Yes

This morning I asked,

Did McCain Reverse Course on His New Economic Plan to Wait for Obama’s New Plan?

 It appears the answer to that question is, "yes."

On a conference call just now, McCain policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said that Sen. McCain would address the economy tomorrow — "he never intended to speak about the economy today," according to Holtz-Eakin.

"He will in fact talk about economic conditions and those harmed most deeply harmed by them," Holtz-Eakin said.

And he’ll unveil new proposals.

I guess McCain just needed to take a peek at what the smart kid had answered before he finished his own take-home test.

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  1. randiego says:

    I guess McCain just needed to take a peak at what the smart kid had answered before he finished in his own take-home test.

    Heh.

    • bmaz says:

      He’ll still fuck it up. When you are 894 out of a graduating class of 899, you are so fucking lame that you can’t even cheat competently.

      • randiego says:

        Okay, true story – I was out with some friends catching the Sox game last weekend and one of them is a PhD (cellular biology I think). She and I were discussing various policy subjects and the discussions grew more strident as the beer was consumed. At one point we were discussing McCain and I was talking about how he was an incurious lightweight douchebag. I backed up my point by saying he was next to last in his class at Annapolis, to which she said “who cares!”. I said, “who cares!!?? – You’re a PhD for christ sakes! Imagine the poorest students in your classes that you can think of – THAT’s who we are talking about~!”

        That shut her up.

        • Professor Foland says:

          shudder

          Thanks, I never thought of it in quite those terms. I taught roughly a thousand students in the pre-med program at a school generally more selective on academics than the Naval Academy. And if I think of any of the worst six trying to run the country, I just want to go into a corner and cry.

          And some of them were actually quite aggressive, and left exactly the same sort of impression with me that bmaz described in his last post…

        • Ishmael says:

          I recall in 2004 when a former professor of Shrub’s at Harvard made the following comments in a Salon interview titled “The Dunce”:

          “I don’t remember all the students in detail unless I’m prompted by something,” Tsurumi said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “But I always remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong social values, compassion and intellect — the very rare person you never forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are totally the opposite.”

          http://dir.salon.com/story/new…..6/tsurumi/

          The irony that Barack Obama, the editor of the Harvard Law Review, is painted by the Rethugs as some kind of affirmative action project, while a lazy legacy like W actually paraded his Harvard MBA as the CEO president says everything about the shattered discourse in the US.

        • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

          Ishmael, in his book “Conservatives without Conscience”, John Dean explains the way that certain egoists (authoritarians) actually believe in their own superiority, and goes into the social psychology of these ‘authoritarian leaders’ and the psychology of their followers.

          And, FWIW, with that background in mind, bmaz’s previous post is very alarming.
          Completely agree with you about the ’shattered discourse’; the outcomes of such shattering being to costly to count.

        • Professor Foland says:

          I remember this article well. It led to a lot of speculation among faculty types at the time.

          I’ll just make an observation (apropos given EW’s comment about C’s): at some schools at least, failing someone requires a startling amount of work to lay a paper trail. I taught a large class, and the dozen-or-so students a year who were in danger of failing ate up a ridiculously disproportionate amount of bureacratic time. (Not teaching time, since they had a tendency not to appear…) Outside the truly unsalvageable cases, it was not so uncommon for me to give out a “gentleman’s D’s” (which served the relevant purpose, which was to prevent them from getting into med school.)

          This leads to why there was a lot of speculation when that article came out: in order to fail a class, it is not enough merely to be dumb as a post. And to be memorable twenty five years later, it is not enough merely to fail a class.

        • emptywheel says:

          When I was teaching, I specifically told students I would not give out gentleman’s C’s because we didn’t want any assholes like Bush to become President again. I can’t remember how I said this so that it wasn’t screamingly partisan (I think I succeeded though). But it always elicited a funny response.

  2. WilliamOckham says:

    Is it time to start placing bets on when Marc Ambinder’s head explodes? He’s trying so hard to give the McCain campaign the benefit of the doubt, but he doesn’t have the, um, complete detachment from reality that is required.

  3. readerOfTeaLeaves says:

    Well, FWIW, although I don’t think it wise to often quote other places in comments here at EWs, if I might humbly beg indulgence for two:

    Andrew Sullivan: I don’t want to belittle in any way the stress it will inflict on many people who deserve nothing of the kind. But the truth is: there is always something of a relief about hitting reality… The silver lining is that denial is no longer an option, and denial was the chief problem of the Bush administration for seven long years. Daily Dish 10.13.2008, at 5:27pm

    And Walcott: I don’t want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself… so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity. Oct 7, 2008

    McSame made his bed with the evils of Free Market Fundamentalism, which is a form of intellectual and moral blindness. Whatever he says is too little, too late.

    • ralphbon says:

      All deference to Sullivan, but denial is always an option. As our empire crumbles, American exceptionalism will only increase in volume and stridency, as the McPalin rallies frighteningly demonstrate.

      The neocons and slackjaws will cling to their hubris the way Richard Perle clings to his combover — against all logic, sense, and propriety — to the final desperate strand. If the last 8 years have taught us nothing, they have taught us this.

      • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

        The louder the wingnuts shriek, the more they’re exposed as frauds.

        But another lesson of the past 8 years is that most people despise being lied to, and loathe being expected to underwrite other people’s follies. That’s the upside IMHO.

  4. dipper says:

    To RoTL @6

    And Walcott: I don’t want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself… so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity. Oct 7, 2008

    LOVE, love it! Surely hope it happens.

  5. jayt says:

    “He will in fact talk about economic conditions and those harmed most deeply harmed by them,” Holtz-Eakin said.

    And he’ll unveil new proposals.

    Let’s hope that the proposals came from Doug Holtz-Eakin.

    Lord, what a walking catastrophe that guy is….

  6. JimWhite says:

    Well, let’s see. The campaign is run by lobbyists and the two candidates have the combined intellect of a sand flea. So, I boldly predict that tomorrow’s proposal from our hero and savior will consist of tax breaks for large corporations and increased contracts to them for administering the TARP plan. He’ll say the he profoundly regrets not being able to do something to keep homeowners in their homes, but we all must sacrifice for the overlords the good of the country.

    Oh, and spend, baby, spend. Even if you can’t afford it. It’s just not patriotic to live within your means.

  7. MadDog says:

    OT – This should give Christy a chuckle:

    More encouraging news from Appalachia

    Last week, when a poll came out showing Obama with an eight-point lead in West Virginia of all places, the McCain campaign hastily decided it would dispatch Palin to the state to cover the base.

    I had visions of a huge rally. So here’s what happened:

    Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made a pit stop in West Virginia en route to battleground Ohio, riling up some of Democrat Barack Obama’s Mountain State supporters in the process.

    The Alaska governor and family members spent about 25 minutes at Tri-State Airport in Kenova after arriving Sunday. She made no remarks before her campaign motorcade headed into Ohio.

    About a dozen supporters greeted Palin as she left the aircraft holding her infant son, Trig. A small group of protesters also was on hand…

    Uh-oh, somebody messed up. A vice-presidential candidate is not supposed to come to a state and get…a dozen people, and a similar number of protestors. And provoke a counter-rally eight times larger for the other side

    (My Bold)

    And McSame gets less attendance than MsBull…winkle? How much less can there be?

  8. wavpeac says:

    The only way he can win on the economy is if he stops sounding like a republican…and we all know that once you have drunk the koolaide…you can’t go back.

    This out to be hilarious. I think I am actually looking forward to hearing mcsame speak on the economy.

    He’ll say no new taxes. He’ll say ‘read my lips’. It will be oodles of republican fun.

  9. freepatriot says:

    give gramps mcsame some slack

    it’s hard to find a way to spin a capital gains tax into a populist slogan

    if mcsame came out with a capital gains tax before Obama’s plan was announced, mcsame would have been ridiculed for the idea

    now Obama has something solid to talk about, and mcsame can sneak by with his outragous and stupid idea

  10. kspena says:

    David Frumm verbally berated a surprised Rachel Maddow tonight. He’s one of those junior high cowards that throws a snowball on the playground then hides his hand. What a prick….Oh, that’s right; he’s with the American Enterprise Institute, isn’t he…

  11. randiego says:

    Wow, David Frum is a condescending jackass. I’ve never seen him live before. Rachel Maddow was attempting a reasoned conversation with him and he was rolling his eyes, sighing and making faces on camera, bigtime. What a sexist jackass.

  12. randiego says:

    Rachel almost laughed out loud when he brought up Paul Wolfowitz to engage her on moral equivalencies.

  13. rosalind says:

    SusanG over at Dkos sums up my feelings on John Boys’s latest moves:

    “This feels like campaigning by younger irritating sibling in the back seat on a long cross-country car ride screaming Me too! Me too! Me too!”

  14. freepatriot says:

    rachel maddow reported that Obama mentioned pie 15 times in 2 minutes

    shamelessly pandering to DKOS ???

    or maybe he really likes pie

    Cleveland over the GNTS, 35 – 14 wtf ???

  15. masaccio says:

    Well, Paulson establishes his Bush bona fides by decidering that 9 major banks and investment banks need billions of dollars, and need to give the Treasury permanent preferred dividend paying stock. From the NYT:

    reasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. outlined the plan on Monday to nine of the nation’s leading bankers at an afternoon meeting, officials said, in which he essentially told the participants that they would have to accept government investment for the good of the American financial system. This capital injection plan will use a huge chunk of the money authorized for Troubled Assets Relief Program.

    Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were told they would each get $25 billion; Bank of America and Wells Fargo, $20 billion each (plus an additional $5 billion for their recent acquisitions); Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, $10 billion each, with Bank of New York Mellon and State Street each receiving $2 to 3 billion. Wells Fargo will get $5 billion for its acquisition of Wachovia, and Bank of America the same for amount for its purchase of Merrill Lynch.

    Now we know that capitalism is officially down the memory hole. What do we call the new system?

  16. behindthefall says:

    Wildly O/T, but I don’t know when something appropriate is going to come around on the git-tar:

    538 is giving McC/P a 0.051 probability of winning. What if they win? Do we:

    a) Say the polling was flawed?
    b) Declare the election results invalid and do it again, perhaps under the watchful eyes of an international commission?
    c) Do the unthinkable?
    d) Something else?

    Just what would it take to have the election results called into question? (I sometimes think back to a short story by Azimov, if I recall correctly, in which pollsters and statisticians have become so adept at predicting the outcomes of elections that they only need one randomly selected person to express an opinion on election day for them to say which candidate would have won had everyone in the country voted. As I recall, the kicker was that they selected an 8-year-old boy to be the token ‘voter’.)

    • skdadl says:

      Why do we have different Thanksgivings, though?

      I guess because our harvest times are mainly earlier than yours; by the time of your Thanksgiving, we’re all hibernating. Ok, not all of us, but parts of the country will be in permanent deep freeze by mid-November.

      Rachel handled Frum wonderfully imho — that very gracious and graceful ending of hers was most effective, underlined how graceless his entry to the interview had been, all that thinly veiled contempt and faked patience with the peasants who don’t agree with him. I remember Frum when he was just a smug, glib, and arrogant young man up here. Now he is a smug, glib, and arrogant middle-aged man down there. I suppose we should apologize to you for that.

      We vote today. If you’re a prayin’ type, we could use a few of those.

  17. readerOfTeaLeaves says:

    Wow, Maddow is masterful.
    What a refreshing contrast to the O’Reilly’s, the Limbaugh’s, and the otherwise unable to stay focused.
    As for Frum… hmmmmm. He needs to get out more; maybe try teaching in a public school for a few months, volunteer at a food bank…. seems extremely insular. Nice to see Rachel ask for clarification without losing her cool. Impressive.

    But to tie my observation to THIS post, I suspect it was easier for McCain (and GWBush) to slosh their bogus economic claims around the O’Reillys, the FauxNewz ‘personalities’, and other media interviewers who didn’t have Maddow’s incisive, analytical, level-headed approach to inquiring about policies. So really, McCain has a tougher media audience, not only because he’s alienated people, but because there are a few new IQ points making a difference.

    Heaven only knows Bill Moyers needs all the help he can get ;-))

  18. kspena says:

    David Frum wants Rachel to use her ‘tiny platform’ for more thoughtful thought? Here’s what Salon thoughtfully thinks of David’s thoughtful thoughtfulness in his latest thoughtful text:

    “An End to Evil” by David Frum and Richard Perle

    “Undaunted by the Iraq debacle, uber-hawks David Frum and Richard Perle air their fevered wet dream of a national-security superstate that slaps down uppity Muslims, bombs North Korea, slices and dices civil liberties and scatters the Palestinians like birdseed.”

    By Gary Kamiya

    http://dir.salon.com/story/boo…..index.html