The Candidate We Still Don’t Know
So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.
What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.
With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.
While we’re at it, what did all of you think of that odd Q & A with McCain and Obama at Rick Warren’s Faith Forum? Odd because who is Warren that he gets this kind of power on national TV to make or break the candidates with a particular group of voters? And should religion play that big a role in a Presidential election?
TomB, good answer. Thanks. I’ll put it on my reading list.
I haven’t got it figured out at all. I do think both the Canadian and the US systems are breaking, and we need to get out of our modes of thinking.
For example, on a completely different topic SKS Microfinance is a “for profit” company that lends small cash amounts (e.g. $20) to poor women in India (and now beyond) to do simple things like buy a cow, or the basics to start a business. They’ve lent $250 million over 5 years, have a 99.5% payback success rate, and use novel practices to efficiently drive capital into the world’s poorest areas. They also offer other products like insurance and cell plans.
They developed a hybrid that isn’t charity (who wants that), finances itself, and effectively helps people climb out of poverty. It’s this type of thinking that excites me.
I think our models of health care delivery in the west are based on 19th industrial models and innovative thinking (like SKS has done) with practical outcomes is what we need. Personally I find the “patient choice” vs “socialized” medicine debates somewhat pointless since neither is working rather well.
#171, I’ve actually heard of it and talked to some people who have experience with it. It does seem like a good program.
AFA our health system. I admit it has problems and something needs to be done to fix it. I just strongly believe that getting more government into the mix is the not the solution. There have been too many instances where the government didn’t do anything else but make things worse. The government is good at things where hammers are required – particularly one-size-fits-all hammers. One size doesn’t fit all in the HC market.
One quote from the book I mentioned states:
“Those who favor national health care schemes should take a good, hard look at our veterans’ hospitals. There is your national health care. Those institutions are a national disgrace. If this is the care the government dispenses to those it honors as its most heroic and admirable citizens, why should anyone else expect to be treated any better?”
I’ve been in those hospitals in three different states. I agree with that assessment.
I do believe that free markets are the answer but I also feel that corpo-anarchy isn’t. I find that smaller governments usually do a better job at managing local resources. Perhaps HC is something best left to the States and local municipalities.
I don’t have the answer either. I just know when I read that section on HC in the book, it just made too much sense.
>BTW, Wilson has been shown correct about everything he wrote about.
That’s funny. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence established that he lied. The biggest one is that in reality the CIA concluded from his trip that Iraq did try to get uranium from Niger, not the opposite as he implied. Look up the report for yourself.
#173 – It has already been pointed out further up the thread, but there appears to be an unlimited supply of Kool Aid for some of the posters suffering from advanced Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Obama’s not far ahead because he’s black. Thats pretty much it.