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 Posted: Sat 10:34, 28 Sep 2013 Post subject: 4. It occurs to me |
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| news viewer—who saw the Couric interview,[url=http://www.xirland.com]christian louboutin uk[/url], or maybe just the SNL skit—it sure is likely to look that way.3. Can we all agree now that shielding Palin from the press was a serious mistake? By limiting her to a handful of high-profile interviews, the campaign made each one into an Olympics-like event, magnifying any failure. McCain-Palin have complained that there’s a double standard over Joe Biden’s gaffes. But without getting into the nature of Biden’s gaffes or what they say about his knowledge and preparation as opposed to Palin’s, the big difference is that he makes so freaking many of them—at a certain point,[url=http://www.xirland.com]christian louboutin sale[/url], they tend to wash each other out and cease being news. Fair or not, it’s a simple fact of the media that any campaign should be aware of. Maybe the solution for Sarah Palin is: more gaffes!Update: 4. It occurs to me,http://www.xirland.com, by the way, that some of Biden’s gaffes—on clean coal, on the McCain-can’t-use-a-computer ad—have been of much the same nature as Palin’s Pakistan statement, in that they contradicted the guy at the top of the ticket. There’s a reasonable way to answer gaffes like that: “We’re two people; no one agrees on everything; but [Sen. McCain/Obama] is the one running for President, and he will call the shots in our administration.” Or you can avoid the whole issue and say it’s all the media’s fault, and see how well that works for you.[Another update: Because it's come up a couple of times in the comments: I am emphatically not saying that Biden's and Palin's gaffes—and I'm using the term very broadly—are equivalent, either in kind or in what they say about the two candidates and their qualifications. As I said in comments, that's another post altogether, and one that I would think people don't want the TV critic's opinion on. But I do think it's true as a practical matter, whether anyone likes it or not, that the more one speaks—and screws up—on camera, the more people get inured to it. Whereas if you put your candidate out once a week, it blasts a floodlight on her every word.]McCain gets all disgraceful about Social SecurityJosh Marshall has an outraged little post this morning on something that John McCain said about Social Security the other day:McCain told a townhall in Denver on Monday, “Americans have got to understand that. Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace and it’s got to be fixed.”It’s really a disgrace? That’s how the system was designed to operate. And it’s served as financial bedrock of retirement security in this country for going on a century.I would imagine that this was more a case of McCain misspeaking or misunderstanding than having a secret plan to dismantle Social Security as we know it. But still,[url=http://www.xirland.com]christian louboutin men[/url], calling Social Security a “disgrace” is just patently ridiculous. Giving retirees a claim on current workers’ earnings is actually a pretty economically sensible way to fund retirement (just ask Robert Merton!), although it shouldn’t be the only way. And while Social Security may have some long-run funding issues as the ratio of active workers to retirees shrinks, they certainly aren’t insurmountable or disgraceful.The only disgraceful thing involving Social Security at the moment is that payroll taxes are being used to paper over deficit spending by the rest of the federal government. Or if you want to get all class-warfarey about, payroll taxes paid by working- and middle-class Americans that are intended for Social Security’s coffers are instead being diverted to fund income tax cuts for the rich. I’m sure McCain will be addressing this outrage at his next town hall meeting.The other thing that gets me about this whole Social Security discussion is that the real retirement crisis of today is the disappearance of the corporate pension and its |
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