Tonight's debate.

[xiinfaniin]

Obama vs. Mcain.

 

 

Watch it. Report it. Comment on it.

[nuune]

What time is that yaa Xaaji, Europe time!

[xiinfaniin]

^^I think it's on 2AM london time.

 

October 7, 2008

McCain facing the 'crisis of his career,' Gingrich says

Posted: 04:16 PM ET

 

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

 

 

Gingrich says McCain should come out against the bailout.

 

(CNN) — John McCain faces the "crisis of his career," says former House Speak Newt Gingrich, who predicted the Republican nominee will lose the election unless he makes a public break from the economic bailout proposal.

 

In a column posted on the Web site of the conservative Human Events Tuesday, Gingrich says it is impossible for McCain to catch up in the national or state polls unless he taps into the anger many Americans feel toward the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street investment banks.

 

"If Senator McCain is not prepared to separate himself from the Bush-Paulson economic program, he has no opportunity to win," Gingrich writes. "The country is deeply fed up with the Bush presidency and angry about the Paulson bailout. If McCain is confused or uncertain about how bad this economic performance is, he will never get the country to listen to him."

 

Gingrich is the latest prominent conservative to criticize McCain for supporting the bill, which Congress passed last week. Speaking on CNN last week, radio host Glenn Beck said the Arizona senator will lose the election over the vote: I think he lost the election — there was a moment here for somebody here to rise up as a leader," Beck said.

 

The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll confirms the majority of Americans remain deeply distrustful of the massive bailout package. According to the new survey released Tuesday, close to 60 percent say the plan will not treat taxpayers fairly, and more than half think the government will only get a little bit of the money back. More than half also said they don't think the government will spend the money properly.

 

"Just as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (as well as the House Republicans in 1994 with the Contract with America) created a large argument which led to a decisive result, so McCain has an opportunity to reach beyond the daily attacks and clever tactics and spend the last 28 days of this campaign making a large argument over America's future," Gingrich, a primary author of the 1994 Contract with America, also said.

 

But it may be impossible for McCain to publicly break with the president on the plan. The GOP nominee suspended his campaign two weeks ago to ensure the economic bailout package was passed. When he cast his vote for the bill last week, McCain said it was "significantly improved" from its original version and now included "strengthened protections and oversight" for taxpayers. Though the legislation did contain billions in earmarks, something McCain said he opposed.

 

McCain campaign aides have since said they are aiming to turn the narrative on the campaign trail away from the country's financial woes and the unpopular economic bailout — a strategy Gingrich sharply opposes.

 

"If McCain is prepared to declare that it is time for a fundamental change away from the failure of Bush-Paulson and away from the leftism of Obama …then he has a huge opportunity," Gingrich writes.

 

Filed under: Barack Obama • John McCain

[Che -Guevara]

Is there something wrong with sheriff in uniform rallying for presidential candidate?

[nuune]

Thanks Xiin,

 

 

This would be debatekii lagu kala bixi lahaa baan filayaa!

[xiinfaniin]

^^adeer odoga gacmo-gaaba naga hari waa, waase la reebin ia.

 

che, desperate times call for desperate measures.

[Che -Guevara]

Nuune...still get few more weeks. Who knows wat's gonna happen but Mccain is definately running out of time and out of ideas. Attacking Obama is all that's left now. Amazing, one could call presidential a terrorist this despite Palin's associatation with secessionist Alaskan party.

[xiinfaniin]

Dan Balz's Take

A Debate About McCain

 

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), arrives for a technical walk-through of the debate site in advance of the presidential debate with Democrat rival Barack Obama at Belmont University in Nashville, Oct. 7, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)By Dan Balz

NASHVILLE -- Every debate, every encounter, every moment of Campaign 2008 is its own mini-drama. Tuesday's debate at Belmont University is no exception. The focus is all on John McCain.

 

Since his first debate with Barack Obama, McCain has seen his fortunes take a turn for the worse. His post-convention, Sarah Palin-generated bounce began to fade. The economic meltdown shifted the playing field to terrain more hostile to his candidacy. His handling of the negotiations in Washington drew sharp criticism.

 

More troublesome for McCain has been the political impact of all those factors on the state of the race. Over the past three weeks, there has been an across-the-board shift toward Obama, to the point that, without a reversal, McCain is threatened with losing the election -- and not by the whisker that many had predicted earlier.

 

McCain has, for now, ceded Michigan, once a prime pickup target for the GOP, to Obama. Bellwether Ohio, a state that no Republican has lost while winning the presidency, is trending away from McCain. Solid red North Carolina is, for now at least, a toss up.

 

Florida, which broke Al Gore's heart eight years ago and then moved decisively to President Bush four years later, also is in that category, partly out of neglect by McCain's campaign. Virginia and Colorado, two of this year's new battlegrounds, look favorable to Obama. The electoral map looks awfully promising for Obama. For now, at least.

 

But this is not late October. There are still four weeks of hard campaigning left. The twists and turns have come at a dizzying pace in this campaign. Think how rapidly perceptions -- and the campaign narrative they have driven -- have changed just in the last few months.

 

Obama's foreign trip was considered a triumph on the weekend he returned to Chicago. Within two weeks, thanks to a concerted strategy by the McCain campaign to bring him down to earth with mocking ads linking him to Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton, the trip was seen, at best, as a questionable exercise and at worst as a demonstration of hubris by the Democratic nominee.

 

Then came Denver and the Invesco Field acceptance speech and, it seemed, Obama had put his campaign on track. Then came Palin's selection, judged harshly by the political cognoscenti but received enthusiastically by the Republican faithful, and by mid-September, Democrats were grumbling about what had gone wrong with the Obama campaign.

 

Now it is less than a month later. Obama appears to be cruising and McCain stumbling. Every shift in campaign tactics by McCain is seen through the prism of an operation in distress. That's why McCain is on the hot seat for Tuesday's debate.

 

What are his options? Even his running mate, offering encouragement from her perch, says it's time to take off the gloves and go after Obama. Through advertising and in campaign trail rhetoric, that's the direction McCain has charted. But the other piece of wisdom that must be rolling around in McCain's head is the warning that town hall audiences don't like confrontation, attacks or anything particularly nasty.

 

So calibrating his performance Tuesday becomes especially difficult. In the first debate, McCain wouldn't even look at his younger rival. That's not really possible when the two will be less tethered to specific spots on the stage at Belmont. Can he be engaging and still engage?

 

Town halls invite civility. That's one of the reasons McCain proposed doing a series of town halls with Obama over the summer and fall. It was, his advisers know, his hope of conducting a different kind of campaign, one in which the two nominees might even share a meal after their joint performances. McCain long has envisioned this kind of a presidential campaign, something out of the ordinary.

 

The irony now is that, when McCain finally gets Obama on the stage for a town hall style debate, the pressure on him is to discard his traditional instincts and go after his opponent. That reality may cause McCain to be even more resentful toward Obama for rejecting what seemed like an eminently sensible proposal. But this campaign is leagues away from all that now.

 

The other challenge for McCain is finding ways to raise the questions he wants to raise about Obama during a debate in which the all-enveloping economic crisis demands serious attention and discussion by the candidates. Obama mocked McCain's campaign advisers on Monday for suggesting they wanted to turn the page on the economic crisis and move to character issues.

 

What McCain and his team really want is breathing room. They know the economy won't go away, but as long as the markets continue a roller coaster ride that is more down than up and the problem spreads globally, they can't easily interject anything else into the conversation.

 

McCain can't avoid talking about it, nor does he plan to. But one of the fundamental realities of a campaign driven by fundamentals is that Democrats benefit when the economy dominates.

 

So it would seem the deck is stacked against McCain, for Tuesday's debate and generally. But how many times has he been counted out already in this campaign? How much did Palin exceed the generally low expectations for her in last weeks' debate? How often has Obama faced questions about his own focus or strategy?

 

Only a few debates ever rise to the category of game-changers. McCain may need something just short of that to shift the narrative back in his direction -- a winning performance or at least one that erases some of the questions that have emerged recently and that puts Obama on the defensive.

 

McCain will have a final opportunity to engage his opponent on Oct. 15 at Hofstra University. Outside events will continue to shape perceptions. No one can predict the degree of public anxiety over the economic situation in a few weeks.

 

Things may not change significantly for McCain but there is time for that to happen, if McCain finds the right voice. Haley Barbour, the governor or Mississippi and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, likes to say, nothing is ever as good or bad as it seems. That's what has to propel McCain at this moment.

[The Zack]

Originally posted by nuune:

This would be debatekii lagu kala bixi lahaa baan filayaa!

Maya, but it is one of them. There will be another debate on the 15th.

[The Zack]

It was a landslide for Obama tonight, like it'll be a landslide on November 4th. Holy cow, that was a mis-match. McCain was WEAK. Sad for all McCainers, but he's just not president material.

[Kool_Kat]

McCain spent most of his time attacking Obama rather than the issues at hand...Worst was in his discussion about energy, when he referred to Obama as

 

Gaffe some may say, I beg to differ! Not only was disrespectful, it was also demeaning to say the least...Dhankiisa xataa muusan fiirin, while uu farta ku fiiqaayay referring to him as 'THAT ONE'...Almost racistnimo aan ka dhadhamin rabaa sheekadaas!!! Claiming he can 'cross the aisle and reach'...

 

I really think it is over for McCain...Finito!

 

 

Once again, OBAMA came on top! :cool:

[The Zack]

KK, Duqa waa iska socday. I don't see a contest any more, sheekadu wey isku dhamaatay.

[Kool_Kat]

I guess 'That One' just picked up a whole lot of voters from the other side tonite...I ain't complaining...

[Pujah]

[Gheelle.T]

McCain camp is sinking so fast that their last resort is to name call, belittle, and smear Obama's good name.