Some Answers I Wish John McCain Had Given Last Night

Obviously, I’m a big admirer of John McCain, and while nobody’s perfect, Obama served up a few easy lobs last night that McCain failed to smash back, so I’ll do it for him:

Bill Ayers: McCain did say, “Who cares about an old, washed-up terrorist?”, but what he should’ve added, I believe, is that the problem is not Ayers, it’s Obama associating with Ayers when it was politically convenient, and then distancing himself as much as possible when it was not. His campaign has used every possible lever to make this story disappear, only changing Obama’s original line of “just a guy in my neighborhood” when forced to face the facts.

The Mayor of Chicago, member of the old boy network that included Ayers’ father, did everything he could to prevent researchers from reviewing the files of the Annenberg Challenge, possibly buying enough time to have clues to the relationship between Obama and Ayers expunged before the researchers were able to finally gain access to the files. Obama supporters were alerted to jam the call lines of a local radio station to prevent a public discussion of this issue, on a call-in show to which Obama or one of his staff were invited to appear, but refused. Why, if it is such a small, insignificant matter, the extraordinary effort to prevent disclosure?

The main researcher into this matter has been a left-leaning blogger named Stephen Diamond, whose blog is normally devoted to global labor issues (globallabor.blogspot.com), and who has more of a problem with the cover-up than the actual association—remember Watergate?—it wasn’t the crime that brought the President down, it was the amateurish effort to conceal the crime. So far, the Obama campaign is far more adept at this than Nixon’s.

Obama fairly adroitly dodged this question, by in part, referring to the people who advise him now, and would be a part of his administration. Notice, however, that his current “good associations” (Warren Buffet, Dick Lugar, etc.) don’t pre-date his decision to run for the Senate. Again, he chooses his comrades on their value to his political career, principles be damned.

Equal pay for women: This was stupidly brought up by Obama in the middle of the abortion discussion, and McCain, absorbed in the topic at hand, failed to mention another glaring example of Obama’s rhetoric not matching his record. Deroy Murdock (http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmEzMTZmNTk5MDI0NTZmNjUwMjllN2ZlZTc0MWFmYzY=) delved into publicly available records of Congressional staffers and found that Obama pays his female staffers $.83 on the dollar for every dollar his male staffers earn, while McCain pays the women on his staff $1.04 for every dollar the men on in his Senate office earn. Read it and weep at the missed opportunity to point out the difference, again, between what Obama says and what he does.

Healthcare: The Obama campaign has stopped repeating their distortion of the McCain plan as a tax increase, because it has been discredited by so many other sources, (Michael Dobbs, "Vice Presidential Debate: St. Louis," Washington Post Fact Checker, 10/2/08, to name just one), but still paints the McCain plan as one that would cause millions of people to lose their coverage under their current employer-sponsored plan.

This is entirely wrong, and in fact, as pointed out by Yuval Levin in the October 20, 2008 issue of The Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/680cwvaz.asp
Obama’s plan, by providing benefits equal to the coverage Senators enjoy, sets up the government plan as an alternative even employees currently covered by their employers will prefer, creating a mass exodus from the private market to the government-run public one. Obama has said he prefers a single payer system, like those in Canada and England, and that’s where this plan will take us.

Obama says he’ll subsidize these new plans for the uninsured with the fines received from employers who don’t provide health insurance for their employees. (And not only has he still not named that number, now he’s saying small businessmen would be exempted from this fine, (without, you notice, defining “small”, but that only “large" businesses would have to pay--still an unspecified amount--the fine.) But wait, how many “large” businesses don’t already cover their employees? So who will be fined??!! It has to be a large enough source to pay for very nice insurance policies for all the currently uninsured—approximately 40 million times say, $6000 per policy—he needs at least $240 billion in fines to pay for this, not to mention the administrative costs involved in setting up a new Medicare-type entitlement program!

Again, not wanting to frighten anyone who thinks of himself as a small businessman, he offers a 50% tax credit to those businesses that do offer provide health coverage. But again, don’t they already have that credit, at 100%, by being able to expense premiums paid on behalf of employees, prior to calculating taxable income? Maybe he is doing, on the employer side, what McCain is doing on the employee side (removing the current tax deduction, but then giving back a tax credit when health insurance is purchased). The difference is, the McCain credit gives the uninsured and insured employees more choices than they now have, while the Obama plan offers only one new choice to employers ("Pay or Play")—and it all hinges on the eligibility for and size of the “fine”.

As I noted above, the fine has to be large enough to pay the cost of this massive new health plan, otherwise the plan is underfunded. It also has to be very close to the cost employers now pay for group coverage not to cause employers to drop coverage, pay the fine, and tell their employees to apply for National Health Insurance. And if the Obama plan is free to individuals, why would they choose to stay with their group plan if they could leave for better benefits and less cost? It seems to me that employees would be begging their employer to drop group coverage so that they can become eligible for the government plan. Again, unless the fine is high enough (higher than the cost of a current group premium), what rational business would continue to cover their employees, comply with all the regulations concerning group health insurance, etc., when the government will do it for them?

McCain’s plan is much less radical and will keep most employees currently covered right where they are (which he failed to point out!), but gives the uninsured a big boost towards purchasing their own insurance. His plan also has the greatest potential to bring down health care costs, by introducing more competition into the individual policy market, as opposed to the Obama plan, which looks a lot like Medicare the more we hear about it.

Socialism: McCain slipped, but not enough, when he called Obama “Senator Government”. It should’ve been “Senator REALLY REALLY BIG Government”.