2:12--McCain mentions that he suspended his campaign in response to the economic crisis. Of course, he promised it would remain suspended until a bailout was reached. He did no such thing, and it would be hard to argue that he ever really suspended his campaign at all. It was a stunt, it failed, and it revealed his flitty modus operandi. The man lacks the temperament to be president.
2:16--Obama seems to have regained his footing after a somewhat weak start. McCain is on game, but he still has the losing hand. The question is not who will win. It's will Obama perform.
2:22--Earmarks, Earmarks, Earmarks. McCain loves to hate them, entirely out of proportion with their importance. McCain cares about process, when the problem is policy.
2:31--9/11 and the Sublime. Obama bemoans George Bush's request in the wake of 9/11 that people go shopping. We all felt rather united after that day. We felt the sublime. Edmund Burke argued that the sublime is based in fear, the irrational, things of an impressive, inhuman scale. This elevated our thoughts; it was sublime, and people miss the feeling in these bad days. But 9/11 was a very bad day, a day that changed history for the worse.
And what, given the fact of George Bush's ideology, would he have asked of us? To ask for anything grandiose, as Obama suggests we should have done, would have been plainly inconsistent with the laissez faire of the modern Republican Party, the party of Grover Norquist.
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