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[bacasper]

McCain, Obama find common ground at Columbia forum

BY ELIZABETH MOORE | [email protected]
September 12, 2008

In a brief and uneven truce in an otherwise rough few days of political warfare, presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama agreed last night on the need to expand the U.S. military, and said they would have done more to tap the nation's outpouring of patriotism if they had been in the White House when the World Trade Center was attacked.

Instead of asking Americans to go shopping to support the economy, as President George W. Bush did after the attacks, McCain said he would have created citizen block watches, and increased security on nuclear plants, while Obama said he would have kicked off a "bold energy plan" asking citizens to reduce dependence on foreign oil through fuel-efficient cars and other measures.

The two, who met on stage only for a brief and awkward handshake between McCain's presentation and Obama's shared their vision of service in America at a forum at Columbia University.

And while both spoke convincingly about their belief in the power of service, McCain did not miss an opportunity to take a small shot at Obama, seeming to blame him for the ugliness of the campaigns' exchanges in recent days.



"This is a tough business," McCain said, when asked by moderator Judy Woodruff about his running mate Sarah Palin's caustic remarks at the Republican convention that unfavorably compared community organizers like Obama with small-town mayors like her.

"The tone of this whole campaign would have been very different" if Obama had accepted his offer to appear together in a series of Town Hall-style meetings, he said. But "we should set aside this partisanship, at least for today, and praise one another for our dedication."

Obama later said that he was surprised by the comments on community organizers while praising small-town mayors as having "some of the toughest jobs in the country."

Obama and McCain suspended their partisan campaigning and political advertising yesterday in deference to the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks. But if this was supposed to be a timeout, McCain was clearly in campaign mode nevertheless, forcefully claiming the mantle of a Washington reformer.

"The fact is, I fought 'em and fought 'em and fought 'em," he said. "We're not all a go-along, and get-along crowd, and I know how it works, and I know how to fix it and I know where the problems are, so I'm confident we can fix it."

Obama hewed more closely to the theme of inspiring Americans to do more to serve their country, and talking about his own service-corps proposal, parts of which are in a bill to be presented in Congress by Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Orrin Hatch of Utah.

"We are part of a common project of creating a better life for the next generation," he said. "That's something that's been lost, and what we're seeing in this campaign is it's something people want to restore."

The candidates agreed the ROTC should be allowed onto the Columbia campus, where opponents had prevented its return since the Vietnam War.

[bacasper]

ROTC and the Ivies
The presidential candidates agree that the de facto ban by elite universities should end.

Saturday, September 13, 2008; Page A16

IVY LEAGUE administrators, take heed: The next president will oppose the de facto bans on the Reserve Officers' Training Corps that prevail at several of these prestigious institutions. We learned this at a candidates forum held at Columbia University on Thursday and sponsored by ServiceNation, which promotes national service and civic engagement. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took the occasion to chide Columbia for its lack of on-campus ROTC. "I don't think that's right," Mr. McCain said. "Shouldn't the students here be exposed to the attractiveness of serving in the military, particularly as an officer?" Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) readily agreed, calling Columbia's anti-ROTC stance a "mistake."

During the 1960s, Ivy League institutions kicked ROTC off campus, partly as an expression of faculty protest against the Vietnam War, partly to appease sometimes-violent antiwar students. Universities did not formally ban ROTC, but they stripped it of autonomy and for-credit status, without which the program could not legally operate. More recently, opposition to ROTC has been framed as a protest of the U.S. military's discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gay and lesbian service members.

Today, there is no on-campus ROTC at Columbia, Harvard, Yale or Brown. Students who want to participate must travel to nearby schools that do have ROTC. There, they take the training and classes, for which their own institutions give them no academic credit. Of the Ivies, only Cornell, Princeton and Penn offer on-campus ROTC. Dartmouth's program returned in a limited capacity in the 1980s, through a visiting professor from Norwich University.

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[bacasper]

AFGHANISTAN

Obama and McCain on pretty much the same page

"[Obama] called for sending two brigades of U.S. forces to Afghanistan 13 months before the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the same thing," said Richard A. Clarke, the onetime Bush and Clinton adviser who has been chairing an advisory panel on counterterrorism for the Obama campaign. . . . Despite the rhetorical differences, the candidates share important similarities.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Mod edit to remove utterly unnecessary (and not particularly witty) ad hominem. Knock it off, Ya-ta. - The Management]



The different responses given to what they would have done after 9/11 speaks volumes about the two candidates. Spy on your neighbor vs attack a fundamental problem. Hmmm.

[mises]

But isn't this the problem? Clearly, Obama is talking nonsense to appeal to the Republican base. Shouldn't he actually be talking about change? Not "change we can believe in" or whatever but stuff like:

"We can't afford our military anymore. I will reduce aggregate military expenditures"

or

"While we worry about non-issues like the ROTC on campus, our country is in serious financial trouble".

or

"The war in Afghanistan cannot be won, given our stated objectives of turning the place into a Western style democracy. We will stabilize it to the extent we can and then leave"

[Kuros]

[mises]

Why can't he establish issues? Does he have to follow the talking points of the right?

edited for grammar.

[Gopher]

ROTC at places such as Columbia is indeed a total nonissue. There is nothing any president can do about it. These are private, independently-funded institutions.

Yet another thing the campaign is discussing that has nothing to do with anything but is apparently getting at least some people excited.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[huffdaddy]

[bacasper]

Bush's Overseas Policies Begin Resembling Obama's

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 15, 2008; Page A02

Barack Obama contends that a John McCain presidency would amount to little more than President Bush's third term. But as it turns out, an Obama presidency might look a bit like Bush's second.

On a range of major foreign policy issues over the past year, Bush has pursued strategies and actions very much along the lines of what Sen. Obama has advocated during his presidential race, according to the Illinois Democrat's campaign and many diplomatic and security experts.

The administration has pushed ahead with high-level diplomatic negotiations with Iran and North Korea, agreed to a "time horizon" for a reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq and announced plans last week to shift troops and other resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. U.S. officials also confirmed last week that Bush has formally authorized cross-border raids into Pakistan without that government's approval -- an idea that Obama first endorsed, and was heavily criticized for, last year.

Bush administration officials and aides to Sen. McCain (Ariz.), the Republican presidential nominee, argue that the developments have little in common with Obama's policies and dismiss any comparison as simplistic and misleading.

But the Obama campaign views the moves as vindication of sorts, arguing that Bush has been forced by the pressure of events to move away from the hard-line policies of his first term and toward a more pragmatic path in his second. When Bush announced the new troop deployments to Afghanistan, for example, Obama said he was "glad that the president is moving in the direction of the policy that I have advocated for years."

Obama aides also say the moves by Bush complicate matters for McCain, who is more hawkish than his opponent on issues including the crisis in Georgia and the war in Iraq.

"What we have here, in many ways, is that a McCain presidency would look a lot like a Bush first term and a move back in that direction," said Rand Beers, who served as a National Security Council staffer in Republican and Democratic administrations and is now an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. "The flip side of that is that John McCain is therefore to the right of George Bush, which I don't think is the way he conceived of his campaign."

But Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, accused the Obama campaign of "rank hypocrisy" and said it was "comical" for the Democrat to now claim accord with the Bush administration on some issues. "I find the whole argument relatively amusing, given that they have done nothing but criticize Bush administration foreign policy and now claim that Bush is moving in their direction," Scheunemann said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

McCain has accused Obama of wanting to "lose in Iraq to win in Afghanistan," criticized him for endorsing direct talks with leaders of Iran and other enemies, and repeatedly called Obama "naive" for publicly advocating the Pakistan raids.

McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seemed to endorse unilateral raids in Pakistan during an interview last week with ABC News, saying: "We have got to have all options out there on the table." Scheunemann said that Palin's remarks were in line with McCain's views and that McCain's criticism of Obama was focused on his decision to talk publicly about detailed counterterrorism strategies.

The renewed wrangling over foreign policy comes as Obama struggles to convince voters that he is trustworthy on world affairs and seeks to fend off McCain's overall gains in national polls. The Republican nominee has a 17-point lead on the question of which candidate can better handle an unexpected crisis and a double-digit advantage as the one more trusted on international affairs, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week.

McCain and Obama said they approved of Bush's announcement last week that 8,000 troops would be removed from Iraq by early next year while nearly 5,000 troops would be added to Afghanistan by the end of the year. But their interpretations of these events were starkly different.

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[mises]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[mises]

The US was as strong as the next 10, because the next all were/are using American dollars for all international transactions. As this unwinds, as it is doing so now, the United States will become a normal country. It really matters not if McCain or Obama wins because the motion is already set. The government is totally, absolutely and miserably broke. Final answer. Broke. 3/4tillion$ on empire will not continue once the US has to finance her expenses as do I, or you or General Electric.

[bacasper]

Afghanistan: The war they all agree on

Posted: 2008/09/19

Despite the appalling conditions that seven years of U.S. occupation have produced for ordinary Afghans, the two U.S. ruling parties came together in August to plan the escalation of that sordid war with the goal of adding 10,000 more U.S. troops in the coming year.

Barack Obama chided his Republican rival during his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention on August 28, using a page from Bush's playbook: "John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell--but he won't even go to the cave where he lives."

Obama did not utter a word of criticism about rising civilian casualties, rampant corruption, the flourishing drug trade or women's oppression in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan during that historic speech. On the contrary, he continued, "I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan."

Ending the war in Iraq "responsibly" will allow a long-term U.S. military presence there--and the redeployment of 10,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to "finish" the job started by George W. Bush.

In one fell swoop, the candidate whose slogan is "change" laid out a strategy bearing striking similarity to that of the neocons who invaded Afghanistan in 2001. This was not a surprise. Obama first expressed his willingness to bomb Iran and Pakistan in 2004, when he told the Chicago Tribune, "surgical missile strikes" on Iran may become necessary.

"On the other hand," he continued, "having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse." Obama went on to argue that military strikes on Pakistan should not be ruled out if "violent Islamic extremists" were to "take over."

Obama represents the dissenting ruling class view since 2003, which regarded the Iraq war as a "distraction" from the real war the U.S. should pursue. That war has little to do with al-Qaeda, but much more to do with Afghanistan's strategic location in Central Asia, and its borders with Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China.

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