Debate Update

It's no secret that essentially every opinion person or organization has declared the candidate they like to be the winner of Friday's debate. That means you can take every single one of those opinions and flush them down the toilet in favor of your own.

First off is one detail that should be noted: Jim Lehrer, the moderator, is the real winner of this debate. Rasmussen shows 76% believed he was neutral. I have to agree - he asked pointed questions of both candidates, and included the logical follow up questions to both, as well. He pulled no punches, and gave the candidates ample opportunity to respond to each other's attacks. He was invisible, allowing the candidates to be the focus of attention. Lehrer did an outstanding job, and we would be well served to have all these debates moderated as well as that one.

Now, back to the candidates. What I think is much more intriguing than the one-sided arguments about who 'won', now that a few days has passed, is to examine the gaffes that have come out from Barack the Obamessiah. [For the record, I'm not going to worry about any McCain gaffes here - if there were any, the MSM will make sure you hear about them over and over and over...]

First, a relatively minor one:

Obama is talking about the Home Owners Loan Corporation, and he mangled an op-ed by HRC from last Thursday:

He may also have read these articles from TNR and WP

Here's a contemporary one from TIME.

Obama was at least in the ballpark so this probably won't be seen as a major gaffe. Note, however, that the profits were phantom, and the conditions that reduced the actual losses are quite unlikely to be repeated. Here's the low-down...

See the link for all the details. Bottom line: he either misrepresented the truth, or he is unfamiliar with it. Next up is a '57 states' moment:

Obama: "...we’ holding assets long enough that eventually taxpayers get it back and that happened during the Great Depression when Roosevelt purchased a whole bunch of homes,"

Obama is talking about the present bailout that will return a profit - only problem is that FDR never did such a thing.

He probably got that bit of information from Biden...

We can't leave out the flip-flops, so here's a good one on missile defense:

If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you've seen that part about cutting missile defense before. The point is that he clearly contradicted himself in this debate - so which is his real policy? I'll bet you $1000 not one member of the MSM will ask him to clarify that in the coming days.

One of the biggest difficulties Obama had was explaining away his vote to cut off funding for the troops in Iraq. The McCain campaign has put together an ad specifically to blast that vote:

If there is one lesson learned from this year's election, I think it will be for future nominees to not select a former presidential competitor as his or her Vice President. There's just too much material for the opposition to work with!

In the spirit of the statement 'actions speak louder than words', after the debate was done, what did the two candidates do? Hugh Hewitt's website tells us:

John McCain spent the morning after the first general-election presidential debate working the phones:

Senior adviser Mark Salter said the Arizona senator spent the morning at his campaign headquarters placing calls to congressional leaders and White House officials involved in finalizing a multibillion-dollar deal to bail out failing financial firms. Earlier in the week McCain suspended most campaign activities to help develop a bipartisan agreement....

"He can effectively do what he needs to do by phone," Salter said Saturday. "He's calling members on both sides, talking to people in the administration, helping out as he can."

Once again, faced with the choice between country and career, John McCain chose country. He'd rather lose a campaign than risk our country's fundamental economic security.

No legislator wants to admit that he had to be cajoled into doing the right thing for his country, and so probably both McCain and everyone he influenced will keep mum on how much effect McCain's vigorous phone campaign actually had. But USA Today reports that a bipartisan coalition of "House and Senate negotiators [announced that they had] worked out a tentative deal with the White House late Saturday."

By very sharp contrast:

Obama, meanwhile, stuck to his campaign schedule which will take him and Biden from here to two other swing states this weekend: Virginia and Michigan....

Though he has dismissed the presidential candidates' intervention in the bailout talks as counterproductive grandstanding, Obama expressed forceful opinions about what the deal should — and should not — include.

"I will not allow this plan to become a welfare program for Wall Street executives," he told the crowd here. And he suggested an additional $50 billion in aid for the unemployed and investments in infrastructure should be part of the deal.

"Washington has to feel the same sense of urgency about passing an economic stimulus plan" as it does about rescuing mega-investors, said Obama, who spoke by phone Saturday about the state of the negotiations with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Got that? Obama spoke only to the real leaders of his own party on this matter, who obviously have not needed or particularly wanted his involvement, along with the Bush-43 Administration's representative (who is already scrambling to get a deal in place). The nation's financial future is at risk, but The One can only manage to make time for a total of three phone calls, and none of those were even to people who needed to be persuaded to support a bill.

We don't yet have details on what is and isn't included in the compromise agreement in principle reached late Saturday night. Based on what he told the public, however, even in those three calls, Obama wasn't urging his colleagues to make compromises that would trim the pork-and-graft potential which has so disturbed fiscal conservatives from both parties. Instead he wanted to hold the deal hostage to a $50 billion giveaway, plus drum up a little more class warfare (as if Main Street and Wall Street are competitors in a zero-sum game, instead of mutually dependent components whose health is essential to sustain economic growth).

That would frighten me a lot more if I actually thought Obama had any substantial influence on this deal or any of the actual decision-makers. My expectation is that it will include some sorts of salary-related restrictions on some private-sector executives who are involved in the implementation of the plan — that much was already under discussion before Obama even returned to Washington on McCain's heels last week — but I remain hopeful that it isn't heavily larded with pork.

You may or may not support the deal. I'm not certain myself, and won't be until I see the details, of course. But of one thing I'm very certain: In this crisis, as so often before, regardless of whether you or I think he was in the right or in the wrong, John McCain has consistently put duty ahead of ambition.

Barack Obama can't point to a single instance in his entire life in which he's put his ambitions at risk for any higher cause. Not one. And that does frighten me.

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UPDATE (Sun Sep 28 @ 1:00 p.m. CST): This useful summary of the terms of the tentative deal (h/t InstaPundit), compared side-by-side to the original Paulson proposal and the Pelosi-Frank proposed add-ons, does not include Obama's $50 billion in pork, anything for ACORN, or the bankruptcy law changes. The restrictions on executive compensation apparently don't affect companies and industries other than those directly involved in the plan's execution, so the restructions can be justified as fiscal restraint rather than class warfare.

This confirms that Obama wasn't ever a meaningful player in the negotiations.

Aside from blowing them up and then running away from them, of course.

Probably the most damning gaffe Obama made was the bracelet thing. I mentioned this before, but for those of you who missed it, here it is again:

The point here is to show two things:
1. Obama's "Me, too!" philosophy. He does this with just about everything. Despite his paper-thin record, he likes to talk about a handful of bills that he's worked on to illustrate how he's bipartisan. What he fails to mention is that most of those bills are ones that were so uncontroversial that they had many co-sponsors and simply passed on a unanimous voice vote (he likes to talk about one with Republican Dick Lugar, on which this exact scenario happened). To my knowledge, the only bill he's actually conceived and driven forward is the Global Poverty Act, which is essentially a tax on being an American that will drain our economy and submit America to U.N. regulation. What a winner.
2. He apparently cares so much about the soldier's bracelet that he doesn't even remember the poor kid's name...!

Now, to compound this major gaffe, we have learned this:

Barack Obama played the "me too" game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son's name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

Radio host Glenn Moberg of the show "Route 51" asked Mr. Jopek, a man who believes in the efforts in Iraq and is not in favor of Obama's positions on the war, what he and his ex-wife think of Obama continually using their son's name on the campaign trail. (h/t D. Keith Howington of www.dehavelle.com)

Jopek began by saying that his ex-wife was taken aback, even upset, that Obama has made the death of her son a campaign issue. Jopek says his wife gave Obama the bracelet because "she just wanted Mr. Obama to know Ryan's name." Jopek went on to say that "she wasn't looking to turn it into a big media event" and "just wanted it to be something between Barack Obama and herself." Apparently, they were all shocked it became such a big deal.

But, he also said that his ex-wife has refused further interviews on the matter and that she wanted Obama to stop wearing the reminder of her son's sacrifice that he keeps turning into a campaign soundbyte. This begins at about 10 minutes into the radio program. (Download radio show HERE)

Of all the low-life, disrespectful, downright mean things to do to someone who has lost a child...!

Whether this is a sign of the Obamessiah's level of respect for our troops or just other people in general -- that he will use them how he wishes despite what they think or feel -- it is most certainly a sign that the Obamessiah is not cut out to lead this nation.

There's my two cents.