Bailouts, Debates, and Crapshooting

There was a lot of action in the world of politics this week. Firstly, I doubt anyone could have escaped hearing about the massive bailout proposed in an attempt to save several major financial corporations. Joe Klein gives his own take on the dealings and how they might influence the presidential campaign here. He writes that it will be a difficult task for both candidates to gain the trust of the people of America aster they have been promised reform time and time again. He also brings up a point which I think should be very important in this election. The reason we are in this mess in the first place is the ridiculous amount of deregulation that was allowed under the Bush administration and with the support of, yes, Senator McCain. Indisputably, what we need right now is regulation, and I personally cannot understand why anyone would think a career deregulator like John McCain would be better suited to do this than Barack Obama.
In this week we also saw our first presidential debate of this election season. In this article, Klein writes what he saw in it. He seems to share the view of most pundits that the debate was fairly equal, the slight edge going slightly towards Obama because he held his own in a field that was supposed to be McCain’s specialty. He believes that in substance Obama was the winner, recognizes that substance rarely is what viewers stake away from debates. In that respect, he admits McCain and Obama were even on matters of style and tone. However, in a more recent post on the blog Swamland, found here, he has a different angle. He seems to think that McCain came off a snobbish by implying Obama was inexperienced, while making more mistakes on foreign policy than Obama.
Another interesting post of his can be found here. It comments on a New York Times article about his “unseemly” though not illegal connections to lobbyists in the Indian gambling scandals. The more interesting part in my mind however is the part about how McCain is an avid craps shooter. This plays in unimaginably well into his recently garnered reputation of a reckless gambler, exhibited in his choice of Gov. Palin among other things.

"John McCain and the Lying Game"

Well, Joe Klein took a turn for the hateful towards John McCain's campaign this week. In his In the Arena column, which can be found here, he really goes at them. This is honestly one of the most partisan articles I have read by him, which just goes to show how fed up he really is with the recent shift of politics towards the smear campaign. Klein is usually fairly moderate with a slight liberal twist on occasion, but this article is in no way a slight twist.
He says, "... John McCain has allowed his campaign to slip the normal bounds of political propriety" and, "McCain's lies have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind." While I obviously do not follow the campaign as closely as Klein, I fully agree with his examples. One of the most sleazy attacks, for example, was that McCain accused Obama of wanting to have sex education for kindergartners, while the truth is that Obama merely wants to inform them on the dangers of predators. These dishonorable attacks bring back memories of a certain 2000 election where McCain was on the receiving end of the mudslinging.
And there is no doubt Klein is alone in his calling out of the McCain campaign. Perhaps most prominently, the past SNL opening skit was a spoof of a McCain political advertisement session. This displays another reason why Klein is one of the best political analysts there are. He writes about what other people will be talking about a week before.

Joe Klien's New Article

In a new and interesting column by Joe Klein in this weeks issue of TIME, he argue the the New VP candidate Sara Palin is representative of an America that no longer exists. The McCain campaign champions her as an average American coming from an average American community, But Joe Klein argues, how many people many people still live in rural America. He states, Palin is an average American of fifty year ago. Now, our citizens make their ------ in city businesses, and our food is made by big corporations, not farmers. However, he also says that this strategy, however flawed, may work. He argues that America today is more nostalgic then it used to be. The cause of this he says, is the absence of recent military success in wars like Vietnam and Iraq. Klein is well known for his dislike of political dishonesty, lauded this as a smart strategy, but was disappointed in the McCain-Palin for distracting Americans from the issues. In one of his latest posts on Swampland, he is also disappointed in McCain's defense of his remarks that the economy is "fundamentally sound." The McCain campaign defended this comment saying that he meant he had confidence in the hardworking Americans. Klein posted that of course every candidate in this election believes in the American worker, but by simply saying the economy is sound instead of actually saying how he will fix it, McCain is disrespecting the American working class.

First Day Blogging

I had to put up something to make my blog actually look functional. I think I have decided on a basic theme for my outside reading this quarter. I will be reading the columns, blog, and possibly a book by my favorite political writer, Joe Klien. Since we are in the middle of a historic election season, I figure its a good time to keep up with politics, and there is never a bad time to keep up with Joe Klien who in my opinion is one of the most brilliant political analysts and writers of this day and age. I plan on reading his weekly column in TIME, called In the Arena, the blog he contributes to on time.com, called Swampland, and possibly a book he wrote called The Natural. I personally think Joe Klien will be a facinating topic for my outside reading this quarter, and I think if you continue to read my blog, you will agree.