Blogito, Ergo Sum - 12 April 2008

Tony's big birthday day! Carol's expecting at least 30 people and the piñata is loaded and ready. You buy the empty shell of your choice and then load it with assorted candies and small plastic gew-gaws, quite a lot like Mardi Gras stuff, and then the kids take turns whacking it with a stick until it breaks and all of the goodies spill out into the ensuing melee, during which encounter the adults try to keep the bigger kids from traumatizing the littler ones and making sure that everybody gets something.

They do birthdays differently in that apparently the birthday child's presents are not opened at the party in front of everyone else, and bringing a gift is not considered to be essential, either. It's more of simply a party, or at least so it looks to me. We have several presents for Tony which will be opened before everybody gets here, I guess, and we won't bring out the bike until all have left so we won't be fighting the other little boys to keep them off of it.

We got him a mid-sized bike which still has training wheels, so I suppose much of the rest of the late afternoon will be spent watching him ride it.

McCain has been steadily gaining in national polls against Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and he holds a lead in many of the swing states that are likely to determine who wins the presidency.

McCain's advisers attribute this seeming contradiction to what they believe is McCain™, a political brand that for over a decade has stood for strength, experience, straight talk and independence, qualities they believe help buffer him from many of the ills of his party. The attacks from conservatives that McCain withstood during the Republican primaries served to enhance his brand and bolster his position among moderates and independents, who are critical to winning in November, they contend.

"John McCain has an identity that's well established with the American people," said Steve Schmidt, one of his top political strategists. "He's a person who stands up and fights for what he believes in. It's appealing to independents. It's appealing to conservative Democrats. It's appealing to Republicans."

The campaign's general-election strategy is to sell the McCain brand to show voters that he is distinct from President Bush and other Republicans: His patented town hall meetings will showcase his "straight talk" with voters. His frequent conversations with reporters will highlight his openness and risk-taking. His ads and speeches will tout experience and strength of character.

McCain has some areas in which they simply cannot and also are unwilling to compete. For instance, neither Barack nor Hillary wants the town-meeting format, or the easy access and openness McCain grants to journalists. That's not their style.

The Democrat strategy line which attempts to tie McCain to Bush is doomed to failure if for no other reason than the fact that the press took such delight in pointing out that McCain wasn't going to be able to get the support of the right-wing of the Republican Party because he was too much of a maverick. They banged that drum too loudly for their own good. Lieberman stumping for him shows the independents and the conservative Democrats where McCain actually stands, especially when the Conservative Republicans are hanging back like they are.

And for all he wants to talk about his childhood in Indonesia, and she her time in the wife's quarters portion of the West Wing, both Obama and Hillary look silly trying to match experience. That's the danger in trying to knock McCain's age...all of those years represent more experience than either one of them have. But if you try to knock him as being incompetent because of his age, there goes the senior vote. If I was McCain, I'd be hitting the AARP crowd very hard indeed. Are you folks tired of being marginalized because others say that you are too old to be good for anything any more?

That leaves strength of character. McCain survived the Hanoi Hilton on the basis of character alone, while Hillary was puffing at Woodstock and creating serial lies, and Barack socialized with a sermonizing minister he apparently never heard say anything wrong, and if white folks think that his minister did then they are racists who do not understand how folks in black churches talk.

You have to wonder why the Democrats have been picking the candidates that they have been. Gore, for instance, brought nothing more to the fray than the fact that he had been vice president. His signature effort, Kyoto, had been unanimously rejected in the Senate even as he stood there before them, available to break a tie with his swing vote. At 96-0, he had nothing to swing. And, in the end, he couldn't even carry his home state of Tennessee, which would have meant no recount in Florida, none at all.

With Bush in such low esteem, many calling him not even the president, how could he lose to a Democrat the next time? They picked Kerry, a weak senator with no track record or convictions of his own, and a man who elected to run on his record as a war hero. Since this was a man who 'made his bones' testifying before the Senate that everybody who had fought in Vietnam, from the bottommost soldier to the top command, were dishonorable war criminals, you'd have thought that fact alone might have disqualified him, even if his medals had been real and President Nixon had actually sent Kerry to Cambodia before he even became president.

Now Obama and Hillary. I realize that something went wrong...Obama was supposed to run a comfortably-distant second, just strong enough so that he could graciously be offered and graciously accept the vice presidency. If Hillary had run comfortably in front then there wouldn't have been any of the negative advertising which bloodied both of them. Hillary would not have been panicked into serial lying in an effort to boost her weak credentials and Obama's minister would mean a lot less in the case of a vice president.

I suspect that Obama got greedy and lost his head once he took the lead, abandoning any understanding they might have had reached ahead of time. It will be interesting to see when Bill comments on this at some future date.

From an article with the theme that we are all responsible for deficit spending, not just the Congress, comes this little item:

You can see what a fantastic scheme it was! They didn't even expect to pay the majority of Americans ANY of their money back, from the beginning!

The plan, you undoubtedly don't remember, was to provide a safety net to older people at retirement age, and specifically those people who had been unable or unwilling to provide for themselves. Ideally, they were being forced to save their own money for their own retirement, but the government really planned on workers working until the died, or at least very shortly thereafter. Work to 65, maybe 70, if you don't die at 63.

This was such a good deal for the government that the funds started to pile up in the trust fund. Congress, however, couldn't bear to see all that money just sitting there, so they decided to "borrow" the money and put it into the general fund, leaving behind a very special IOU worth exactly the paper it was printed upon.

Congress, of course, really didn't want to make a big deal of this scheme, to they kept the fiction going about the social security lockbox...I'm sure that many of you probably even believe that there is one. They don't need to lock it, because it doesn't contain anything of value.

And THIS is the reason they get so nervous when people propose a plan where social security taxpayers actually know where their own funds are going. Congress doesn't really want you to understand that they are going into the general fund and spent for the ordinary expenses of government, including wars and highways and farm subsidies.

Oh, no, they say, social security is fine, just like it is...and if only we went back to the old demographics, where people couldn't collect until after they were dead, at which point it is too late, why the system would work just fine.

Mark Steyn's column is so upsetting I can't even write about it. Go read it. Prepare to be sick.