By Warren Hinckle

At the end of the day, the Republican Party would have been better off with a ticket of Joe the Plumber and Sara the hockey mom. Joe just wants his money and wants government to keep his sticky fingers off it. Sara wants the rough justice of the frontier for the Wall Street crooks who stole our cattle. Both are very American attitudes.In Wednesday’s debate both presidential candidates betrayed their better natures. Obama’s chilling caution betrayed the idealism that propelled him to where is; McCain betrayed his chivalric stature by mocking a woman’s concern about her own health during a difficult pregnancy, surely a deal breaker in an election; Obama no longer has to close the deal, because McCain has broken it.

Obama morphed into a suave, cocky, obfuscating eggplant of the Washington he ran against; McCain morphed into a demented walrus.

The candidates of both parties voiced a scary unanimity of opinion that tax cuts, in varying Easter egg dyes of political hue, were the panacea for the very real personal suffering of people out of a job, many of them out of their homes. Tax cuts will not put out the fire in Miss Havisham’s dress.

For Christ’s sake, tax cuts are about next year. Unfortunately that don’t mean diddle squat at the moment to the tens upon hundreds of thousands who are now in economic extremis; many of them won’t make enough money this year to qualify to pay taxes. What they need are jobs, now. How? A new WPA? One way perhaps, and certainly a legitimate topic for debate in a debate about the economy. Not a peep about a WPA or a rush jobs and relief program. America seemingly can hurry up relief overseas, but not at home.  I don’t recall anyone even mentioning more food stamps.

There was something surreal, certainly unreal, about last Wednesday’s hee-haw; rather than intelligent discourse there were but talking points from each candidate’s campaign briefing books. Obama was the elegant matador, patiently waiting for the kill on Nov. 4; McCain was the doomed, charging bull.  Bob Schieffer, the moderator, the mold from which the Washington Establishment journo was cast, rocked no boats, a favor to Obama who was sailing by instrument to seek a harbor safe from  controversy. Schieffer did for the reputation of his ever-diminishing fourth estate what Henry Kissinger did for Nixon in his drooling stage – enabled the decline.

McCain raised an interesting point certainly relevant to any discussion about the economy – that America has the second highest corporate income tax in the world, implying that provoked U.S. corporations to move operations to friendlier climes. (Maybe this is not really such a big deal, since both Republicans and Democrats have allowed so many loopholes in the corporate tax codes that the really big guys only pay two pence, sometimes no pence at all, while the average Joe (not the plumber) pays six pence and more.) However it was a legit topic for debate: did taxes drive corporations to move operations out of America, sucking blood from the economy – or were they money-crazed traitors like the fine Americans who sold scrap metal to the Japanese during WW Deuce? Not a follow-up, from Obama or the moderator. Nary a peep.

Watching the Big Yawn brought to mind my old friend the late Walter Karp’s seminal 1973 book, Indispensable Enemies, which might have been better titled The Two Parties Against The People, because it relentlessly documented the two parties collusion to split the vig and screw the voters who keep re-electing them to a revolving door, corrupt power sharing political system. (Indispensable Enemies is still in print; ask Amazon.)
When McCain laughingly accused Obama of fermenting class warfare, nobody got the gag; hey guys, let the folks in on the joke. Obama is as much a revolutionary as I am a Holly Roller; the only class he’s interested in is his Harvard graduating class.

McCain, just once, let the word-that-must-not-be-spoken – immigration – slip from his lips like a burp at a proper Sedona dinner party. He once bucked the Know Nothings in his own party and took a brave position on a sensible immigration law, but when Obama and Schieffer sniffed as if he had laid a smelly fart and McCain never uttered the  I-word again; Obama let the mention go by him like a blimp over his head, and the alert moderator seemed to not have heard. Immigration was the hottest political issue in America earlier this year and a solution to it is clearly central to the economic state of the nation, but it was off limits for this no holds barred debate. There was a gentlemen’s agreement between the two parties not to wade into such politically dangerous waters at this time and McCain, the war hero oaf, forgot the secret handshake..

This was the serious, substantive debate actually engaging and advancing the tough issues that both candidates had said they wanted? (See for comparison: Debates, Lincoln-Douglas.) The media predictably reported this boring night through the prism of a prizefight, rather than as the failed intellectual contest it was.
Obama, in re:-abortion and Roe v. Wade, said words to the effect that the right to privacy was in the Constitution. That was an interesting thing for a Con Law professor to say; my reading of the Constitution in Con Law class found no specific mention by the founders of the right to privacy; it was an interpretation, extrapolation if you will, by the courts that made the right to privacy the bedrock of Roe v. Wade. To find a ban on abortion explicitly in the Constitution, one would have to argue that an abortion of a woman’s choosing was an unreasonable search and seizure of the fetus under the Fourth Amendment.  That is precisely why Supreme Court appointments are so important – a different court could interpret the Constitution Humpty Dumpty upside down on Roe v. Wade. There is no specific right to privacy in the Constitution, as Justice Scalia will be happy to tell you in his charming way.

Obama came as a Quaker to the debate, seeking peace and harmony. He brought no gun, so he missed his best shots against McCain. McCain had tried to invoke the psalms of St. Hillary against Obama but lost that vertiginous moral high ground when he fatally crashed on the rock of abortion, coming t-h-i-s close to snotting on the legitimacy of a woman’s – or her doctor’s – health concerns about carrying a troubled pregnancy to term. He belittled  “abortion advocates” for defiing “health’ to mean just about anything. The commentariat declared Obama the winner by a TKO with extra points for cool but generally opined that there had been no knockout punches delivered. I disrespectfully disagree. There was a knockout punch. With his snarky words translating to women didn’t know what was best for their health, McCain knocked himself out of the White House. There are a sufficient number of women, not necessarily feminists, right, center and left, who will be so outraged by such a condescending statement that they would never vote for McCain. If Obama loses it will be because he is black, the Tom Bradley of the new century.

When McCain said that, all Obama had to do was to point out that Republicans habitually have opposed abortion for any reason because they say they value life – but when the life from an unwanted or difficult pregnancy comes to being, they look the other way and will not put up a federal dime to help care and feed and educate that new life.  Naked kid, you’re on you own. In a future edition of the O.E.D., that will be an example of the many uses of the word hypocrisy. The street fighter from Chicago didn’t throw that punch.

The only interesting thing about the debate was the questions that were not asked.
Example: Who is responsible for this mess:

Greedy, reckless Wall Street financial institutions that criminally engaged in leveraged gambling?
Deregulation – which lest one forgets began unde putatively progressive President Clinton, not, as so many lefties  commonly assume, under a conservative, serial dirt bag President Bush?

Congress, where both Democrats and Republicans encouraged Fannie Mae and her (his?) cousins to run wild – Democrats wanted the credit for increasing home ownership be it without strings, Republicans wanted Wall Street to make big bucks on the unregulated financial instruments.

What should be done to punish the Wall Street banditos who walked away with billions and when their Potemkin Villages collapsed and burned they were rewarded by Democrats and Republicans voting to bail out the bankers (who never said thank you) without helping the hapless new homeowners, now homeless and going dead broke?
Should not a hickory stick taken to the ungreatful hinnies of the bankers who so fabulously profited by suckering people into deals they could not afford that turned the financial system into bitter ashes? (Ralph Nader has suggested a tinsy tax on derivative transactions which are in the trillions of dollars; this would go a long way towards paying back the taxpayers’ ante up to bail out the Wall Street miscreants.)

Q. to Obama: Why were you standing in the wings when the Democratic leadership cowardly dropped their (quite sensible) proposal to adjust the Bankruptcy Code (section 1322(b)(2) to allow bankruptcy judges to adjust residential mortgages and revalue the property and interest rate, the way they now do with commercial properties in the toilet?

Q.to McCain? You say you work across the aisle for bipartisanship. Do you oppose such a common sense resolution to allow the bankruptcy system to determine the value of foreclosed or foreclosing homes the Democrats originally proposed (and then, true to the herd, chickened out)? If so, why, since it would avoid another new federal bureaucracy – which you so disdain – to value distressed residential real estate, when bankruptcy courts are already experienced in settling such matters with distressed commercial properties? Would that be because if the Treasury Department hires Wall Streeters to do it they would favor the banks against the homeowners?

And how in the name of Beelzebub is Sarah Palin the only populist crusader on the stump really blowing the battle sopher against those who rode the gold elephant and inveighing against Wall Street greed and  corruption – a premise probably two-thirds of the people in the country agree with?

Why did John McCain wait until the last debate to start running against George W. Bush? (Too late.)
There are similar queries but you get my drift.
These are not idle or rhetorical questions.

On Wednesday, before the debate, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair, gave hell to the Treasury Department for bailing out Hank Paulson’s Wall Street buddies but doing basically nothing with his $700 Billion rescue package to rescue financially stranded homeowners.

The nation would have been well served by a frank discussion, hell, a real debate, between the presidential candidates on such specific questions. Yet even though the head of the FDIC rather dramatically criticized the bailout – which both McCain and Obama voted for – as favoring Wall Street over homeowners, the debate moderator did not raise any such substantive questions. Neither did the candidates, even when the format allowed them to question one another.

Q. Why weren’t such questions asked or answered??
A. Being Jesuit-trained, I will answer the question with a question. One, two, three lead balloons.?

Warren Hinckle can be reached at: editor@argonaut360.com