McCain’s New Tactics

It didn’t take long for John McCain’s campaign to take on the look and feel of the Bush campaign of 2004. I admired the Senator for always claiming that he wanted to have civil discourse in campaigns and respect but now I just shake my head at the tone he has adopted since early July. It was earlier this month when McCain brought Steve Schmidt and others from the “Karl Rove School of Campaigning” and the Bush White House into his organization. Now, we have ads from McCain that are misleading at best and downright lies at worst.

Senator McCain’s campaign has adopted the tactics of Karl Rove and his ilk by trying to play on the fears of American voters and by distorting the truth. In fact McCain’s campaign has made many patently false claims like “[Senator] Obama opposes “innovation” on energy policy; that he [Senator Obama] voted 94 times for “higher taxes”; and that [Senator] Obama is personally responsible for rising gasoline prices.” (“Low-Road Express“, The New York Times, July 30, 2008 )

Now, Senator McCain has released (and approved) an ad that shows Senator Obama as a “celebrity.” But, how does he do it? He gives us clips at the beginning of the ad showing snippets of Barack Obama in Berlin with a crowd of 200,000 attendees at a rally. But then we see two quick snippets of Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton? Why? Does McCain’s campaign intimate that Barack Obama is associated with Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton? Is he comparing Mr. Obama as being as no more intelligent than either of the two? What’s the real message? Perhaps it’s something more racist and undignified of Senator McCain.

Nevertheless, after those quick shots we get to listen how Senator Obama is opposed to offshore drilling and in favor of raising taxes on electricity and the announcer then ends with “higher taxes, more foreign oil…that’s the real Barack Obama.” (“Celebrity“, found at John McCain’s Campaign Website) This is utterly misleading. Notice how the announcer didn’t say “higher taxes on electricity” but rather “higher taxes” making the listener walk away with the idea that Barack Obama intends to raise all taxes. It’s hard to argue with this since Mr. Obama did indicate in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News “What we ought to tax is dirty energy, like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas.” (“Q&A With Sen. Barack Obama,” San Antonio Express-News, 2/19/2008 ) What John McCain doesn’t tell you is the full story. The full question and answer was started around funding of education and was

Q. Have you considered other funding sources, say taxing emerging energy forms, for example, say a penny per kilowatt hour on wind energy?

A. Well, that’s clean energy, and we want to drive down the cost of that, not raise it. We need to give them subsidies so they can start developing that. What we ought to tax is dirty energy, like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas.

(“Q&A With Sen. Barack Obama,” San Antonio Express-News, 2/19/2008 )

So here we have the truth. McCain’s ad leaves the viewer with the impression that Obama simply wants to raise taxes for the sake of raising taxes (a typical Republican accusation against Democrats). He wants to portray Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. But in reality the original discussion centered on education and how to fund it but then went off on a bit of a tangent by the questioner by asking if he would support taxing emerging forms of energy like wind energy. Mr. Obama clearly says that we should be supporting clean energy and we want to drive the cost of that down so that it is cost-competitive with current dirty energy. The way to do that is to possibly even the playing field by taxing dirty energy like coal and natural gas. If we are ever going to make renewable energy cost effective and competitive we need to encourage its development and deployment.

But the real mud is the statement “more foreign oil.” Obama opposes offshore oil drilling which will do nothing to help our situation in the near or even long term. Mr. Obama understands that our solution to this energy crisis is not more drilling but rather developing alternative, renewable energy technologies and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels like oil and gas.

If you really want to see what Barack Obama’s platform is with respect to energy I would encourage you to read his Energy Fact Sheet here.

However, the lowest jab that McCain’s “Rovian” campaign has fired involves the fact that Senator Obama canceled a visit with wounded U.S. troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. McCain immediately falsely claimed that this was due to the fact that the hospital would not allow him to bring news cameras along on the trip — a blatant lie. The truth was that Senator Obama canceled it out of respect for the servicemen and women and as Obama’s spokesman Roger Gibbs pointed out, he felt it would be “inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign.” (“McCain criticizes Obama decision to cancel visit to wounded troops“, BostonHerald.com, July 24, 2008 ).

It’s clear that this will be a dirty campaign now that the “Attack of the Karl Rove Clones” has started — at least from the McCain perspective. Hopefully Senator McCain will return to his previously respectable stance of demanding a higher standard of discourse in American politics and we will truly be able to make an choice between two candidates in a clean fashion. However, if Senator McCain continues to utilize the tactics of the Bush 2004 campaign team then we can also expect that should he be elected, he will simply be McBush. And we definitely don’t need that right now.

Here We Go Again

In another push to put the blame of high oil and gas prices on the Congressional Democrats President Bush yesterday urged congress to move quickly on lifting the ban on domestic offshore oil drilling. The Senate is currently gridlocked on a variety of energy bills with the Republicans claiming that they want an “open debate” and accuse the Democrat majority in the Senate of limiting amendments to avoid a vote on offshore drilling (Moscrip, Lara, “Bush pushes Congress on oil drilling“, CNN Money, July 30, 2008 ).

The President remarked: “American drivers are counting on Congress to lift the ban and so are American workers…I’ve lifted the ban, I’ve done my part, all Democrats have to do is allow a vote, they should not leave Washington without doing so.” (Moscrip, Lara, “Bush pushes Congress on oil drilling“, CNN Money, July 30, 2008 )

Sorry Mr. President…you haven’t done your part. Your part was to devise an energy policy for the 21st century that would have us weaning ourselves off of oil and gas and moving to more renewable energy technologies. Your administration has failed miserably at that part and now, when the chickens come home to roost, you want to blame Congressional Democrats for the whole situation. Remember, the Democrats have only controlled Congress for just under 2 years. You’ve been at the helm of the ship for almost 8 years. Our reliance on oil and foreign energy sources should have become painfully obvious after September 11, 2001 and you had the opportunity to lead us away from that reliance to a more independent energy future. But you chose not to. If anyone is at fault it is your administration and the Republican Congressional majority (as well as previous administrations and their failure to act as well).

Now the Congressional Democrat response is pretty lame as well. Senator Harry Reid suggested that the President “focus on releasing oil from the strategic oil reserve, speeding up production in areas already open for drilling and cracking down on oil traders.” (Moscrip, Lara, “Bush pushes Congress on oil drilling“, CNN Money, July 30, 2008 ) To me this sounds so weak as a response. Releasing oil from the strategic oil reserve will do nothing to really impact the cost of a barrel of oil and cracking down on oil traders falls into the old argument that it’s the “evil” oil speculators who are responsible for the current cost of oil. No Senator Reid…it’s something called supply and demand market forces. Stop playing populist politics at the level of the President and rise above the fray. Be honest.

As for speeding up production in areas already open for oil drilling…that I agree with. Oil companies are sitting on a lot of leases and doing nothing with them because they figure that the President and this administration will do everything in their power to get them more land (whether it’s offshore or not)…and then they can sit on that as well. The oil companies are raking in the profits at this point…why would they want to see the price of oil go down? Consider that Exxon-Mobil just announced that their second quarter profit rose 14% to 11.68 billion dollars (Werdigier, Julia, “Rising Oil Prices Lift Exxon to Record Profit“, The New York Times, August 1, 2008 ) Even if Congress repealed the ban on offshore oil drilling it would have zero impact on prices at the pump today. It takes years to develop a new oil field to the point that the oil reaches the market and on top of that, remember that this is a global market. The oil found in any new offshore field could just as easily be sold to India or China or to some other country who’s willing to pay top dollar for that oil. Americans need to tighten our belts, conserve, and develop and deploy new automotive technologies like better hybrid cards, electric cars, wind power and solar power to help reduce our consumption of oil and gas. That’s the long term solution to this energy crunch. But don’t ask the President or Congress to act…they’re much more interested in playing politics than doing something substantive to address this crisis.

Oil Drilling or Afghanistan

The latest Tom Friedman op-ed points out an interesting fact. Both Republicans and Democrats are fixated on two primary, though different, issues. The Republicans are fixated on offshore oil-drilling and the Democrats are fixated on the war in Afghanistan. For the Republicans, and for President Bush, the only solution they can come up with for the current energy crisis is the idea that we need to open up the nation’s shorelines to the oil companies for exploration and development. Never mind the fact that it would take years for any new field discovered to be developed to the point that the oil extracted would be available at the pump. Never mind the fact that this could potentially lead to an environmental disaster. Never mind the fact that the oil that would be found would be sold on the open market for the going market rate. No…those are merely minor issues. The Republican motto seems to be — “When in doubt…drill offshore!”

But wait, the Democrats, while not supporting the idea of offshore oil drilling, have their own issue that they’re fixated on. Troop levels in Afghanistan. See the Republicans have managed to shape the view of Democrats, and Senator McCain is trying extremely hard to make this view stick to Senator Obama, as being soft on defense and on terrorism. So, in knee jerk fashion, the Democrats feel that they must focus on sending more troops to Afghanistan since, as Tom Friedman remarks, it’s considered “‘the good war’, as opposed to Iraq.” (Friedman, Tom, “Drilling in Afghanistan“, The New York Times, July 30, 2008 )

The problem that the Democrats need to ask themselves (and especially Mr. Obama) “Can we really win the war on terrorism by sending more troops to Afghanistan or am I (or we) doing it just to make ourselves look tough enough?” As Friedman points out sending more troops to Afghanistan is not going to really do anything as the problem is not the terrorists — they’re the symptom — the problem is the failure of the Arab-Muslim world to join the rest of the world in the 21st century. The Arabs still have this vision of a global (or regional) caliphate where Islam is the dominant religion and all others are either ejected, eliminated, or reduced to “dhwimmi” status (basically less than second-class citizens). The fact is that the Arab regimes use authoritarian rule, religion and a shift of blame to the “West” for all of the ills of their population as a way to maintain control. Until there is serious and concerted political reform in the Arab world that takes these factors off the table we will always have a serious problem with Arab-Muslim terrorism. The only way to do that is to ensure, as Tom Friedman notes, that there is “decent and consensual government in Baghdad or Kabul or Islamabad” (Friedman, Tom, “Drilling in Afghanistan“, The New York Times, July 30, 2008 ).

However, we are faced with a quandry here. We need to help stabilize these governments and that takes a military presence for now. But by having a military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan we inflame the indiginous population. In Iraq, the Iraqis have gotten the message and are willing to stand up and fight for their new government; in Afghanistan — well, we’re not doing so well there. Our presence inflames the Afghans and is used for political reasons by the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. Tom Friedman, in his opinion piece “Drilling in Afghanistan” quotes Thomas Schweich, a former Bush administration counternarcotics official focused on Afghanistan, and his article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009, he would be elected to a new term.

(Friedman, Tom, “Drilling in Afghanistan“, The New York Times, July 30, 2008 )

In addition Friedman quotes Afghan expert Rory Stewart’s July 17 Time magazine cover story from Kabul:

A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining … The more responsibility we take in Afghanistan, the more we undermine the credibility and responsibility of the Afghan government and encourage it to act irresponsibly. Our claims that Afghanistan is the ‘front line in the war on terror’ and that ‘failure is not an option’ have convinced the Afghan government that we need it more than it needs us. The worse things become, the more assistance it seems to receive. This is not an incentive to reform.

(Friedman, Tom, “Drilling in Afghanistan“, The New York Times, July 30, 2008 )

Before the Democrats and Mr. Obama go off and commit more troops to Afghanistan, they need to determine whether this is really going to be beneficial in the overall picture. The Democrats need to find a more comprehensive picture to winning the war on terrorism — they need to be more inventive than the Republicans. Commiting more troops to Afghanistan has become a political ploy to counter the Republican assertion that the Democrats are “soft on terrorism and defense.”