The Blog @ Spolitics

Obama-mercial Rebuttal

by Heywood U. Reedmore -- October 30, 2008 at 2:25 pm | In 2008 Election | 1 Comment

To see a candidate for President narrating what in tone and style was a low-budget documentary was… well, creepy. If he wasn’t up in the polls, I would have guessed Barack Obama was auditioning to host a program on PBS. But let’s set tone aside and address content. Obama highlighted stories of Americans who are struggling in one way or another, but he never specifically addressed how his plans would solve those problems. Arguably, each person would do better with McCain’s policies.

The first American story is about a family that moved into a more upscale neighborhood to send their kids to a better school and now they’re struggling financially because of the increased cost of living. School choice — something John McCain supports and Barack Obama does not — means they never would have had to move in the first place to sends their kids to a better school. They could have simply chosen one.

The second story is about a man who was shortchanged on his pension by his employer. Obama reminds him that that was his money — he earned it. Unfortunately for this gentleman, unlike with a 401(k), he doesn’t control his pension, his company does. The Democrats are considering doing away with the 401(k). This means most companies will go back to offering pensions (if any retirement benefits at all) and therefore, people will be more susceptible to getting stiffed by troubled companies (or by Uncle Sam).

The third story is a little baffling. The woman says she has no medical insurance, so presumably she’s not 65 years old and covered by Medicare. So, under both McCain and Obama’s plan she’d still have to buy health insurance. But McCain would give her a $5,000 refundable tax credit to help her with her medical costs.

The next woman mentions the rising cost of energy as well as healthcare. McCain plans to raise the deduction for each child to $7,000 and give her a $2,500 tax credit for healthcare costs. Furthermore, McCain’s energy plan — because it includes more domestic production of oil and natural gas as well as nuclear energy, is a lot more likely to reduce energy costs.

The last gentleman spoke about how working at Ford was all her knew. McCain plans to revamp training programs at the community college to help people laid off in struggling industries acquire new skills. Obama highlighted this story, but didn’t talk about how his policies would address it.

But of course, all of this is just about plans, intentions. More importantly, voters need to consider which candidate is more likely to actually get these things done. We’ve seen McCain at work for over twenty years. We’ve never seen Obama do much of anything but campaign. Where McCain is known in the Senate as someone who will cross party lines to get things done, Obama is known as the guy who shows up late and leaves early, but is always around for the photo-op and to take credit.

So while Senator Obama may have spent millions of dollars force-feeding a piece of propaganda into living rooms across America, I’d like to leave you with what the real thing looks like:

Update: Via Hot Air, infomercial experts pan Obama-mercial. Too depressing and (as I noted above) he focused almost exclusively on problems without presenting the solutions. It was like he showed the stain in the carpet and then instead of showing it being cleaned or even explaining how he’d remove it, Obama just moved on to the mildew in the shower.