WSJ blasts McCain

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Wall Street Journal blasts John McCain

Posted: 01:59 PM ET



John McCain said 'Raising taxes in a tough economy isn't patriotic.'

FROM CNN?s Jack Cafferty:



When you graduate 894th out of a class of 899, eventually it will show up.



And John McCain?s mediocre performance at the Naval Academy is showing up big time this week in his total lack of understanding of the nation?s financial crisis.



He told us he didn?t know much about the economy? now he?s proving it.



So much so that the Wall Street Journal, perhaps America?s leading financial publication, is blasting McCain over what its editorial board sees as inaccurate and, ?unpresidential? comments about the crisis in America?s financial system.



If you?re a Republican running for president of the United States and the Wall Street Journal basically says you?re an incompetent buffoon, you?re in serious trouble.



Specifically the paper pointed to comments McCain made yesterday about SEC Chair Christopher Cox.



McCain pointed the finger at Cox and said if he were president, he?d fire him for ?betraying the public?s trust.?



The Wall Street Journal called that assault ?both false and deeply unfair.?



The Journal also said, ?In a crisis voters want steady, calm leadership? not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help.?



______________________________________________________________________________________________________________



I guess the question is, how many people in the central US read the Wall Street Journal?
 
I really think I see a tide turning. If the knuckle draggers can just get a clue, Obama should be able to carry this country.
 
OP article cite for the less Google literate forum members:





<a href="http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/19/how-does-the-wsj-article-affect-mccain/">http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/19/how-does-the-wsj-article-affect-mccain/</a>





WSJ article linked in the story, which isn't the one cited in the story:





<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178517994254919.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178517994254919.html?mod=googlenews_wsj</a>



<em><strong>With an Eye to History,

McCain Hits Obama on Taxes

Republican Exploits Issue That Worked for Party in the Past</strong></em>



<blockquote>WASHINGTON -- John McCain is trying to shift the 2008 economic debate to an issue where Republicans historically have had an edge over Democrats: taxes.



In a television ad that began airing Thursday, the McCain presidential campaign warned that Americans can expect "painful income taxes" if Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, wins the White House. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Sen. McCain pounced on comments by Sen. Obama's running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, on a morning news show that paying higher taxes is "patriotic."



"Raising taxes in a tough economy isn't patriotic," Sen. McCain scoffed. "It's not a badge of honor. It's just plain dumb."



The gambit by Sen. McCain comes amid a relentless cycle of turmoil in the nation's credit and housing markets, which has in recent days moved the campaign focus to the economy, an area where polls consistently show voters favoring Democrats.



Watch the campaign ads released so far this presidential election season.

But Republicans have reason to hope a sharpened focus on taxes specifically will help Sen. McCain. That is because Sen. Obama is trying to do what no national politician has done since Ronald Reagan transformed the tax debate in 1980: win on a platform that includes significant tax increases.



Under the Obama plan, tax rates for couples making more than $250,000 a year would go up, as would their taxes on capital gains and corporate dividends. Sen. Obama says he would keep the taxes the same for those making less than $250,000 and propose additional cuts for lower-income families. Among other things, he proposes new initiatives to promote savings and ease the tax burden of working seniors.



In recent decades, raising any taxes on any households hasn't been a winner. Democrat Walter Mondale lost to Mr. Reagan in a landslide in 1984 after promising tax increases. Republican President George H.W. Bush broke the "no new taxes" pledge he made in his 1988 campaign, and paid for it at the polls when he sought re-election in 1992. Bill Clinton won that campaign promising tax cuts for the middle class. He ended up pushing tax increases on the rich and his party subsequently lost control of Congress, in part over pubic discontent on the issue. John Kerry had a tax plan similar to Sen. Obama's -- raising taxes on the rich, cutting them for others -- in his losing 2004 challenge to George W. Bush.



But the economy is now weak, even after Mr. Bush's tax cuts, and polls show voters giving the current administration poor marks for its handling of the economy. The Obama campaign is betting that, under those conditions, voters may be more willing to accept some tax increases.



Austan Goolsbee, a senior Obama adviser, said the Democrat's plan is a direct challenge to the "philosophy" behind Mr. Bush's across-the-board tax cuts, which assumed the U.S. economy, broadly, would benefit as tax rates were lowered across all income spectrums. In hindsight, Mr. Goolsbee says, "that philosophy is a job killer, not a job creator."



Mr. Goolsbee said Sen. Obama would let taxes on the wealthy rise only to Clinton-era levels, a time of prosperity for the country. He said the senator believes tax cuts should be targeted at "working people, who are the ones who are struggling."



Republicans are hoping that the old antitax strain remains strong this year. Sen. McCain is pushing for a permanent extension of the tax cuts enacted by Mr. Bush, which are set to expire at the end of 2010. Among other things, the plan would keep the top income-tax rate, paid by the wealthiest Americans, at 35%. Absent an extension, the top rate would rise to 39.6%. Sen. McCain is also pushing a new tax benefit for middle-class families, promising to double the exemption that can be claimed for dependents.



"The reality is raising taxes in a weak economy is a bad idea, and we don't," said McCain campaign policy chief Doug Holtz-Eakin, adding that higher individual rates would hit small businesses particularly hard.



Polls suggest Sen. McCain has room to exploit the issue. Even though Sen. Obama has vowed the middle class will get tax cuts, not tax increases, 49% of voters said they believed their taxes would go up if the Democrat wins, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News survey.



At the McCain rally Thursday in Iowa, Kate Julicher, 25 years old, said she is not persuaded by Sen. Obama's promise to cut taxes for people like her. She doesn't believe he will raise taxes only on couples earning more than $250,000 a year. "I don't believe him," said Ms. Julicher, a software engineer from Cedar Rapids. <u><em>"I have a feeling that $250,000 limit is going to come down when they realize they need more money to bail out whoever they bail out.</em></u>"</blockquote>


Smart girl. I just hope she's smart enough to realize McCain is going to do the same thing. The math doesn't change no matter who sits in the White House. McCain is being disingenous. We all know it.



But this doesn't answer the question, did the WSJ bust McCain for being "unpresidential"? See next post.
 
Here is the op-ed piece.



<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178318884054675.html">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178318884054675.html</a>



<em><strong>McCain's Scapegoat </strong></em>



<blockquote>John McCain has made it clear this week he doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does. But on Thursday, he took his populist riffing up a notch and found his scapegoat for financial panic -- Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.



To give readers a flavor of Mr. McCain untethered, we'll quote at length: "Mismanagement and greed became the operating standard while regulators were asleep at the switch. The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino. They allowed naked short selling -- which simply means that you can sell stock without ever owning it. They eliminated last year the uptick rule that has protected investors for 70 years. Speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground.



"The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the President and has betrayed the public's trust. If I were President today, I would fire him."



Wow. "Betrayed the public's trust." Was Mr. Cox dishonest? No. He merely changed some minor rules, and didn't change others, on short-selling. String him up! Mr. McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. <u>It's also un-Presidential</u>.



Take "naked" shorting, in which an investor sells a stock short -- betting that it will fall in price -- without first borrowing the shares he is selling from an investor who owns them. The SEC has never condoned the practice, and since 2005 it has clamped down on short selling in any stock that shows evidence of naked shorting. The SEC further tightened its rules against naked shorting just hours before Mr. McCain excoriated Mr. Cox for doing nothing.



The rules announced Wednesday will increase penalties and close loopholes that exempted broker-dealers from the rules against naked shorting. They also make it clear that deliberately selling short a stock whose shares cannot be borrowed is fraud under the Securities Exchange Act. That's all to the good, we suppose; fraud is fraud. But regular short selling is not fraud. It adds valuable information to the market about what investors believe to be the price direction of a stock. Demonizing short-sellers as a band of criminals, or barring short-selling outright in financial stocks, as regulators in the U.K. did Thursday, removes information from the market.



Then there's Mr. McCain's tirade against the "uptick rule," a Depression-era chestnut that investors could only short stock after a rise in that stock's price. The SEC staff studied the effect of the uptick rule on prices for years, in a controlled experiment involving thousands of stocks. It found the rule had no effect. Other studies, including those that examined the uptick rule's effect on stocks disclosing bad news, also found that it "protected" no one. The SEC's permanent staff has long supported repeal and the SEC's commissioners voted to do so unanimously in June 2007.



While he was at it, Mr. McCain added the wholly unsupported assertion that "speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground." It wasn't very long ago that he blamed speculators on the long side for sky-high oil prices. Then oil prices fell. Now Mr. McCain wants voters to believe speculators are responsible for driving mismanaged financial companies to ruin. The irony is that this critique puts Mr. McCain in the same camp as some of the Wall Street CEOs who have led their firms so poorly. They also want someone (else) to blame.



In case Mr. McCain is interested, overall short interest in financial companies actually declined by 20% between July and the end of August. That's right: Far from driving this crisis, shorts were net buyers of financial stocks this summer, as they must buy stocks back to close their positions and realize their gains (or losses).



<u>In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help.</u> Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution. <u>He'll never beat Mr. Obama by running as an angry populist like Al Gore</u>, circa 2000.</blockquote>


WSJ calls McCain unpresidential, says McCain lacks "steady" temperment important in a leader during a time of crisis, and thus goes in the tank for Obama. Game over.
 
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