Senator McCain was forced to drop his attempts to associate Senator Obama to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. In the end, McCain himself had to defend Obama as a “decent man.” The problem, of course, was that calling Obama a terrorist was inciting people to feel physical action, such as killing a prospective future President of the United States, would be justified. Yet, McCain doesn’t seem to have learned the danger of peddling fear.

He’s now calling Sen. Obama, Speaker of the House Pelosi, and Sen. Harry Reid “dangerous.” To this, Ms. Pelosi responded,

“It’s interesting to hear Senator McCain talking about the dangerous Obama, Reid, Pelosi. Dangerous is not really a word that should be a part of a national debate as we go into a presidential race.”

While this may seem a small thing, and perhaps part of the rough-and-tumble of modern politics, citizens who want a well functioning democracy should view these kinds of comments harshly. Just like the Ayers problem, labeling senators, congresspeople, and other political figures as “dangerous” incites violence. The word “dangerous” implies something untoward, life threatening, and illegal. Uniformed people will begin to think that there is a real physical threat, and that they are then compelled and justified to take dramatic action. Hence the people at Gov. Palin’s rallies who were shouting to “kill” Sen. Obama. This is unprofessional and should not be tolerated in political discourse.

Its the last debate, so I’m keeping up the tradition of the quick poll round up. Here’s what I’ve got so that you can check the latest yourself (or vote). See the links. I’ll be updating periodically.

UDPATE: This morning (Oct 16), a regular poll

Fifty-eight percent of debate watchers questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll said Democratic candidate Obama did the best job in the debate, with 31 percent saying Republican Sen. John McCain performed best.

The poll also suggests that debate watchers’ favorable opinion of Obama rose slightly during the debate, from 63 percent at the start to 66 percent at the end. The poll indicates that McCain’s favorables dropped slightly, from 51 percent to 49 percent.

NOTE: see my other posts on previous polls and their comments for notes about poll accuracy, bias, perhaps even deceit.

Personal attacks have become increasingly sharp in the U. S. presidential election. The McCain campaign has even reportedly decided to make character attacks on Senator Obama a primary strategy. Just recently, Telegraph reported,

A former McCain strategist familiar with the senator’s tactical discussions told The Sunday Telegraph that he would pursue the “nuclear option” targeting Mr Obama personally in the final month leading up to November’s vote.

This strategic turn has resulted in Governor Sarah Palin making a big fuss about Senator Obama’s casual encounters with former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. In response, Senator Obama’s campaign has been reminding Americans about Senator McCain’s participation in the Keating Five scandal. Certainly, the punch-counterpunch will continue as we approach the election, but does negative campaigning like this work?

It depends. Sometimes, negative campaigning works effectively, particularly when the allegations are largely true. But other times, the attacks can make the attacker seem petty and weak. For example, during last night’s second presidential debate, voter’s reactions to both candidates dipped when the candidate made an attack.

Nearly every time one candidate threw a jab at the other, the voter reaction dipped measurably.

The dips were minor for small digs but slipped further if a candidate continued criticizing his opponent.

SenseUs, a firm that does polling about emotional reactions, recently did study of two anti-Obama ads and two anti-McCain ads. They found that,

Of the four negative ads (two Anti-McCain and two Anti-Obama) examined, the only one to significantly better the standing of the sponsor was an Obama ad which challenged and disproved McCain’s assessment that the country is better off than it was eight years ago.

I can’t wait for the official polls, so I like to troll the sites watching the quick polls. Here’s what I’ve got so that you can check the latest yourself (or vote). See the links. I’ll be updating periodically.

*UPDATE 10/8/08: The actual WSJ poll has been removed from the page it was on. For a while just after the debate the poll was radically for McCain but then switched to favor Obama. Comments to the poll suggest there might have been tampering, and that would make sense as in the last two debates (prez and VP) the poll seemed to track CNN’s poll.

A CNN poll of 675 debate watchers found, “64 percent had a favorable opinion of Obama after the debate, an increase of four points from his pre-debate showing.”

NOTE: I know a lot of you believe the polls from various organizations are biased or even mischievously manipulated. I’m not endorsing any one poll, but I do believe that about the best guess you can get of how the viewers judged the debates is from large numbers of responses, hopefully accurately collected from a random sample. So I’m compiling here the polls from any site, conservative or liberal, that I find. Pundits, focus groups, person-on-the-street interviews, straw polls of debate watching groups are all basically meaningless as far as how the debate was really received.

Political spin is now a sophisticated art form, one that is really unhelpful to voters. The intentional half truths, radical distortions, and even outright lies that candidates use in attacks on each other significantly burden the work of becoming an informed voter. Fortunately, over the last 10 years or so, many news organizations have kept focus on checking the facts.

One of the fact checkers that I really like is Politifact, provides extensive evaluations of candidate’s claims. However, although evaluations for each candidate are provided, Politifact doesn’t give a side-by-side comparison. So I’ve compiled one from their data for Obama vs McCain, using what was available today on their website. The comparison is shown in the graph below.

See the table below for the data. You can see that well over one hundred statements by each candidate have been evaluated. Obama’s have been 73% Mostly True, while McCain’s were only 55% Mostly True.
Notes on the Graph

• The “Pants on Fire” designation means the statement “is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”
• Politifact evaluates the claims of candidates and categorizes the claim as True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and Pants on Fire. I grouped the categories True, Mostly True, and Half True into one category, Mostly True.

Before the near meltdown of the financial system, the big talk was the escalating price of oil. High gas prices have been putting the crunch on all of our wallets and purses, not only when we fill up the family vehicle, but also, well, for the price of everything. We can be sure that while the price of oil has subsided a little, the problem has not gone away.

As a remedy, Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has started advocating more domestic drilling, particularly in the form of offshore drilling. Also, although McCain has traditionally been against it, his new running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, has been also for drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

To be sure, there are many arguments for and against opening up offshoring drilling (~18.7 billion barrels) or ANWR (~10.4 billion barrels). One of the arguments put forward by protagonists is that it will help reduce the price of gas at the pump. And that’s what we really care about, isn’t it?

Politifact has gathered together some salient views on the relationship of expanded drilling to price at the pump. Here’s the summary in a nutshell:

• Opening up drilling is a long-term plan, not a short-term solution. Although Gov. Palin claims only 5 years are needed to bring ANWR online, energy experts say 10 years is a more realistic estimate.
• The impact to gas prices at the pump would be marginal at best

Both the offshore continental shelf reserves and ANWR are only small contributions to the overall world reserves. So, their effect on price is small. A report by the Energy Information Administration estimates that oil from ANWR could “subtract anywhere from 41 cents to $1.44 per barrel of crude oil around 2025.” This could perhaps be doubled if both offshoring drilling and ANWR came online together. These will be a few percent changes in price, which translates to small change at the pump–a few pennies to perhaps 25 to 40 cents.

To make a good choice about whether to support such drilling, we have to consider the benefit (a small reduction at the pump in 10 years) versus the potential environmental impacts.

Both of the major U.S. 2008 presidential candidates are proposing radical changes to the health care system, as it is clear that the system is teetering. According to Fortune Magazine,

The U.S. now has 47 million uninsured, and costs are out of control. The Department of Health and Human Services predicts that if things continue as they are, health spending will almost double by 2017 to $4.3 trillion, or one-fifth of GDP, vs. 16% today.

The ins and outs of each program are complex, so I’ll try to simplify them here. Fortune states that essentially,

McCain wants to create a kind of national insurance market that shoves more decision-making power into the hands of consumers; the Democrats are aiming for a Medicare-like federal superprogram.

Information reported in The Wall Street Journal, drawing from analysis by The Tax Policy Center, provides a great comparison of Obama vs McCain’s health care plans. The comparison is summarized below.

Here’s a few additional comments and observations:

• It seems there is quite a difference in costs for the newly covered person, in terms of cost/newly insured. For Obama, that is roughly $47,058; for McCain, it is $260,000.
• The general consensus seems to be that McCain’s plan is either bolder or a gamble, depending on the political party of the speaker

For more in depth reading:
WSJ: Why Obama’s Plan is Best
Fortune Magazine: Why McCain’s Plan is Best
Benefits Execs Prefer Obama’s Plan
Carly Fiorina Extols the Benefits of McCain’s Plan

The McCain campaign has been trying to paint Senator Obama as intending to raise taxes. In fact, Obama’s plan calls for cutting taxes for the majority of Americans, as shown in the table below.

Republican VP nominee Gov. Sarah Palin explained the discrepancy in a recent interview with Charles Gibson:

GIBSON: … Why do you both keep saying that Obama is going to raise people’s taxes? It’s been pretty clear what he intends. [Obama's] talked about middle-class tax cuts, extending Bush tax cuts on everything but people who own or earn more than $250,000 a year — cuts taxes on over 91 percent of the country. Why do you keep saying he’s going to raise people’s taxes?

PALIN: Well, I would argue with the whole premise of that, that his mission is to not increase taxes. He’s had 94 opportunities to either vote for a tax cut or not support tax increases. And 94 times, he’s been on the other side of what I believe the majority of Americans want.

So in this rather dubious line of reasoning, Palin attempts to argue that Obama is just instrinsically motivated to raise taxes or has some kind of mission to raise taxes as much as possible, and she discards his stated plan to actually reduce taxes more than McCain’s plan. This would be like Biden arguing that McCain intends to reduce taxes until the government is broke and falls apart. But politicians don’t raise or lower taxes just for the sake of it, they do it to achieve certain social goals. To call someone a “tax raiser” or “tax lower” without reference to the sought after goals of the action is just intentionally trying to stir people up and confuse the real issues.

For a dizzying array of information on tax policy, see the Tax Policy Center.

There is a lot of talk lately about conservatives being angry at McCain, and there are certainly many articles and blogs out there that are critical of McCain. But it seems to me that “anger” at McCain is kind of a misnomer, or at least only a symptom of the underlying issue.

By definition, conservatives are “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.” Although there are several different conservative factions that emphasize different issues, the general conservative agenda typically involves such things as the following:

• Conservative judicial appointments
• A ban on federal funding for stem-cell research
• A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage
• Tax reduction and smaller government
• More emphasis on free markets
  
• More tax cuts
• Private accounts as part of Social Security
• Oil exploration in Alaska, to ease dependence on foreign oil
• Military build up and vigorousness abroad
• Advocating the needs of business, often at the expense of the environment
• Advocating school curriculum that doesn’t teach evolution or also teaches creationism

A number of these items are likely to suffer if McCain becomes President. So isn’t it really the case that the anger is more about the loss of power than about McCain himself? By that, I mean that McCain’s views have long known, well before the primaries. So what has he done “wrong” that merits anger? McCain is just the personification of that threat.

Columnist Charles Krautheimer argues that Bush should be blamed, because Bush’s policies set the stage for McCain by establishing a “compassionate” variant of conservativism. Without excusing Bush, I doubt that is the reason. For one, the “Bush improved security argument” doesn’t really hold up. Rather, it seems more likely that, despite the purist grievances against him, Bush is largely viewed by the rest of the country as a conservative, and thus his failures also represent failures of conservatism.  (For a poignant perspective of how many people probably feel, see the Implied Observer.)  What we are seeing is the reaction to the perceived failings of conservatism, both within and without the Republican party. And then we are seeing the reactions of conservatives to change, which they are by nature against.