We’ve seen this kind of over-reaching from the Bush administration before. It has usurped far too many powers under a banner of urgency — think wiretapping — and abused those powers. Now, Congress and the American people are being told that unless they quickly approve sweeping executive powers for the bailout, capitalism may collapse. Even if this administration weren’t so untrustworthy, rushing ahead would be a bad idea.
Aides to Senator McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, said it was too soon to say whether he would oppose the plan being hashed out by the Bush administration and Congress, noting that the final details had yet to be presented. But Mr. McCain repeated his calls to add several provisions that the administration has opposed, including a guarantee that taxpayer money would not be used to enrich the executives of failing companies.
Senator Barack Obama significantly outspent Senator John McCain in August as the two campaigns ramped up their general election fight, with the Obama campaign spending $53 million that month, $32 million of which went to advertising. That compared with the $41 million spent by the McCain campaign, $23 million of which went to advertising.
The candidates echoed each other in assessing the threat from the financial crisis as severe enough to warrant government intervention. But Senator John McCain said that he would press on with his plan to extend the Bush tax cuts and to cut others. Contrary to the warnings of fiscal analysts, he said he could still balance the federal budget, which was falling deeper into deficit even before the financial crisis, by the end of his first term.
Republican candidate John McCain faces the daunting task of trying to square his long history of advocating corporate and financial deregulation - the sort of loose controls many blame for the turmoil on Wall Street. Senator McCain now says more controls are needed to prevent a repeat of the turmoil that sent the stock market plunging, as he tries to recover from a damaging series of gaffes regarding the unfolding crisis.
Posing as a mere “issue advocacy” operation, the “Real Truth About Obama” group’s ad attacks Mr. Obama’s character and trashes the candidate’s nuanced position on abortion. To spread these lies, the group wants an injunction against the Federal Election Commission’s disclosure and spending rules, instituted after the 2004 campaign.
John McCain and Barack Obama have made it clear that they would pick very different kinds of justices. The results could be particularly dramatic under Mr. McCain, who is likely to complete President Bush’s campaign to make the court an aggressive right-wing force.
In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Senator Obama is sufficiently Christian. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.
The Obama and McCain campaigns have agreed to an unusual free-flowing format for the three televised presidential debates, which begin Friday, but the McCain camp fought for and won a much more structured approach for the questioning at the vice-presidential debate, advisers to both campaigns said Saturday.
While Senator McCain has not called for a full privatization of Social Security, he has supported the concept of allowing individuals to invest part of their payroll taxes in stock and bonds. But the idea has taken on a new air of political vulnerability because of the upheaval on Wall Street, which Senator Obama has sought to seize on.