Digest: October 4-6, 2008
2008-10-04
October 6, 2008
McCain Lawyers Push Back on Obama Keating Five Charges
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, October 6, 2008
PHOENIX -- The McCain campaign pushed back hard against the new Obama attack over the Keating Five, arguing that the Arizona senator was treated unfairly by the Senate ethics investigation and asserting that John McCain had been much more open about his relationship with disgraced thrift executive Charles Keating than Obama has been about his connection with one-time radical William Ayers.
In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, John Dowd, the Washington lawyer who represented McCain during the Senate investigation, called the inquiry a "classic political smear job" by the Democrats running the Senate at the time, saying that they only included McCain to make sure that a Republican was among the targets. "John had not done anything wrong," Dowd said.
Dowd's point of view was amplified by Robert Bennett, the Washington lawyer and Democrat who served as special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee during the Keating Five investigation, which focused on whether McCain and other senators exercised improper political influence over the regulation of Keating's failed Lincoln Savings & Loan.
In an interview, Bennett said McCain should never have been dragged into the ethics case to begin with. He said that after his own lengthy investigation, he came to the conclusion that the case against McCain and former Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) "should have been dropped" because the evidence suggested that once McCain understood that the Justice Department was investigating Keating, he backed off any involvement. Dowd noted that McCain threw Keating,once a strong supporter, out of his office after Keating pressed him to intervene in his case.
Bennett said former Sen. Howell Hefflin (D-Ala.) insisted that the two be included in the formal public inquiry because otherwise there would have been a month of public hearings "with no Republicans in the dock." The other members of the Keating Five were Democrats.
"It was clear that McCain should not have been at the table nor should Glenn," Bennett said. "I felt it was unfair for McCain to be included as part of the Keating Five." Bennett stressed that he was not speaking as part of the campaign, though he noted he also represented McCain in his recent battles with the New York Times.
The sharp defense of McCain by Dowd was in contrast to McCain's previous contrition about his involvement in the matter. He told the New York Times in 1999 that going into the meetings with regulators was a mistake. "Going into that room gave a definite appearance of impropriety," he said.
McCain was ultimately exonerated by the Ethics Committee, which did fault him for exercising poor judgment in attending two meetings with federal regulators about their case against Keating, a once high-flying savings and loans owner who contributed $112,000 to McCain campaigns (as well as making gifts that were not found to be illegal). The collapse of Keating's thrift ultimately cost taxpayers billions, and Obama's campaign mounted a full-scale assault today on McCain's involvement, with an ad and short web documentary questioning his judgment.
In an e-mail to supporters, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe argued that the Keating Five affair highlighted McCain's support for a broad philosophy of deregulation that is eerily similiar to the crisis of today. "During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion," Plouffe wrote.
"In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts -- and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain," Plouffe added.
Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman, said McCain has been "open and honest" about his relationship with Keating, in contrast with Obama's statements about Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground. "We're seeing the opposite from Barack Obama," he said
Source:voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/06/mccain_lawyers_push_back_on_ob.html
Young Americans on the Election
USA Today, October 6, 2008
Justin Baines, 22, of North Hollywood, Calif., cast the first presidential ballot of his life in 2004 for Democrat John Kerry, but this year he's supporting Republican John McCain.
"I believe Democrats are best with home issues and Republicans with foreign policy issues," he says, "and I think we have to pay more attention to foreign policy now because of all the hostility in the world" toward the United States.
Count Baines among the "fired up," a group that includes 29% of Americans under 30 — the voters most likely to turn out for a rally and volunteer for a campaign. Everyone in this group is registered to vote and paying a great deal of attention to the election. They are the most firmly committed to a candidate.
They not only like their choice; they distrust his opponent. Fewer than one in 10 say they might change their minds about whom to support before Election Day, the lowest of any group.
This is the oldest group among the four categories of younger voters — most are over 24 — and has the highest annual income; 18% make $75,000 a year or more. It has the highest percentage of women and of African Americans.
The "fired up" category includes both the most Democrats (50%) and the most conservatives (40%) of any group — a sign that its ranks include many with the most fully formed and strongly held points of view.
They are the most likely of any of the four groups to say their parents have influenced their outlook. Six in 10 say their folks have had a great deal or moderate amount of influence on their political views. Nearly half cite their friends as influences, too.
These younger Americans see the election as having significant consequences for them personally. Six in 10 say their lives will be "greatly affected" if Obama wins. Half say a McCain victory would have such an impact.
Baines, who works as a financial planner, disagrees with McCain on such social issues as same-sex marriage and abortion rights, but he supports the Arizona senator as a strong leader he can count on to keep the nation safe. He doesn't have that faith in Obama.
"I feel that Obama doesn't have enough backbone to carry our country," he says. "McCain seems like a mean old" guy, but "I see Obama and I just see the next Jimmy Carter. I see our troops hostages and POWs and him not doing anything — and McCain would go in there guns blazing."
Source: www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-10-06-youngvoter-soldonpick_N.htm
October 5, 2008
The Sunday commentaries - ABC's This Week's Roundtable: Bailout Politics
The American Debate: HERE WE GO AGAIN
By Dick Polman, Philadephia Inquirer, October 5, 2008
The crux of the McCain-Palin election strategy can be found in these phrases, articulated during the vice presidential debate by the junior member of the Republican ticket:
"Americans are going to say, enough is enough with [the Democrats] constantly looking backwards, and pointing fingers, and doing the blame game. . . . There's just too much finger-pointing backwards. . . . Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again, pointing backwards again."
Clearly, John McCain and Sarah Palin would prefer that the voters behave as amnesiacs and cast their ballots next month with scant awareness of the incumbent party's governance these last eight years. Palin even tried to channel Ronald Reagan, by adopting his famous 1980 debating line - "There you go again" - in an effort to delegitimize Joe Biden's attacks on the GOP track record.
But there's a fundamental problem with the amnesia strategy.
Reagan won the 1980 election precisely because he tapped into the electorate's strong desire to look backward on four years of unsuccessful Democratic rule, and to judge President Jimmy Carter accordingly by throwing him out.
Reagan played the blame game and pointed fingers backwards ("Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"). That's generally how it works. A presidential election is typically a referendum on the incumbent party; if times are tough and the "out party" candidate is deemed to be an acceptable risk, he usually wins.
Palin in debate was an effective communicator for her side, but she can't change the weather. The prevailing winds favor Barack Obama; indeed, he now enjoys many of the same advantages that aided Reagan in 1980. The economy was bad then (double-digit inflation, lines at the gas pump) - and it's bad now. (Need I enumerate?) America's image abroad was bad then (Iranian hostage crisis) - and it's bad now ($10 billion a month in Iraq, with no exit horizon).
Granted, Carter was still on the ballot in 1980, unlike George W. Bush in 2008, but the polls show a strong majority believe McCain will perpetuate the Bush policies. And, granted, Obama as a newbie has a higher hurdle than Reagan (the latter had been a two-term governor of the largest state), but just as Americans in the fall of 1980 slowly grew comfortable with Reagan, the same autumn trend seems to be happening with Obama.
Virtually all the polls conducted subsequent to the first presidential debate bear this out. Obama has cleared the 50 percent threshold in several national surveys, something no Democrat has done in decades; more significantly, he now leads in the pivotal state of Florida, and is dead even with McCain in states normally assumed to be red (North Carolina, Indiana).
Two things appear to be happening: The sour economy has strengthened the desire for a change of parties, and Obama (aided by his steady, albeit unspectacular, debate performance) is crossing the threshold of acceptability. Again, these trends closely parallel 1980.
We tend to mis-remember that election as a Reagan cakewalk. He trounced Carter by 9 points, but that margin was not foreseen. Until very late, Reagan was widely viewed by swing voters as a risky choice, a charismatic celebrity with no foreign-policy experience. As evidenced by the autumn Gallup polls, many feared that Reagan would be a warmonger abroad and an extremist at home. These persistent doubts prevented Reagan from opening a solid lead - much as the doubts about Obama have repeatedly hampered his progress.
Reagan didn't allay his doubters until he met Carter in their sole debate, one week before the election. He was deemed sufficiently conversant with foreign-policy issues, and he exuded a sufficient sense of command. He crossed the threshold from risky to safe. Voters who were looking for a reason to fire Carter felt comfortable enough to follow through.
Most important, Reagan accomplished this feat because he had the wind at his back. He did precisely what Sarah Palin now deems inappropriate.
He pointed fingers backward, focusing on four years of Democratic rule - particularly the "misery index," a term coined by economist Arthur Okin, combining the jobless rate and the inflation rate. Reagan talked a lot about how the incumbent party was failing America's middle class - just as Obama and Biden are doing today, fueled by the news, released Friday, that the September jobless figures are the worst of any month in the last five years.
Palin was an efficient attacker the other night, and she gave a winsome toss of the head while reciting the Reagan line about "the shining city on a hill." But her invocation of the old master was ahistorical, and her credibility as a candidate is not strong enough to rework the fundamentals of this election. The initial post-debate polls all report that Biden was judged to be the winner, which suggests, again, that Americans predisposed to oust the incumbent party were sufficiently reassured.
I'm not suggesting that Obama will win this election by 9 points, as Reagan did in 1980. Hardly. Democrats haven't done that well since the landslide of 1964. But they're in sync with the elements this autumn, and McCain - who now finds himself forced to defend Florida, Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina - will head into the second debate, on Tuesday night, with no imminent forecast of better weather.
Source:www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/20081005_The_American_Debate__HERE_WE_GO_AGAIN.html
Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain
By FRANK RICH, The New York Times, October 5, 2008
SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.
McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?
Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.
The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.
There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)
That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.
Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning McCain’s medical status, Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published last Tuesday by The Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.
It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.
This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.
In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.
But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.
After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.
You can understand why they believe that. She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with Larry King, for heaven’s sake, in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.
We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”
Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.
Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.
So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.
You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.
Source:www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05rich.html
October 4, 2008
Obama Attacks McCain's Health Plan
By AMY CHOZICK, The Wall Street Journal. September 4, 2008
NEWPORT NEWS, VA -- The race for the White House took an aggressive turn on Saturday as Barack Obama unveiled a series of attacks against rival John McCain's health-care proposals on Saturday and fended off Republican criticism about his association to a 1960s extremist.
Sen. Obama painted his opponent's health-care plan as "radical" and said the free-market approach would lead to at least 20 million Americans losing the insurance they rely on from their employer.
The McCain campaign used the attack as an opportunity to bring up Sen. Obama's association with Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground group responsible for bombings and nonfatal explosions at federal buildings in the 1960s.
"On a day when new reports have surfaced about Barack Obama's long association with a domestic terrorist, our Democratic opponent had the audacity to call John McCain's health care plan 'radical'?" McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.
At a fundraiser in Colorado on Saturday, Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accused Sen. Obama of "palling around with terrorists."
The Illinois senator briefly served on a charity board with Mr. Ayers in Chicago and has frequently denounced his past activities.
"Gov. Palin's comments, while offensive, are not surprising, given the McCain campaign's statement…that they would be launching Swift Boat-like attacks in hopes of deflecting attention from the nation's economic ills," said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan.
Sen. Obama spent Saturday ripping apart his opponent's health-care plan. Sen. McCain's plan would provide a $2,500 per person or $5,000 per family refundable tax credit to find coverage. In exchange, employees would pay income taxes on the value of health insurance as part of their compensation.
"He tells you that he'll give you a tax credit of $2,500 per person – $5,000 per family – to help you pay for your insurance and health care costs," Sen. Obama said at a waterfront rally of 18,000 here on Saturday. "But like those ads for prescription drugs, you have to read the fine print to learn the rest of the story."
A woman in the crowd yelled "Amen!"
"You see, Senator McCain would pay for his plan, in part, by taxing your health care benefits for the first time in history," Sen. Obama said. "I reject the radical idea that government has no role to play in protecting ordinary Americans."
McCain campaign spokesman Mr. Bounds said Sen. Obama is misrepresenting Sen. McCain's health-care plan and omitting facts about his own plan that would amount to an inefficient government bureaucracy.
A report released last month by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reveals that neither presidential candidate's plan would vastly reduce the millions of uninsured Americans, though Sen. Obama's plan would cover more people, eventually adding about 34 million.
Health care played a prominent role in the prolonged Democratic primary between Sen. Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, but has largely been a sleeper issue in a general election dogged by daily news of a worsening economic crisis and the largest financial industry rescue in history.
According to a Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll conducted last month, voters rank health care ahead of terrorism and immigration but behind the cost of gas and the war in Iraq as a top priority this election year.
Sen. Obama has enjoyed a boost in recent polls partly because of his focus on kitchen table issues and the economy. A Rasmussen Tracking poll released Saturday gives the Illinois senator a 51% to 45% lead against Sen. McCain.
An Obama aide said the weekend marked a critical time to debut the new line of criticism. The deadline to register to vote in many battleground states including Virginia is Monday, a crucial deadline for Sen. Obama who is largely staking his campaign on its ability to bring in new voters.
In addition to Sen. Obama's remarks, his campaign launched four new television ads, radio commercials, four different leaflets and surrogate events in several battleground states focused on attacking Sen. McCain's health-care plan.
In a mailer reminiscent of the famous "Harry & Louise" advertising campaign launched in 1993 by a health insurance lobbying group to protest President Bill Clinton's proposed health care plan, a nice-looking middle-class couple sits at the kitchen table stressing over bills. "John McCain's solution to rising health care costs?" the flier reads. "Tax your health care."
The message may strike a chord since Sen. McCain often promises he would not raise taxes and criticizes Sen. Obama's plan to increase taxes on families making more than $250,000. The Arizona senator has dismissed his opponent's health care plan for adding another government bureaucracy.
Sen. Obama's health-care plan would aim to make coverage more affordable by creating a new government-run plan as well as an "exchange" in which private companies would offer insurance to compete with the government plan.
Under the plan, new rules would require that insurance companies provide coverage to everyone at consistent prices, even those with existing ailments. Parents would be required to cover their children or be charged a fine.
Gov. Palin attacked Sen. Obama's plan during Thursday's debate when she said it would create an inefficient state-run system.
Republican National Committee spokesman Alex Conant echoed that line of attack on Saturday. "Barack Obama is lying about John McCain's plan to provide more Americans with more health care choices," Mr. Conant said. "Obama's plan only offers more government, while McCain's plan offers more choices."
Sen. Obama mocked the Gov. Palin's attacks on Saturday. "Thanks, but no thanks to those overpriced drugs," he said, a reference to a now famous line from Gov. Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention when she said she told the federal government "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere.
The attacks come just days before the second presidential debate on Tuesday in Nashville and could signal a sharper tone between the two presidential contenders.
Source:
Debate analysis: Palin spoke at 10th-grade level, Biden at eighth
CNN, October 4
(CNN) -- An analysis carried out by a language monitoring service said Friday that Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at a more than ninth-grade level and Sen. Joseph Biden spoke at a nearly eighth-grade level in Thursday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates.
Sen. Joe Biden used 5,492 words during the debate; Gov. Sarah Palin used 5,235.
The analysis by the Austin, Texas-based Global Language Monitor said Palin, governor of Alaska and the GOP vice presidential nominee, used the passive voice in 8 percent of her sentences, far more than the 5 percent used by the Democratic senator from Delaware.
The analysis noted that the "passive voice can be used to deflect responsibility; Biden used active voice when referring to [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [President] Bush; Palin countered with passive deflections."
"It obscures the doer of the action," said Language Monitor President Paul Payack, an independent with no political affiliation.
The two candidates were nearly even in total number of words spoken. The normally voluble Biden restrained his tendency to ramble by uttering just 5,492 words during the 90-minute debate, versus 5,235 for Palin, Payack said.
In last week's debate between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, Obama spoke 8,068 words during the 90-minute event, while McCain spoke 7,150, Payack said.
Thursday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates "was more collegial, thinking out loud as opposed to just hammering points," Payack said in trying to explain the difference. "It was a much calmer style."
His analysis ranked the candidates' speech on several other levels, too. Here's the breakdown:
Grade level: Biden, 7.8; Palin, 9.5 (Newspapers are typically written to a sixth-grade reading level.)
Sentences per paragraph: statistically tied at 2.7 for Biden and 2.6 for Palin.
Letters per word: tied at 4.4.
Ease of reading: Biden, 66.7 (with 100 being the easiest to read or hear), versus 62.4 for Palin.
The analysis said Abraham Lincoln spoke at an 11th-grade level during his seven debates in 1858 against incumbent Stephen A. Douglas in their race for a Senate seat from Illinois.
But higher grade level doesn't necessarily mean better sentence, Payack said. He pointed to Palin's second-to-last sentence in the debate, which the formula put at a grade level of 18.3:
"What I would do, also, if that were ever to happen, though, is to continue the good work he is so committed to of putting government back on the side of the people and get rid of the greed and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington," Palin said.
"When she said it, it sounded good, but on paper it's a completely different animal," Payack said. "It's like, what is that?"
But Biden had his own challenging moments, such as this 32-word gem, rated grade 15.6: "The middle class under John McCain's tax proposal, 100 million families, middle-class families, households to be precise, they got not a single change; they got not a single break in taxes."
Payack praised the usually longer-winded Biden for showing restraint here. "In a typical Joe Biden thing, this sentence would serve as a launching point to even more complex and convoluted statements. Last night, he was particularly reserved, and you only had to be a college graduate to decipher it, according to the readability statistics."
Source: edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/03/debate.words/
Palin: Send me to Michigan
Gordon Trowbridge / Detroit News October 4
Sarah Palin wants another shot at Michigan. "I want to get back to Michigan and I want to try," the Republican vice presidential nominee told Fox News Channel on Friday. Palin told Fox reporter Carl Cameron that the John McCain campaign's decision Thursday to pull out of Michigan was "not a surprise because ... the polls are showing we are not doing as well there as evidently we would like to."
That didn't mean she was happy, said Palin, who was campaigning in Texas the day after her vice presidential debate with Democrat Joe Biden.
"I read that this morning and I fired off a quick e-mail and said, 'Oh, come on, you know, do we have to? Do we have to call it there?' "
McCain's campaign decided Thursday to end its bid to win Michigan's 17 electoral votes, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV ads and making a dozen campaign stops in the state.
Palin said she and her husband want to reach out to struggling Michigan workers. "Todd and I, we'd be happy to get to Michigan and walk through those plants of the car manufacturers. We'd be so happy to get to speak to the people in Michigan because the economy is hurting."
The interview drew an immediate response from Chuck Yob, a co-chair of McCain's Michigan campaign and a longtime Republican National Committee member from Michigan. "I hereby invite you to come to Michigan immediately," Yob wrote in an e-mail to Palin Friday -- a message also sent to reporters in the apparent hope the McCain campaign would reconsider. "The good people of Macomb County, Northern Michigan, the Upper Peninsula, and Grand Rapids await your response."
"P.S.," Yob wrote, "We have MANY requests for Todd to come to Michigan."
Yob's son, John, is McCain's deputy political director.
Source: detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article
Sarah Palin, St. Louis and 2012
Washington Post, October 4, 2008
The rapidly congealing conventional wisdom concerning last night's vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden is that the Alaska governor did enough to make herself a non-issue (or at least less of an issue) in the final month of the campaign.
But it may well be a mistake to assume that the only impact of Palin's performance last night was to stop the bleeding caused by a series of missteps in interviews with CBS News Katie Couric.
Palin's performance last night -- particularly her willingness to stand by conservative principles on things such as gay marriage and do it with a smile (and even a wink) -- further endeared her to not only conservative opinion makers but the rank and file GOPers who will play an outsized role in picking the next nominee of the party in 2012 if McCain comes up short in 32 days time.
As Jim Geraghty wrote on National Review's "Campaign Spot" blog: "She's a natural saleswoman. She certainly saved her prospects for national office in 2012, if she so chooses."
What Palin did last night is bring her own national prospects back from the brink of disaster with a performance that -- while occasionally exposing her decided lack of knowledge on certain issues -- managed to keep her star ascendant for a party that may well be looking for a new face to lead it on Nov. 5.
Palin is clearly likable, charismatic and telegenic. In an insta-poll conducted by CNN, more than eight in ten people who watched the debate said she did better than they had expected while just seven percent said she had done worse. Asked which candidate was more likable, 54 percent chose Palin while 36 percent opted for Biden.
The CNN poll also showed the obvious weaknesses that Palin must address between now and 2012 -- or whenever the next time the Republican presidential nomination is open. Less than half (46 percent) of the sample said they thought Palin was qualified to be president while 53 percent said she want not. (Interestingly, those numbers were largely unchanged from a pre-debate poll in which 42 percent said she was qualified to be president and 54 percent said she was not.)
And so, judging from the polls, Palin's image to the average American is as a likable Republican who probably needs a bit more seasoning. Sub out "Republican" for "Democrat" in that last sentence and you have the general sentiment about former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards following his 2004 run for president and subsequent vice presidential bid alongside Sen. John Kerry (Mass.).
Edwards spent the next four years laying the policy groundwork for a second bid, founding the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina and touring the country to talk about poverty and its import as a national issue.
Palin could follow the same blueprint -- choosing a signature issue (or two) and focusing heavily on making herself a leading authority on the issue while also boning up on other policy matters (particularly foreign policy) and putting in place a political team.
And, while Palin's weaknesses are apparent to any political junkie following the last few weeks of the campaign closely, her strengths are also legion.
She is beloved by social conservative voters who view her as "one of them". She will end this race, win or lose, with extremely high name identification nationwide. Regardless of the outcome, she will be a rockstar on the Republican fundraising circuit over the coming months and years. And, for a party that may well be looking to redefine itself in 2012, Palin stands out from a field that could include former Govs. Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Mike Huckabee (Ark.) as well as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty among others.
Last night Palin may not have materially aided McCain's chances of defeating Obama in the fall campaign but she did her own political future a world of good.
Source: voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/10/sarah_palin_st_louis_and_2012.html
Digest: October 4-6, 2008