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Over the past month, a foolish narrative has been abroad in the land: that this election is going to be a "referendum" on Barack Obama. This is not uncommon in presidential politics--John Kerry's consultants fantasized that the 2004 election was going to be a referendum on George W. Bush--but it is usually peddled by weak campaigns that want to avoid dealing with their own candidate's deficiencies. Presidential elections are never referendums. They are, ultimately, a choice. Two candidates stand on a stage in debate: they talk; you decide...
Quite often, though strangely not in Kerry's case, the referendum gambit is a rationale for mudslinging. This year we have John McCain's attempt to paint Obama as aloof, messianic ... a celebrity, like Paris or Britney. The McCain ads have the slightly sordid quality of an inside joke: Oprah Winfrey called Obama "the One," and McCain's dyspeptic staffers latched on to that moniker, and now there's a sardonic ad using the messianic nickname, filled with celestial images of Obama smiling and orating grandiloquently, followed by Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea. When Obama--correctly--said that keeping...
...John McCain's use of his signature phrase, my friends...
...Defusing Attacks Balance Of Power Vacation Days ACTION Using Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Charlton Heston (as Moses) to mock Barack Obama's celebrity, fitness for the presidency and alleged Messiah complex is not the classiest or most substantive gambit in presidential-campaign history. But it sure did allow John McCain to focus the conversation on Obama's greatest vulnerabilities. When Obama remarked on the campaign trail that he doesn't look like previous Presidents, McCain's campaign manager was quick to accuse the Democrat of playing the race card from "the bottom of the deck." In the short term...
...soaring oil revenues, Iraq could have a cumulative budget surplus of $79 billion by the end of the year, the Government Accountability Office reported. And yet, of the $67 billion the Iraqi government spent from 2005 to 2007, just 1% went toward infrastructure projects. Senators Carl Levin and John Warner, who requested the report, expressed outrage at Iraq's weak spending record; U.S. taxpayers have spent $48 billion on Iraq reconstruction...