1. Senator Barack Obama’s strongest defenders, led by Andrew Sullivan, were furious at the questioning directed at Senator Obama by two of the best in the news business: ABC’s Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.
In Sullivan’s words:
The loser was ABC News: one of the worst media performances I can remember — petty, shallow, process-obsessed, trivial where substantive, and utterly divorced from the actual issues that Americans want to talk about.
What really irritated Sullivan is that the early part of the debate focused on issues like Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright Jr., Obama’s association with a former leader of the radical and violent group the Weather Underground, his reluctance to wear an American flag pin on his lapel, and his comments in San Francisco about how middle-class voters are “bitter” and frustrated and “cling” to guns, religion, and xenophobia.
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These issues were entirely appropriate to raise — and, in fact, several of them have not been asked of Obama before, including Obama’s relationship with William Ayers (the former leader of the Weather Underground). Obama, after all, was given a chance to respond in full, and there are few questions that should be declared out of bounds for presidential candidates. There was no “specious and gossipy trivia” (to quote the close-to-unhinged Tom Shales in Thursday’s
Washington Post). And the debate did not focus exclusively on those issues; there were questions about Iraq, Iran, taxes, guns, affirmative action, and other topics. This debate, more than most, was enlightening and useful. Obama’s supporters are enraged that he would be treated like any other candidate running for president.
2. The consensus view is that the reason Obama did poorly Wednesday night is because he was on the defensive due to his recent gaffes. But let’s unpack some of the substantive policy answers Obama gave as well.
On Iraq, Obama reaffirmed a rock-hard pledge that he will withdraw our combat troops and leave no permanent bases. He is wholly uninterested in what General Petraeus or anyone else has to say on the matter of our mission; our troops are coming home, come what may. And if as a result of a precipitous withdrawal we see mass death and genocide, a revitalized al-Qaeda, a strengthened Iran, and massive instability in the region, the withdrawal would presumably continue. There is, it seems, no scenario that would cause Obama to change his mind. David Brooks of the
New York Times put it well: “To pledge an automatic withdrawal is just insane. A mature politician would’ve been honest and said:
I fully intend to withdraw, but I want to know what the reality is at that moment.”3. On the matter of capital-gains taxes, ABC’s Gibson pointed out that in the past, when the rate dropped, revenues
increased. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased, revenues went
down. “So why raise it at all,” Gibson asked Obama, “especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”
Sen. Obama’s response was, “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” Obama assures us that he wants “businesses to thrive and I want people to be rewarded for their success.” But he also wants to “make sure … that our tax system is fair and that we are able to finance health care for Americans who currently don’t have it and that we're able to invest in our infrastructure and invest in our schools.” But back to the empirical evidence: when capital-gains taxes are cut, the private economy expands. So if lowering the capital gains tax led to a stronger economy and higher revenues, Obama presumably would
still oppose it on grounds of “fairness” (a concept that doesn’t help you determine what the precise tax rate ought to be). This demonstrates the depth of Obama’s animus toward the corporate world, which is the engine of prosperity for America.
