John McCain is 72 and has had bouts with a serious form of cancer so it is important to know if his running mate would be a competent president? In fact, as Frank Rich notes in his editorial today, "It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election." So does Rich think she is competent to be president?

He thinks not. Palin even dissembles about her own record and shows ignorance about many things of fundamental importance to a modern president. She is the darling of what has become an increasingly radical right wing party that will use racism and xenophobia to achieve its ends. It is all marketing. She is not competent to become president. (David Ignatius makes some similar points in his editorial in the Washington Post.)

Rich notes that "(t)he cunning of the Palin choice as a political strategy is that a candidate who embodies fear of change can be sold as a “maverick” simply because she looks the part." The flip side is that because McCain is weak he is inexorably linked to Palin. He simply cannot even appear often now without her. Perhaps, Maureen Dowd's prophecy noted in my 9/9 post is coming true even sooner than even Dowd thought it would. Rich concludes that:

This election is still about the fierce urgency of change before it’s too late. But in framing this debate, it isn’t enough for Obama to keep presenting McCain as simply a third Bush term. Any invocation of the despised president — like Iraq — invites voters to stop listening. Meanwhile, before our eyes, McCain is turning over the keys to his administration to ideologues and a running mate to Bush’s right.

A haunting thought for me over the last several years as I watch deficits grow seemingly exponentially was is this a cunning strategy to so saddle the US with debt that the government can do little more than pay it off? Eh gads! I may have been onto something as Broder points out in Washington Post today. The answer to Rich's question is that it may be too late already.

While both of them may know this, Broder points out that you "will not hear them admit that, before they do any of those things (new programs), they will have to pay a gigantic annual interest bill on the rapidly expanding national debt -- or else our foreign creditors will stop lending us the money to pay our bills." Even if the Bushies didn't plan it, their monumental incompetence has had that effect.

Gorbachev is reported to have said the Soviet Union lost the cold war because they went broke first. Is it America's turn to go broke first?

Has Obama done what he must do to win, toughen his message in ways the electorate will understand? He was in Concord, NH, yesterday and as the Concord Monitor reported in its story today (Obama's velvet attack - He says enough Rove-style politics from McCain camp) he has to a certain extent without getting down in pig trough with his opponents. He is hitting hard on economic issues pointing out the misinformation about his plan that the McCain team has tried to sell. Some thought he could have been tougher on his opponents, but it just isn't in him to get down in the gutter with them. Hope it works.

He was also in Dover, NH. The Boston Herald reported that Barack Obama hits John McCain in New Hampshire where he said:

The McCain-Sarah Palin ticket, they don’t want to debate the Obama-Biden ticket on issues because they are running on eight more years of what we’ve just seen,” Obama said. “As a consequence, what they’re going to spend the next seven, eight weeks doing is trying to distract you. They’re going to talk about pigs, and they’re going to talk about lipstick; they’re going to talk about Paris Hilton, they’re going to talk about Britney Spears. They will try to distort my record, and they will try to undermine your trust in what the Democrats intend to do.

He also seems to be talking in a more direct way as he must to communicate with voters in terms they can understand. "“'John McCain doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know what’s going on in your lives. He is out-of-touch with the American people. Why else would he say the economy’s made great progress?' Obama asked."

Harvard and Columbia gave him great educations for sure, but they also made it easy to label him an elitist who was out of touch with real people. He has to continue to drive home that he, not McCain, is the one who has lived in the economic trenches and knows what that means. He may be making his message more understandable as this quote points out. "Obama won over at least one voter in the audience. June Whitcomb, 80, a lifelong Republican from Kingston, N.H., proudly displayed a picture of the candidate on her straw hat. 'I just felt he was so charismatic,' she said. 'I felt like he was going to help us.'”