Home » McCain vs. Obama: opposites don’t attract

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McCain vs. Obama: opposites don’t attract — 33 Comments

  1. This is the best rating Obama will get. He can only hold on to it or decline. His lack of appeal (and declining appeal) to people outside of the left is astonishing and cannot be blamed on racism. Neo is correct that his race (self proclaimed) is an advantage. People do want to know what you intend to do when in government. With Iraq declining as an urgent concern outside of the left, he needs to generate specifics (health, economy, defense). Like it or not McCain has positions and specifics that are reasonably well thought out.

    Here is Connecticut we went to a democrat dominated legislature in the last election. They accomplished literally nothing as the left would not compromise with the centrists on anything. Obama is already being pressured by the left on many areas, to spurn them for the center is hazardoust to his health.

  2. At this point it’s hard to even imagine what sort of revelations could come out about Obama that would energize the media to criticize him much, short of finding a video of him plotting with Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and Kim Jong-il in a cabal to take over the world.

    Nah, I don’t think the MSM would turn a hair at this. Half of ’em act like they’re in the bag for this already.

    Now if Obama were to praise Halliburton…

  3. Seriously, though, I think the biggest generally unappreciated advantage of McCain is that he doesn’t take himself as seriously as Obama does.

    Obama strikes me as more than a little bit brittle and thin-skinned: a distinct liability when responding extemporaneously to criticism.

    McCain’s ability to laugh at himself could well be a devastating weapon in debate. He can gently chide Obama, who will get steamed but who will be unable to respond in kind because McCain will laugh him off.

  4. The more I follow this election, the more efforts it takes to suppress an evident thought: what a stupid thing, after all, this democracy is! How much better will be the results if all fools and ignoramuses were left out of the process! But, alas, I can not propose any workable idea how to do this.

  5. “Can you visualize the difference in the tone of the coverage if it had been a friend of Bush’s or McCain’s who’d engaged in a shady real estate deal with either of them?”

    http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed7/idUSN0850670520080509

    ‘Republican presidential hopeful John McCain pushed to let an Arizona rancher trade remote land for federally owned acres ready for development, a swap that stands to enrich a top campaign fund-raiser, the Washington Post said on Friday.

    Initially reluctant to support the swap, the senator from Arizona became instrumental in pushing the deal through Congress after rancher Fred Ruskin and the Yavapai Ranch Limited Partnership hired lobbyists that included key McCain supporters, the paper said.’

    As someone who reads the news regularly and is engaged politically, your ignorance over your favored candidate’s involvement in shady real estate dealings indicates that, well, the MSM

  6. sergey: That’s because the suggestion, although tempting, is antithetical to democracy (actually, we really have a republican form of government, which is a way this country has tried to temper some of the inherent flaws in democracy).

    The problem with any such solution is that it would be a form of tyranny—and that each faction has a different idea of who the fools are. If democracy is to work to overwhelm the fools and result in good government, it must be based in an aware and informed electorate, and must include a free press and access to information.

    Churchill was correct: “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

  7. Once, during a driving vacation, I pulled out of Los Angeles in the evening, heading for Las Vegas.

    Crossing the Mojave desert at night, I saw a glow on the horizon, about where the Nevada state line should be; a glow much like that of a large city.

    Upon reaching it, I found a city-sized collection of neon signs (for various Las Vegas enterprises), a power sub-station for them, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE. A completely empty facade.

    If I had to come up with an analogy for the Obama phenomenon, I’d find it very difficult to improve on that.

    I look (and look) at this guy and, so far, all I can see is a narcissistic, feckless, arrogant snot.

    That he seems to be the best the Democratic Party can come up with is maybe the scariest thing of all.

  8. A few additions:

    Congress has an even lower approval rating than President Bush. That should be an issue in this campaign. Can either candidate run against Congress?

    Also, and this is what I find most worrisome, the big issue this election is the economy. I find Obama supporters willing to point out McCain’s shortcomings here. But what about Obama’s? He has absolutely no economic experience and has time and again suggested policies that are going to make things worse (like raising taxes to pay for his big time programs).

    Sorry to say this, and I fight the impulse, but I find it incredibly easy to imagine Obama and his supporters shipping people off to work camps. Must have been something Michelle said.

  9. How much better will be the results if all fools and ignoramuses were left out of the process! But, alas, I can not propose any workable idea how to do this.

    I like the butterfly ballot myself. If you’re too stupid to figure it out you end up voting for someone other than your choice.

    Hey, it’s a start.

  10. It truly amazes me how in the tank the media is for Obama. I know this is my first election cycle and all, but really, what on earth is going on.

  11. I’d rate Obama’s physical attributes even higher. With few exceptions in American presidential elections, tall wins over short and full hair wins over balding. It’s gong to be nasty when Obama stands next to McCain in the debates.

  12. sergey: That’s because the suggestion, although tempting, is antithetical to democracy (actually, we really have a republican form of government, which is a way this country has tried to temper some of the inherent flaws in democracy).

    The problem with any such solution is that it would be a form of tyranny–and that each faction has a different idea of who the fools are. If democracy is to work to overwhelm the fools and result in good government, it must be based in an aware and informed electorate, and must include a free press and access to information.

    Once upon a time we had a more republican system, it has moved more towards democracy with time. While restrictions on voting may be anti-ethical to democracy (or at least our current vision of democracy), I’d suggest it isn’t anti-ethical to a republic.

    One aspect of the republican form is the electorial college, which makes some people’s votes worth more than others depending upon where they live. And I think the EC is a good system; after all the goal is not perfect equality of the vote, but a good government. Get out the vote efforts often like to say “make your voice heard”, but that’s nonsense; voting is all about wining, and the only ones making their voice heard are those swaying the outcome of the election.

    We restrict the vote of felons. And, after the Civil War, former CSA soldiers lost their voting rights. I’d suggest that people who have been on long term welfare (or similar) are showing sufficient lack of judgement that their voting rights should be suspended, until they are supporting themselves again.

  13. Daniel: The media is always in the tank for the Dem candidate. You can expect all coverage to be designed to make Obama look good and McCain bad.

  14. Vince is right. Republicans are always portrayed as dull-witted Neanderthals, going back at least 50 years.

    The difference is that now, with the web, the stranglehold on information by the media has been broken. Twenty years ago Rather would have swung the election to Kerry. Makes you wonder how much crap they pulled before the web arose to keep them honest.

  15. “The psyche of the broad masses does not respond to anything weak or half-way. Like a woman, whose spiritual sensitiveness is determined less by abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for fulfilling power and who, for that reason, prefers to submit to the strong rather than the weakling – the mass, too, prefers the ruler to a pleader.”

  16. hey neo…
    I thought you would have had a post for the 64th anniversary of D-Day…

    it was almost as if it never happened…
    even google chose to celebrate something else (i wont say).

  17. Sergey, the fools and ignoramuses have to learn from painful experience that their feckless, ill-researched choices are costly on many levels. Our system is one in which at some point those naive young Leftists will have painful experience be the most valuable teacher. We learn the most from our failures, not our successes.

    Obonga is going to be Jimmy Carter, Act II, if he is elected. And the kids under 40 will get a hard bitch slap from reality. In 1980 I was a sophomore in college and most of the undergraduates on my campus voted for Ronald Reagan. Some, like me, were older students (I was an Army veteran) who had voted for Carter in 1976. Most of them did not repeat that mistake.

    So it will be with these kids. His economic policy preferences will result in a sickly economy. His foreign policy positions and advisers will lay crisis and catastrophe right at our doorstep. In fact, I think the Carter years will pale in comparison with what the next four will be like.

    At least I think most of the young males will “get it” and begin to dial into reality. I’m not sure the females will (sorry for that sexist remark), because young women tend to look to government for security and tend to vote in favor of expanding the welfare state. This is born out in history since the inception of women’s suffrage. Part of that I blame young males for: for getting gals pregnant before marriage and for abandoning their children. Solid marriages tend to make the kids more conservative over time.

    It may be that in order to renew the conservative movement in this country we will have to pass through some hard lessons. The downside of this: Obonga’s government, on many levels, will bequeath to the nation some far-reaching consequences of a distinctly negative nature.

    I’m pessimistic about November. McCain, while more substantive, cannot match The Golden Mouth Shape Shifter from Chicago.

  18. Two thoughts on image:

    First, the McCain campaign has to find ways to make the charismatic Obama into a caricature of himself. If they can find and flip the right switch, the charisma will negate itself.

    Second, Obama may be tall but have you seen those ears? Unfortunately, they more resemble an elephant’s than a donkey’s, but the if I were selecting Obama photos for McCain ads, I would look for the Dumbo shots. And I’d make sure that any debate took place against a light-colored background without any distracting detail.

  19. Germans also had learned a lot about their stupidity of supporting Nazi. Alas, this education was so painful and so costly for them and for other nations that any reasonable autocracy would be preferable to this learning course.
    Of course, for any restriction of voting rights there must be objective criteria and consensus of absolute majority about these criteria. In deeply divided society this consensus is also impossible, since most of democrats would find such criteria discriminative.
    Democracy as such is no guarantee of sanity, it can be effective only if society itself is sane enough. In deeply dysfunctional or neurotic society, like Weimar Germany or most of nowadays Arab world, it gives power to the worst kind of sociopaths. This is why I find Bush policy of promoting democracy worldwide a dangerous liberal illusion. This can be a good policy of undermining enemy, though; but Carter used it to undermine an ally and creating enemy.

  20. I have a hard time believing that Obama will get enough support to win. I dont think he can hide all of his negatives.. especially if he has to go off-script

  21. “I have a hard time believing that Obama will get enough support to win. I dont think he can hide all of his negatives.. especially if he has to go off-script”

    Remember too that if the Dems primary had been a winner take all then Hillary would have won big time. Much of that is because Obama’s support is from an over all very small group that happens to have a very large presence in many of the small to medium democrat strongholds. The same doesn’t hold true for the country as a whole as those demographics are almost wholly in the democrats side (that is, outside of that support no more is likely to come and that support will not be enough to win outside of the primary).

    Further experience has shown his strongest demographic outside of race and the registered democrats (18-25 year olds) tend to not vote even though they are “active” politically (that is, they attend rallies and campaign meetings – the socially partying type events) – Dean found that one out the hard way and Kerry to a lesser extent.

    Obama will do best by trying to limit debates – he was terrible in most of them. Hillary was able to get him frustrated over nothing really and McCain will too. If he has to do more than talk about grand visions with no substance he comes off as worse than Kerry ever was. For the most part I think that McCain is smart enough to push that and will not see it as “dirty politics” – or at least he hasn’t in the past against similar opponents (and has taken a few swipes at Obama over this already).

    527’s and the internet will massacre him regardless of if McCain is willing to do so or not – and the massacre will occur from his own words taken in context (and thus mostly the True Believers and their MSM’s only viewers will be the only ones buy it).

    This election is McCain’s to loose – not that he isn’t perfectly capable of doing it but I don’t really fear Obama as a candidate if it is a fairly normal election cycle. I greatly fear him as president but outside of things like “he is taller” and “he is black” he has nothing – those things mostly matter when all else is about equal and they aren’t remotely that way now. Really if your main fear of a candidate is that he is taller or something similarly asinine (as many are saying not only this blog) that really ought to tell you something about how to stop them from becoming president. At least Neo has more substantive things to her arguments, though I think it is more from a former liberals point of view and once you get out of the north east those things matter MUCH less (after all, those are precisely the things that make a NE liberal popular in that area and hated around the rest of the country).

  22. This election isn’t about issues, character or America’s best interest, it’s all about vendetta; That of the bitter dimocrats, liberals, and generally left of center, as well as bitter blacks, european left, various totalitarian regimes and muslim culture. Obi wasn’t chosen for his substance, maturity, experience, accomplishments or leadership, all of which is easily discerned as marginal, and where no equivalent Republican candidate would get any respect at all from the left of center MSM. Obi is the manchurian candidate 2008, the mannequin chosen to carry their bitter aspirations of dominance and revenge from their well established failures and frustrations in the real world. It’s the reason for Bush, America and Israel as convenient and “classical” scapegoats. Beware of historically typical left-wing bait and switch, a far left-wing crowd and agenda with influence and access to the most critical corners of White House, military, security and intelligence operations apparatus… This could make the aftermath of the Carter administration look like a cake-walk…

  23. I’m struck by how unsophisticated democrats and their supporters really are about the world.

    We’re talking a shallowness so pervasive that these people would be certain that any good looking guy walking down the street would no doubt be a better screen actor than say…. Danny Devito.

    Democracies without a depth of maturity is just a dictatorship by the retarded.

  24. fredhjr:Part of that I blame young males for: for getting gals pregnant before marriage and for abandoning their children.

    could you expand on this. i makes me think that your young.

    the percentage of those who got pregnant without marraige was extreemly small compared to todays numbers. (as was crime, violence, and a whole host of other ills)

    there was a time when teenagers used to act like they did in the 1940s and 1050s movies. i grew up on the tail end of that and remember the change. take a look at the differences between 60s radicals and the rest of the teen public. the panthers never gave up that dress (the last time that african americans had a dignified culture rather than thugism).

    so i dont understand the link your making.

    however i agree with a lot of other things you said.

    Our system is one in which at some point those naive young Leftists will have painful experience be the most valuable teacher. We learn the most from our failures, not our successes.

    the problem with that is that it would be ok if they also couldnt change the nature of our state fundementally, which is their goal. when they do that your turning a cucumber into a pickle, you cant go back. its the difference between playing within the defined acceptable boundaries and conserve that, or break out and no longer be the kind of state that it was before. if i change every brick in a wall with a new brick is it the same wall?

    chavez people are finding this lesson out. and yet, our own leftists dont see the parallels or remember how they talked when they liked his bolivarian revolution to make the new venezuelan man.

    they are protesting as they did before to effect change. but the state is deaf to them now, that was the last change. chavez has been spending his time changing the nature of the state so that he doesnt leave.

    he gets into office, he puts largesse on all these organizations. the 840 billion payoff was his kid. once so many are vested in him for their status and place, then he changes the state organs. they dont have to be changed much. in fact most of the changes have already happened, and they just dont come into effect until another change happens.

    for instance: recently states and the fed have been making unenforceable laws to “make a statement”. ny did this with certain words, but its done for other things too.

    well, these laws are not enforceable, they violate the constitution… however the second the constitution is suspended they then become viable as any other law.

    thats how dumb we are.

    or to quote sergey above:
    Germans also had learned a lot about their stupidity of supporting Nazi. Alas, this education was so painful and so costly for them

    hitler worked the same crowd. the young and the women. there was a reason for feminizing the population.

    “The people, in an overwhelming majority, are so feminine in their nature and attitude that their activities and thoughts are motivated less by sober consideration than by feeling and sentiment.” (p.237)

    and

    “Do you know the audience at a circus is just like a woman (Die Masse, das Volk is wei ein Weib). Someone who does not understand the intrinsicly feminine character of the masses will never be an effective speaker. Ask yourself: ‘What does a woman expect from a man?’ Clearness, decision, power and action. What we want is to get the masses to act. Like a woman, the masses fluctuate between extremes …. The crowd is not only like a woman, but women constitute the most important element in an audience. The women usualy lead, then follow the children and at last, when I have already won over the whole family – follow the fathers.”

    they could not capture men with this BS. but they could capture children, because their naive, and women because they are easily manipulated. heck can you imagine if they sold wonder jockstraps? but wonder bras do sell… you can go down a list of such inanities that get women to buy (after all even the stores set up is like a set of trails aroung bushes with stuff on the walls like vines. and men protecting the women from lions that dont exist, which is why they stand there bored).

    not all women are like this of course, and some switch modes.. but the point is that you can more easily sway them than the men. i think its biological as the leader of a nation is the ultimate alpha male. after all they fawn over obama and the sexiness is not for the male vote.

    this from an analysis of that pesky german from
    A Psychologial Profile of Adolph Hitler
    His Life and Legend
    Walter C. Langer
    Office of Strategic Services
    Washington, D.C.

    Hitler
    As His Associates Know Him

    has been able, in some manner or other, to unearth and apply successfully many factors pertaining to group psychology, the importance of which has not been generally recognized and some of which we might adopt to good advantage. These might be briefly summarized as follows:

    (1) Full appreciation of the importance of the masses in the success of any movement.

    (2) Recognition of the inestimable value of winning the support of youth; realization of the immense momentum given a social movement by the wild fervor and enthusiasm of young people as well as the importance of early training and indoctrination.

    (3) Recognition of the role of women in advancing a new movement and of the fact that the reactions of the masses as a whole have many feminine characteristics

    (4) The ability to feel, identify with and express in passionate language the deepest needs and sentiments of the average German and present opportunities or possibilities for their gratification

    (5) Capacity to appeal to the most primitive, as well as the most ideal inclinations in man, to arouse the basest instincts and yet cloak them with nobility, justifying all actions as means to the attainment of an ideal goal. Hitler realized that men will not combine and dedicate the,selves to a common purpose unless this purpose be an ideal one capable of survival beyond their generation. He has also perceived that although men will die only for an ideal their continued zest and enterprise can be maintained only by a succession of more immediate and earthly satisfactions

    (6) Appreciation of the fact that the masses are as hungry for a sustaining ideology in political action as they are for daily bread. Any movement which does not satisfy this spiritual hunger in the masses will not mobilize their whole-hearted support and is destined to fail.

    (7) The ability to portray conflicting human forces in vivid, concrete imagery that is understandable and moving to the ordinary man. This comes down to the use of metaphors in the form of imagery which, as Aristotle has said, is the most powerful force on earth.

    (8) The faculty of drawing on the traditions of the people and by reference to the great classical mythological themes evoke the deepest unconscious emotions of the audience. The fact that the unconscious mind is more intensely affected by the great eternal symbols and themes is not generally understood by most modern speakers and writers.

    the list goes on….

    remember that the left projects… bush was called hitler so that someone else when called hitler would not be slandered by it. also, a person not of hitlers race would even less be seen as a person who would do such a thing. if you pole the left they would say that john mccain reminds them of hiter for the same reason that this is in a lot of their educations.

    The University of Delaware is one of the worst brainwashing institutions in America.

    A mandatory indoctrination program at the school as part of the Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training includes the following:

    “A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. ‘The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination.’”

    much of the past 40 years has been a process of setting the stage. just as bismarks egalitarian policies for women and other things (including versailles) set a stage. a large group that responds to emotional argument, a hard financial pressure on the polity who wants relief, a messianic politician that speaks in religious terms, religion being removed to create the hunger that can be directed upon the one that clicks, a constant bias on the machine till a tipping point is reached, and so forth.

    from then on, everyone has been playing similar variations on a theme. or to quote aslan from cs lewis. “it never happens the same way twise”

    he also explained that a man knows he is free if he is free to hurt himself. that he can partake of pleasures that he enjoys that shorten his life or expectancy. of course if he pays for his own way the whole way he is free. if someone else pays, well, is he free?

    there is so many political parallels its scary to those that know them. the parallels were never there for bush. he was not messianic, he was not a red diaper baby, a full leftist with a pedigree to big movers and shakers in communism (including a family member that over threw a country with the communists help), and more…

    hitler spoke of change too, and he changed a whole lot, didnt he. he was a change that his people could believe in. and once he had the position, and he changed the rules, the rest was a ride that everyone was strapped in and forced to take.

    in our case the changes to the laws have been done BEFORE not after. so they get triggered by certain conditions. so the person that will grab things has had the way paved for them, they only need to grab the gold ring at the right time.

    hot potato with the prize being us.

  25. Artfldgr, you have just hit every hot button in existence. Well, not every one, but a lot of them. Still, I think there is something to the feminity of crowds and there is no doubt that the Left has taken over universities. It’s important that children going there be introduced ahead of time to what will happen to them there. It’s also important that we discourage children from modern Liberal Arts degrees now. Victor Davis Hanson has written of how, in one generation, we are going to lose three quarters of our living study-knowledge of the classics. Just a thousand new PhD.s over a few years would solve this; if you have a child considering a liberal arts degree, steer them in this direction and keep the heritage alive.

  26. “A seasoned lawyer?” I would love to go up against this guy. You think Hillary had tears in New Hampshire?

  27. njcommuter,
    I dont know if hitting the buttons was a good thing or a bad thing. I will take good and accept i have a 50% chance of being off. 🙂

    thanks…

  28. njcommuter, i forgot to mention or credit, the statements of the feminizing were from hitler. one or two from mein kampf, and another one from a conversation in 1923…

    and i am not a hitler germany expert. not my thing. i know enough and know where to look to flesh it out.

  29. It’s also important that we discourage children from modern Liberal Arts degrees now.

    Let’s face it, a liberal arts degree is essentially the GED equivalent of grad school.

  30. According to the New York Times, Democrats blocked Bush’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reforms so low income people with bad credit could buy houses.
    ”These two entities -Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, and the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee.
    http://strategicthought-charles77.blogspot.com/2008/09/democrats-blocked-bushs-fannie-mae-and.html

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