The Debate McCain Must Force
By Dick Morris
Real Clear Politics
June 25, 2008
...In our new book, Fleeced, we try to bring the debate back down to earth, focusing on the specific plans that Obama has announced during his presidential primary campaign and discussing the consequences. This is the debate Barack Obama hopes he can avoid.
Consider his proposals:
• In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He'd raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He'd apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA's 12.5 percent plus Medicare's 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.
• He would double the capital gains tax, saddling the 50 percent of Americans who own stock with dramatically higher taxes.
• He'd double the dividend tax, hitting elderly coupon-clippers now retired and depending on fixed incomes.
• He wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up costs and forcing federal rationing of healthcare. As in the U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.
• He proposes requiring Homeland Security operatives to notify terror suspects that they are under investigation within seven days of starting the investigation.
• He says that unless they can establish that there is "probable cause to believe that a certain individual is linked to a specific terrorist group," Homeland Security cannot seize his documents and search his business. The current standard is only that the search be "relevant" to a terror investigation.
And let's not forget that Obama is just fine with higher gas prices and opposes all new coal, petroleum and nuclear energy.
Not All Foreigners Love Obama
I'm sure that readers are bored with the last week's Obama world tour. But if you'll indulge me for a few seconds, it's important to know that not all foreigners love Obama. The following Canadian writing in the Toronto, Ontario Globe and Mail had this view:
Obama's audacity of hubris
By REX MURPHY
The Globe and Mail
July 26, 2008
...The missing element may be the candidate's equally sterling appreciation of himself. The rally in Berlin was the cue for this line of thought. As far as I know, this was his first visit to Germany. I could see him, on a first visit, as a candidate for the presidency, making calls on the Chancellor, meeting with opposition politicians, doing - as the Windsors call it - a bit of a walkabout.
But what was the idea behind a nominee for the highest office of the United States conducting a campaign rally in Berlin? Throw away those disclaimers from the Obama camp that the rally wasn't political. Mr. Obama doesn't knot his tie without politics providing the mirror.
It's strange to have to note this, but, he isn't yet president. He has absolutely no record at all of involvement in foreign policy.
Correction: He did offer unqualified, insistent opposition to the Petraeus surge in Iraq, which turned the war around to the point that some of its most relentless critics now maintain "it cannot be lost." In other words, on the one definitive issue, post-invasion, on his country's most important foreign involvement, the one decision the inarticulate and sublimely unhip Texan in the White House made alone, and got right, Mr. Obama was perfectly, publicly wrong.
There's very little wood - if you'll allow the metaphor - in that record, on which to build a podium to address Europe at a mass rally on your first visit to one of its ancient capitals. But Mr. Obama has self-confidence, he has sublime self-assurance. It's hardly more than two years ago that he was but a Chicago politician whose entire national resumé was a speech to John Kerry's nominating convention.
And it's less than two months ago that, ever so narrowly, he managed to edge Hillary Clinton out of contention for the nomination yet to be confirmed. It was razor close.
Yet, there he was on Thursday, acting in every way as if he were already president delivering, Urbi et Orbi, a proclamation. There was something almost glorious about the presumption: Call it the audacity of hubris. There was also and equally something very reckless about it. The only set who seem more enraptured than a good part of the U.S. media about the Obama campaign is the Obama campaign and the candidate himself.
The self-assurance, the commanding confidence of his campaign may turn out to be a transcending dynamic that rockets him into the White House while Mr. McCain is still trying to find a reporter to talk with. On the other hand, he may be signalling millions of voters that this untested candidate is just a damn sight too cocky for his own, and their, good.
I couldn't have said it better!
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