was irretrievably lost not by John McCain but by George Bush.
We are also aware, John McCain, that your pollsters tell you that uncommitted independents often react negatively to negative campaigning and we concede, if only for purposes of discussion, that to some degree this is true. These two factors, the aversion to Bush which created the need to distance the campaign from him, combined with an understandable desire not to offend decent Americans with negative campaigning, have led you to commit profound campaign blunders in responding to the financial crisis. They caused the McCain campaign to flounder pathetically. They validated the Democrats' mantra that the financial crisis is the inevitable results of wrongheaded Republican laissez-faire capitalism and despicable (Republican) greed on Wall Street. Once this template was explicitly validated by the McCain campaign, the pivotal issue of this election was lost. Like the apathy of the Bush administration in the face of its own destruction by attacks which featured, "Bush lied and people died", the McCain campaign has placed itself on the wrong side of the most important issue to confront America since at least 9/11. Worse, pandering after the votes of those who mindlessly blame everything on George Bush will not gain the foregiveness of these voters but it will leave future generations wallowing in socialism. It will also leave the Republican party groping about in the wilderness trying for a generation to shed the burden of guilt for causing the second great depression.
Many of us now assume that when you belatedly at last turned to the attack along the lines we have been exhorting you to do, that your pollsters had told you what we instinctively understand: the election is lost unless Obama can be destroyed morally. Let us hasten to stipulate that to morally destroy Barak Obama is itself a very moral act because it does not require 1 ounce of lying. You have to understand, John McCain, that it is the duty of the adversary in a two party system to honestly alert the electorate to the true state of facts which would disqualify a candidate. That is how the system works. If a candidate shrinks from this duty, it is the equivalent of condoning the election of a demagogue under our system.
Happily, our natural inclinations as conservatives to expose Obama are utterly in harmony with our two party system. John McCain, you will never be ashamed of yourself for telling the truth about Obama but, if you shirk that duty out of fastidiousness or from bad political advice, your legacy will not be limited to your own election loss. If you think that Obama represents at least a potential threat, then say so. Do not tease conservatives and show a little leg one minute and then wag your finger at us the next minute for our salacious thoughts. Are you our man or not?
Senator McCain, your history in the Senate simply does not warrant our support. We support you only because the alternative to you is not just undesirable but unacceptable. This is the nature of your commitment to conservatives: In return for our support you must fight our fight. If you are not willing to morally expose and destroy Barak Obama because you do not really believe that Obama constitutes a threat as a stealth radical, then we are entitled to say that there is not a significant difference between a committed liberal named Barak Obama and an eratic conservative named John McCain. We are entitled to go our own way and try to somehow resurrect Reagan conservatism from the ashes of your defeat.
John McCain, your duty is clear and the choice is yours.
Trash talk usually backfires. McCain better put issues in context so voters can make sense of it. He’d better have three points on every policy position when he tries to define himself. He’s waited a year to start defining obama and he’d better make that simple, too. He needs to wrap this guy around a single timely metaphor, like peering inside the acorn, or viewing him as a high-risk loan. Tonight is about how well McCain can communicate.
Too late, even if there were ever a good time for that in the past. Attacking Obama has only resulted in McCain's precipitous drop in the polls. The guy's unfavorables are going off the charts because of this. I would say that he should instead try standing on solid conservative principles, but that assumes he has them.
Bottom line: the GOP fouled its own nest by nominating this "aconservative" clown, and now it has to sleep in that nest. The political winds are such that flinging shat from the nest only results in it being blown back in one's face.
The conventional wisdom about the effectiveness of negative campaigning is going to be a lot less true this time. This time is really different, the credit bubble has burst once and for all and most people believe we are in for a rough couple of years (I would argue decade or two). A candidate is going to need a strong economic philosophy to be convincing. McCain has not been particularly strong. Obama has been vague but his platitudes for small business mixed with other sweeping but generic rhetoric is fooling a lot of people.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/14/AR2008101402561.html
I have set the most chilling phrase in bold print for emphasis:
Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated capitalism. The fall of the financial system has been so fast and far-reaching that there's been no time to fully consider its implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30 years. But with the most right-wing administration in modern American history scurrying to nationalize the banks, the question cannot be elided indefinitely.
If the collapse of the markets has left conservatism and Rubin's Wall Street centrism in tatters, it has handed liberalism the task of building a more sustainable economy from the wreckage of the old....Now liberals must turn their attention to the kind of financial nationalization on which we're about to embark.
Don’t tell him your game plan McCain. Surprise Obama.
It's been pretty amusing watching the circle jerk go round and round until posters just nod at each other in content free postings. If you expect McCain to be able to explain radicalism to a voter with a 2 minute attention span at best, you are delusional. The only way he can win this is to explain in clear and simple terms what he will do to fix the economy now.
Of course that didn't fail at all, it behaved as it should have in a twenty year credit boom. McCain's job is to admit that credit was too easy but have a clear plan to save the economy (e.g. inject money directly into the economy instead of trying to sustain insolvent banks that were felled by the credit boom).
A majority of the voters are already disposed to believe that Obama will handle the economy better than McCain (that should not be surprising considering McCain's missteps when the crisis broke).
It is impossible to turn those voters around now with nice arguments about tax levels. I say again:
Obama must be morally destroyed or the race is lost
“If you did not exixt... Obama would have to invent you. If you want to know who is going to put Obama in the white house .. try looking in the mirror.”
Needs to be repeated. There are some here that think they know all the answers, yet do nothing to advance the cause at hand. They join the liberal media in making it harder for McCain to get elected.
Minorities do not want this man as a model for their children...no one does.
FWIW, this is my thinking as well. McCain needs to appeal to the voters and give them an alternative to Obama's socialist approach; he must give them a reason to vote *for* him and not just against Obama. Then, the RNC and 527's must destroy Obama on his radical relationships, infantcide, most liberal senator ever, etc. To some extent, Palin can join this fray, but McCain himself needs to appeal to voters.
As with everything, opinions what they are. Everyone has one.
Much easier said than done. The radical movement is not simple, his connections to it are not easily explained, and the implications in his policy proposals are not clearly connected to that radicalism. If you want to instead claim that his policy proposals are lies you have to show clear and simple evidence of that. Combine that with the protection from the media and FUD heaped on McCain and your proposal will never get off the ground.
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