Results, according to my inbox:
Who Did the Best Job In the Debate?
Obama 51%
McCain 38%Who Would Better Handle Economy?
Obama 58%
McCain 37%Who Would Better Handle Iraq?
Obama 52%
McCain 47%
No link, but I assume this will emerge on the internet at some point.
I’ve seen Joe Biden doing aggressive surrogate appearances on every network I’ve flipped to. I imagine he’s hitting all of them. Sarah Palin, by contrast, isn’t doing any networks.
In tonight’s debate, Sen. John McCain repeatedly asserted that his opponent “doesn’t understand” Iraq or national security. McCain demonstrated, however, that it is he who doesn’t understand the consequences that that the Iraq war has wrought for America’s national security.
- McCain said that withdrawing from Iraq would “increase Iranian influence.” In fact, it is the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that has resulted in increased Iranian influence, not only in Iraq, but in the region.
- McCain correctly identified the resurgence in Russian power as driven by increased oil wealth, but avoided mentioning that Russia’s huge oil revenues, as well as Iran’s, are to a significant extent a result of the destabilization resulting from the Iraq war. According to a leading oil economist, the Iraq war “tripled the price of oil…costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone”:
Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent…that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.
- McCain decried the fact that U.S. taxpayers are “sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much,” but continues to support sending $10-12 billion a month to a country, Iraq, whose people want our military to withdraw. As i wrote in July, “a strong political consensus exists among Iraqis in favour of a US commitment to withdraw its forces from their country”:
President Bush and John McCain have consistently tried to ignore this reality, each insisting that a US withdrawal would be contingent upon “conditions on the ground”, and not on “artificial timetables”. But there’s nothing artificial about Iraqis’ revulsion at the continuing presence of foreign troops in their homeland, and the political expression of this revulsion represents an important condition on the ground.
A condition on the ground that McCain consistently chooses to ignore.
Mark Halperin, the voice of conventional wisdom, gives Obama an A- and McCain gets a B-.
Appearing on CNN’s post-debate coverage is a graphic with the text:
FACT: McCain says he would lower business taxes in order to encourage job growth.
McCain did say during the debates, “I want to cut that business tax. I want to cut it so that businesses will remain in — in the United States of America and create jobs.”
But the real fact is this: according to the Congressional Budget Office, a corporate tax cut “does not create an incentive for [corporations] to spend more on labor” and “is not a particularly cost-effective method of stimulating business spending.” And McCain opposes eliminating the tax loopholes that encourage companies to send jobs overseas.
CNN should have indicated it was posting a “fact” about a “lie.” Is that a lact? A flie?
McCain seriously misstated his vote concerning the marines in Lebanon. He said that when he went into Congress in 1983, he voted against deploying them in Beirut. The Marines went in Lebanon in 1982, before McCain came to Congress. The vote came up a year into their deployment, when the Marines had already suffered 54 casualties. What McCain voted against was a measure to invoke the War Powers Act and to authorize the deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon for an additional 18 months. The measure passed 270-161, with 26 other Republicans (including McCain) and 134 Democrats voting against it.
I’m not even really sure why McCain felt the need to lie about this. It is, however, interesting that he brought it up at all. Back in the 1980s, McCain hewed more or less to a realist line that’s very different from the neoconservative foreign policy he’s adhered to for the past 10 years.
Via email:
40 percent said Obama wins. 22 percent. say Mccain
McCain won slightly on right decisions on the war in Iraq.Obama won 68 percent for right decisions on the economy. (!)
Well there you have it. I still think it would be interesting to put some random, undecided, totally uninformed people on TV and let them talk about the debate.
Nicole Wallace is on CNN trying to convince people that a discretionary spending freeze is somehow part of John McCain’s strategy to recover from the financial crisis. In response, I would note:
Other than that, it’s a good idea.
Paul Begala looked back at Barack Obama’s list of particulars against McCain’s misjudgments on Iraq policy in 2002-2004 and said: “He thrashed John McCain on Iraq.” It’s too bad, though, that Obama didn’t return back to this point more frequently. Unlike the various tactical ins-and-outs of different people’s ideas about exactly when and where you meet with so-and-so, the initial question about whether or not to invade Iraq implicates big picture strategic considerations.
It’s clear to anyone who bothers to ask him that love of preventive war as a primary tool of non-proliferation policy is integral to McCain’s worldview. He sees one of the main problems with the Iraq War as being that it’s tended to make Americans less eager to embrace that agenda. He fears that we may turn to a candidate, Obama, who doesn’t believe in attacking countries that haven’t attacked us or our allies. He thinks that starting such wars is vital to American security, and that’s why he’s running for president.
In fact, though, people have grown disgruntled with preventive war because the preventive war doctrine has resulted in disaster.
Check out our comprehensive ThinkProgress roundup on the debate, lots of fact-checks and so forth.
All things considered, it’s about a draw. McCain got a couple of good punches in and so did Obama. Insofar as the idea is supposed to be that McCain has a domineering advantage on national security he certainly didn’t prove that point. And for the candidate who’s losing, a tie amounts to a loss. He needs to find opportunities to gain ground on Obama and he doesn’t seem to me to have gotten much done.
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