Obama Missed Chances to Degas McCain

Barack Obama missed two great opportunities last night to pitchfork John McCain:

When McCain gimped around the debate stage warning “My Friends” that because of Wall Street’s financial constipation and panic “we’re gonna hafta cut back on entitlements,” Obama failed to point out that McCain means cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare–the two biggest entitlement programs after those dosing bankers and generals with hundreds of billions of borrowed bucks.

McCain certainly does not mean putting the rich and military on dollar diets. He is rich and he has been military. He would not spit in the fountains from which both classes suck their elixirs of life.

No, he means putting fogies like me on food stamps by cutting back Social Security and into pine boxes early by cutting back on our medical care.

Obama let these pass. Too bad. Many of McCain’s supporter are geezers living at or near poverty (one of the great American towns) and depending on government-paid docs to keep them walking and talking.

(McCain is still talking but his shuffling and the growing hump on his back makes one wonder about his arthritis.)

Obama missed another chance to pish McCain’s balloon when in the heat of Wall Street's self-immolations McCain avoided intoning what has been Republican mantra until just the past couple of weeks: Change Social Security to cause each sweating for wages to plop her payments for Social Security into the dry palms of Wall Street stock jockeys. These would have, for a fee, invested her financial future in such sure things as Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, AIG and other outfits that since Labor Day have gone bellybutton up.

Had McCain and Bush had their way on Social Security last year or the year before, most working Americans would have thrilled in the past week to see their Social Security deposits evaporate.

Obama missed these opportunities. Like McCain he instead dropped worm-size tidbits from stump speeches into the maws of onlookers. Neither candidate had anything new to say.

Fortunately for Obama, McCain shambled around the stage, looking the old man he is, while Obama, still lithe and fit, appeared upright, calm and assured.

Presidential elections to date (all between white men) have shown that the candidate who appears taller will win. If the candidates appear the same height, then the candidate who seems to have the most hair will win.

(A smart candidate, from the start of campaigning, will stand upright, wear elevator shoes, be trim and hide his pate under an excellent toupee.)

Obama seems taller, trimmer and more hirsute and upright than McCain. But in this election there enters Obama’s skin. In America, black trumps white. If like Obama you’re half white and half black, you’re black--and subject to the white citizenry’s prejudices.

Prejudice against black as opposed to prejudice for height and hair may put McCain and his intellectual mentor, Sarah Palin–one in dotage and the other a dolt-- in charge of the nation and the health of the world. We would have the depressing in charge of the depression. That truly would be the holistic pits.