Essential viewing after any debate is the follow-up fact-checking. The AP posted theirs very shortly afterward. FactCheck.org, the best place to check up on anything, took until this morning to get theirs done, those lazy jerks.
Read both, and then read this, a general summary of the fact problems both campaigns have had.
One of the biggest ones from last night, to me, was McCain hammering on earmark spending. He said it’s gone up in the past five years, and said “you can look it up”, even referring to Citizens Against Government Waste specifically as a place where you could do so. I guess he must be counting on voters to take him at his word, because if you do look it up (here’s the 2003 report, and the 2008 report), you can see that earmarks have gone down 24 percent. So he’s flat-out lying, and it’s on an issue his supporters really like him for. He’s saying it not to make himself look good, but to smear Obama, and I would have said it was beneath him before this campaign, but running for president bringing out a facet of his character I hadn’t previously been aware of. How refreshing. Maverick indeed.
With the federal government being as big and slow as it is, and with the economy being in such rough shape, and being in such tremendous debt thanks lately to Bush (he’s been the worst, but no president has been as responsible about budgets and borrowing money as they should have been), this kind of thing is important. How are we going to pay for this $700 billion bank bailout, for example? Anyway, cutting unnecessary spending, like ethics reform, is an issue that Obama and McCain mostly agree on, and I find this kind of blatant lying to be unnecessary at best. What’s the point? Just trying to make Obama look like a Scary Big Gummint Liberal, I guess. This is worse than saying Obama has “the most liberal voting record in the Senate”, although I find that irritating as well. What does that even mean? McCain doesn’t feel obligated to tell us, letting conservative imaginations run wild.
One more quickie: in March McCain and Jim DeMint (R, SC) tried to get the Senate to impose a moratorium on earmarks. It didn’t pass, but Obama voted for it. That’s not a full record, but it should indicate something to people who think all Obama’s interested in is taking and spending your money. Don’t get all your information from McCain’s campaign (or Obama’s), that’s what I’m asking.
Based on last night’s debate taken in isolation, without the benefit of fact-checking, I have to say that the idea of McCain presiding over issues of defense and fiscal responsibility was not unpalatable. He’s comfortable talking about those issues, and does have a record of dealing with them fairly well. Unfortunately, he’s running for president, which covers quite a lot more, and it’s on other issues that I find him unacceptable. We’ll see if those issues come up in the next debates.
I think McCain should stay in the Senate where he can do more good than harm, “reaching across the aisle” to Joe Lieberman; a very short reach, indeed.
ETA: Here’s another perspective on the earmarks issue, courtesy of Foreign Policy magazine. They say earmarks are peanuts compared to the overall budget.