Debate -- 1

The first debate of the presidential campaign took place last night and it was very interesting to watch. Each candidate had his mission and each made reasonable progress towards completing that mission. McCain wanted to paint Obama as naive, inexperienced and not ready to lead. Particularly on the foreign policy side of the debate, McCain clearly achieved this. Obama wanted to paint McCain as more of the same and out of touch. Obama was completely unsuccessful in the more of the same argument -- McCain made clear all of the areas where he differs from Bush. Indeed, it was funny when McCain commented that Obama's refusal to say that the surge was a good idea showed that Obama was to stubborn like Bush. On the out of touch point, Obama made some headway in my opinion. Obama made several unanswered points about his supposed middle class tax cut while McCain just spoke about earmarks.

Several clear answers to the Obama points were left untouched by McCain. For example, McCain said that business taxes in the US are the second highest in the world and too high. This high tax rate leads to a loss of jobs. Obama first said that McCain was right about the stated high tax rates, but he went on to say that because of loopholes, the effective tax rate for business is much lower. Later Obama said that he would pay for his programs by closing the tax loopholes for business. This seems like a clear contradiction in the Obama approach -- If a 35% rate is too high but, according to Obama it is actually lower due to loophole, won't closing those loopholes give us a 35% rate that will adversely affect job creation and economic growth? Obama was never made to confront this clear flaw in his logic.