Even More Conservatives Bail…

Seems like a pattern now.

Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for W’s reelection, says:

“They didn’t allow John McCain to pick the person he wanted for Vice President,” Dowd said, referring to Sen. Joe Lieberman, which undercut his experience argument and tethered McCain to the GOP base.

“He knows in his gut he put somebody unqualified on the ballot,” Dowd stressed, “and put the country at risk.”

Dowd also said the Palin pick, in contrast to Sen. Barack Obama’s choice of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate, showed voters which candidate was “serious” about governing.

Also, an interesting case of McCain’s campaign twisting the truth and manipulating the context to create a narrative that doesn’t exist:

“This weekend,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said today, “a plumber concerned that Senator Obama was going to raise his taxes asked him directly about his plan. The response was telling. Senator Obama explained to him that he was going to raise his taxes to quote ‘spread the wealth around.'”

Is that what happened?

Judge for yourself

You’ll have to check the link for yourself to see if McCain’s campaign is being fair.  Interestingly, as I was reading this blog post, I started to wonder what percentage of the tax paying population even understands how progressive tax brackets work.  To be honest, I never thought much of it until this year.  I don’t think most people understand what progressive tax brackets mean. When some people hear that the top tax bracket is going to be at 39% under Obama’s plan, they think that someone making $250,001 will be taxed at 39% when in reality, only the $1 will be taxed at 39%.

Brad Friedman has a nice write up on the whole ACORN faux outrage by the Republicans over “voter fraud”:

Here are the facts. Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can’t authenticate the registration, or it’s incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic (“fraudulent”, “incomplete”, et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you’ve heard about fraud by Acorn, it’s because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that’s been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming “Acorn is committing fraud” know all of the above but don’t bother to share those facts with the media they’ve run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it’s voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

Of course, the outrage is completely unjustified, but what makes it all the more humorous is that McCain has also spoken on behalf of ACORN:

The beleaguered Democratic-leaning community group Acorn sends over this photograph: John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event Acorn co-sponsored in Florida.

The immigration event, which other photos show was packed with red-shirted Acorn member, was co-sponsored by the local Catholic Archdiocese, the SEIU, and other groups.

McCain, still spiting much of his party on immigration at the time, was the headliner.

And how about a video to go with that?

So was McCain for ACORN before he was against it?  So can we stop the faux outrage over this issue already?  It’s a non-sequitur; organizationally, ACORN did everything right and by the book.  It hired some low wage workers who created fraudulent registrations, but they filtered those out and flagged them as fraudulent and the workers were fired or disciplined.

Jim Cramer also shares his thoughts on an Obama presidency versus as McCain presidency and what it could mean for the economy:

What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful. The first step was passing the bank-bailout legislation. Now that it’s done—and if it didn’t get done we would have been looking at a guaranteed economic collapse—the critical issue will be presidential leadership. And while any president will be an improvement over the current one, there is a growing belief on Wall Street that Barack Obama has the capacity to lead us out of this wilderness while John McCain does not. I’ll go a step further: Obama is a recession. McCain is a depression.

Wall Street usually favors Republicans when it comes to managing the economy, but this time around the financial community is skeptical. John McCain has done everything he can to avoid talking about the economy, lest he be tarred with the brush of George Bush’s ineptitude. And when McCain has attempted to step into the fray, he’s been far from reassuring. First, he insisted that the fundamentals of the economy were sound; then he turned around and told us it was the end of the economic world as we know it, and suspended his campaign to scramble back to Washington and save the day on the bailout bill—only to have little visible effect. For all his talk of being a maverick, McCain looks an awful lot like President Bush on the credit crisis: He doesn’t seem to understand Wall Street or Main Street, he is dogmatically anti-regulation, and his economic team is a joke. Carly Fiorina almost destroyed the onetime best technology company in America, Hewlett-Packard, and Meg Whitman took eBay, the best dot-com player, and turned it into a mediocre franchise that has no growth. Both are perceived by Wall Street to be also-rans who are on the team because they have nothing else to do.

Obama is no messiah, of course, but there’s a reason the Street sees him as a more capable manager of the credit crisis. He seems to understand the complexity of the problem, and while he’s nobody’s populist, he’s at least perceived as less tone-deaf to everyday Americans’ problems than his opponent. Obama also has a better team, in the likes of Larry Summers, the renowned economist and former Harvard president who probably knows more about this crisis than anyone, and Warren Buffett, the smartest man in business, period. And Obama is a globalist, in an age where the world’s economies are increasingly interdependent.

Carly Fiorina?  I mean, really, is she the one that you really want to be your surrogate on the economy?  Really?