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.