Well. McCain does seem to be slipping this week. He's had a number of odd gaffes - "the fundamentals of our economy are sound" is just the start of it. Somehow (ie, raw confusion?) he plans as president to refuse meeting with the Prime Minister of Spain. And he was against government regulation of our financial markets before he was for it. He was against bailing out AIG before he was for it. And this week we hear he's opposed to excessive CEO pay, which he (a) would have no control over as president, and (b) he's long benefited from in the form of campaign contributions. But in an effort to stay consistent on this anti-corporate-fat-cats issue he just discovered Monday afternoon, McCain has banished one of his chief campaign surrogates, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and $42-million-golden-parachute-recipient Carly Fiorina. To be fair, however, he didn't ban Ms. Fiona for being a "corporate fat cat", but rather for sticking her foot in her mouth on MSNBC Tuesday and saying neither Palin nor McCain is competent to perform the kind of bang-up management job she herself did at HP (ie, its stock value halved during the time she served there).
[And good riddance. Fiorina was a formidable talking head - she quite beat the crap out of Obama's surrogate Claire McCaskill last Sunday on This Week.]
[And good riddance. Fiorina was a formidable talking head - she quite beat the crap out of Obama's surrogate Claire McCaskill last Sunday on This Week.]
And so as McCain flounders around looking for a public way to address the financial crisis, Obama is doing a reasonable-to-mediocre job of the same - which in relative terms isn't half bad. In all, he seems to be effecting a very calm, cool reovertaking of McCain from behind this week, as the Palin bubble deflates rather than bursts.
To be sure, Obama isn't delivering the kind of bash-'em-upside-the-head-with-violent-rhetoric sort of thing that would make me personally happy. But then again he would never have gotten where he is in life if he had anything like my personal rhetorical preferences (bombast and semicolons).
The first debate's a week from tomorrow. We'll have learned a lot more about how things are settling in by then.
1 comment:
Geez, it seems like all Obama has to do is not screw up, and he should gradually re-ascend as the Republicans burn in a maelstrom of imploding economy.
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