McCain Aide: Turnaround Starts Today
“Sen. McCain will offer a frank assessment of the state of the election and the state of affairs for our country.
“The theme is the new direction that Sen. McCain will take the country through his specific plans for creating jobs, helping those nearing retirement, keeping people in their homes and curbing spending,” an aide to John McCain said on Monday.
Although he will reportedly not give any specifics, his aides believe nonetheless that today’s speech will “begin a turnaround for the campaign.”
And that is a problem. McCain could give a tremendous speech about the economy today, but as long as he does not offer Americans an alternative plan to the one Obama will offer today, he does not stand a chance of ‘turning around’ anything.
Having said that, perhaps it is indeed wise to take it slowly. Team McCain seems to believe that taking it slowly, building suspense, slowly transforming McCain into an Economist-in-Chief, is more effective than a sudden approach. That could, of course, very well be true, considering the fact that many will automatically dismiss any clear proposals, suddenly presented to voters, as yet another ‘gimmick.’
Whatever happens, as noted earlier today, it seems that the debate will finally focus on the issues, not on personalities. And that’s a victory for everyone.
I disagree and I say that because we really don’t know what will need to be done come 1/21/08. Now, will that sell to the American electorate? Probably not. Right now we’re in the “I’ll grant you three wishes” mode of policy.
I’d recommend to Sen McCain that he let the folks in power (i.e. the present administration and present Congress) present their various and asundry ideas and focus more on skills (i.e. long track record working across the aisles to get tough problems solved) and some level of “frankness” (i.e. “given how quickly this situation changes and given the severity of the problems, our ability to do any new programs other than fix our economy may be very limited”)
To me both candidates at this point in time are just “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks”
Agree with c3, although I think it would be very helpful if each candidate would explain his broad policy concepts on the economic crisis more fully, and perhaps start naming potential cabinet members or other staff picks who will have a hand in working on this problem- so that people can have some idea which direction they’ll each take us in.
I still find it hard to believe that many economic gurus aren’t finding fault with Obama’s tax plan, particularly on corporate taxes and small businesses that earn over $250,000. In this case, I really believe the conventional wisdom is correct in that raising taxes on business during a stalled economy is disastrous. If there’s some reason to believe that I’m wrong about that, I’d love to hear why.