Dayton Moms
September 16th, 2008This is the sort of rhetoric John McCain needs to use if he is going to defeat Barack Obama in the Presidential election:
* “Today he claimed the congressional stimulus package was his idea. That’s news to those of us in Congress who supported it. Senator Obama didn’t even show up to vote.”
* “He talks a tough game on the financial crisis but the facts tell a different story. Senator Obama took more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than anyone but the chairman of the committee they answer to. And he put Fannie Mae’s CEO, who helped create this problem, in charge of finding his vice president. That’s not change, that is what’s broken in Washington.”
* “He talks about siding with the people, siding with the people, just before he flew off to Hollywood for a fundraiser with Barbara Streisand and his celebrity friends. Let me tell you my friends, there is no place I’d rather be than here with the working men and women of Ohio.”
Barack Obama answers these attacks with these:
Obama poked fun at McCain for proposing a commission to examine the crisis, calling that “the oldest Washington stunt in the book.”
“This isn’t 9/11. We know how we got into this mess,” Obama said. “What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it, John McCain won’t, and that’s the choice for the American people in this election.”
Obama also pointed to a history of Democratic presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, who commanded the country through rough financial waters. And he hammered McCain repeatedly — for failing, he said, to grasp the root of the problems and for only belatedly deciding that greater regulation is needed.
“John McCain has spent decades in Washington supporting financial institutions instead of their customers,” Obama told a crowd of about 2,100 at the Colorado School of Mines.
Their approaches are intrinsically similar — ridicule, attack — but their rhetoric is quite different, and I suspect that McCain’s pit-bull mentality will work against Obama’s kinder and gentler words. Who knows how the working families of Dayton see this, however.