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McCain, Palin keep up ‘socialist’ attacks on Obama
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Sen. and Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain
Sen. and Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama
The Republicans ‘have run out of ideas,’ Obama said.
McClatchy Newspapers
GREEN, Ohio — John McCain’s campaign continued to hammer away at Barack Obama’s economic plan Wednesday, with Sarah Palin calling him “Barack the wealth-spreader,” while Obama said their attacks smelled of desperation.
Again invoking “Joe the plumber,” McCain and Palin reminded a rally of perhaps 15,000 people at a high school football field here that Obama had told the Toledo plumber he wants to spread the wealth around.
“Knowing that there are a lot of representatives of Joe the plumber around here, it doesn’t sound like many of you are going to be supporting Barack the wealth-spreader in this election,” Palin said. “And that’s because you understand that his plan to redistribute wealth will ultimately punish hard work, and it discourages productivity, and it will stifle the entrepreneurial spirit that made this the greatest country on earth.”
Palin’s remarks continued a Republican strategy in the closing days of the campaign to portray Obama’s tax and economic plans as akin to socialism.
McCain, speaking earlier at a rally of 3,000 at a Manchester, N.H., hockey arena, used Obama’s best-selling book to try show that the Illinois senator’s policies are out of the mainstream.
“Readers of his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’ might recall that he wrote about the need to ‘spread the wealth around’ there, too,” McCain said. “He writes of the need for ‘labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth.’ He has talked elsewhere about how, in our day, ‘the distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequity are now higher.”’
Obama, campaigning in Richmond, Va., said remarks such as Palin’s signified a losing campaign that was running out of time.
“They have been trying to throw whatever they can up against the wall to see what sticks,” he said. “They have run out of ideas.”
Obama told about 13,000 supporters at the Richmond Coliseum that “in the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over.
“We’ve seen it before, and we’re seeing it again today. The ugly phone calls. The misleading mail and TV ads. The careless, outrageous comments. All aimed at keeping us from working together, all aimed at stopping change.”
Obama leads in Virginia by an average of 7 percentage points in public polls, but his lead has narrowed slightly in the past week. He’s trying to become the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the Old Dominion since 1964.
While Obama was in Richmond, he worked to assure Americans that he’ll strive hard as president to protect the country from attack. He met for more than an hour with national security advisers in a Richmond hotel, talking at length about rising violence in Afghanistan and how to guard against the kind of crisis or “test” that running mate Joe Biden warned this week would confront him as a new president.
McCain and Palin accused Obama of being dangerously inexperienced in international affairs, using Biden’s remarks as Exhibit A.
Obama shrugged off Biden’s comments.
“Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes,” he said. “But I think that his core point was that the next administration is going to be tested regardless of who it is.”
Earlier in the day, McCain stumped in New Hampshire hoping that a state that salvaged his White House aspirations in 2000 and earlier this year can come through for him again on Election Day.
“I know one thing for certain: It doesn’t matter what the pundits said or how confident my opponent is,” the Arizona senator told supporters who packed the college ice-hockey arena. “The people of New Hampshire make their own decisions, and more than once, they’ve ignored the polls and the pundits and brought me across the finish line first.
“I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be as Election Day draws close than running an underdog campaign in New Hampshire.”
A third time might not be the charm for McCain in the Granite State, however. Obama leads him there by 9.4 points, according to an average of recent polls by RealClearPolitics.com.
In addition, New Hampshire is becoming more Democratic. Democrats hold the state’s two congressional seats, the governorship and both houses of the state legislature.
Comments
I don't mind the "socialist" attacks that McCain makes against Obama. There are legitimate points to dispute there, regarding their views on the economy, taxation, etc.
(I hate McCain's and Palin's sleaze, but that is not the subject of this article.)
Regarding the "socialist" thing, George W. Bush and his supporters have led us to the greatest intrusion of government into the economy that I have ever seen.
We have $10.3 trillion debt to the Chinese and Saudis, thanks to Bush and McCain. Bush doubled the national debt.
Bush proposed, and McCain voted for, 8 of the largest budget deficits in our history.
Of their $1.5 trillion tax cut, 70% went to the top 1%. I got $600 out of the last one. Boy, that really changed my life. I could by an AIG lunch with that.
* The Paulson giveaway of $700 billion to the Wall Street fat cats,
* the giveaway of $125 billion to AIG so that they could enjoy their half-million dollars retreats and $600 lunches, * the buyout of 20% of commercial paper (corporate short-term loans) of American banks
-- all of this has made this government the most socialist in my lifetime.
McCain said all through the 2000s that he supported Bush "over 90% of the time" and bragged that he supported Bush more than other Republicans. It's only in the last six months that he's gotten religion and said he opposes Bush.
McCain voted for deregulation of the banking industry. That's another fact.
And here is something else: McCain is worth $100 million, money he didn't make, money he married. So yeah, McCain is a fat cat who supports socialism for the wealthy and capitalism for the rest of us.
And BTW Ohio, Chrysler announced today that it is closing another plant and laying off thousands more.
If you are delusional and suicidal, vote for McCain.
Here I think is the real reason McCain has never been able to pull it together in this race. Two two debt-financed wars and a domestic policy rivaling the incompetence of the Katrina disaster have left every American man, woman, and child owing $35,000 on the national debt. Senator McCain’s only real economic idea is to make permanent our existing tax policy, despite its having had several years to work already. Instead, his campaign’s main strategy is to change focus almost completely every few days, usually from one tangential issue to the next, stressing William Ayres, then ACORN, then Joe the Plumber, and now for a few days it’s been that Obama, because he means slightly to modify one of the world's most regressive tax systems, is a “socialist." (That one’s a bit ironic after the Republican government took the single largest equity stake in the previously private financial sector.) McCain’s administration would also be overrun with business lobbyists; his very campaign manager and several other advisers were millionaire lobbyists for, of all things, mortgage bankers.
The tragedy is what his chances of winning show about us as people. By not making utterly inevitable an Obama landslide, we Ohioans have shown ourselves a flock of callow children who’ve earned no right of self-government. How long must we stand like fools in the same burning building before we just step outside?
PragmaticSubstance that was one of the most thought provoking and intelligent postings I've seen on the Vindy website. You can't possibly be a valley resident can you?
Hey Apollo: Thanks! But no need to bad mouth the Valley!
PS: A few thoughts about this inane "socialism" theme. First, it is one thing when anonymous posters in an online forum throw around abstract labels that they intend as polemicizing, Manichaen insults; it isn't even a big deal when they demonstrate that they don't have much grasp of them. (E.g., I saw a post on another thread today showing the author had never read a word of socialist theory or criticism of it when he claimed to show, Q.E.D., that Obama must be socialist because he questions charter school programs. You never hear thoughtful and educated conservatives, even when they are really, really conservative, say things like that. That's because they've taken a little time to educate themselves about the things they criticize.) But when the Republican nominee for President does this, with no foundation, it's a disgrace.
Second, it is insipidly false. Like virtually everyone in the United States and surely every serious political candidate, Obama is a market-oriented capitalist who does not intend centralized ownership or the abolition of private property. (See, e.g., the classic historical study by Louis Hartz, called "The Liberal Tradition in America.") His economic platform is not even as progressive as some of the economic policies of the Nixon administration (remember the Office of Price Administration, anyone?)
Third, and to me this is the knee-slapping howler, why does no one see the irony in the red-baiting that many conservatives have been throwing around lately? That is, you can just announce that Obama is a "socialist" if you want (even though I can't imagine where the support for that claim is to be found in any of Obama's actual economic platform, which frankly contemplates nothing more than middle-of-the-road finance capitalism subject to reasonable regulation), but doesn't that criticism seem pretty ironic when a right-leaning Republican government is even now the largest equity owner of AIG insurance and shortly will become a large stake holder in several huge banks? And this socialization of our financial markets is directly the result of the 8 years of virtually unchallenged GOP control of all three branches of federal government. Though he surely did not consciously intend it, the single biggest socialist in the United States has become George W. Bush!
Finally, if Obama is all the things that his opponent explicitly calls him -- a "socialist" and "pal" of "terrorists" -- you really have to wonder what Colin Powell could possibly be thinking. And, ask yourself, what does Powell have to gain from the endorsement? Nothing -- surely nothing he couldn't also get by helping Senator McCain win. So you really have to wonder why he would do this if any of the inane, foundless namecalling of the McCain/Palin campaign were true.