That’s why Obama’s cheap shot was just typical political rhetoric. Did you actually read McCain’s response? He voted against the bill because it essentially screwed over the long term enlistments. He wasn’t ‘anti GI Bill’, he was against the specifics put forth in this specific one.
Obama did not attack McCain’s military service. He said exressed confusion about why McCain doesn’t give a fuck about veterans (which he doesn’t, and that is kind of weird).
Obama cannot let himself be brushed back from the plate with this kind of red herring. McCain is playing a military equivalent of the race card. It’s complet bullshit and Obama can’t be afraid to call him on it. The old cunt is selling out veterans for his own personal benefit. His status as a veteran and a POW only aggravates his betrayal of the troops, it doesn’t excuse it.
His excuse for opposing the bill is quite stupid. He’s actually complaining that it’s too generous to those who only serve one enlistment (never mind if that enlistment includes a tour or three of Iraq). What a fucking sell-out this guy has become.
Ah, but McCain isn’t running for President, he’s running for Commander-in-Chief. Apparently if you’re not military you’re not of interest to him.
How does it screw over long-term enlistments? They aren’t getting any less than what McCain wants, the shorties are just getting more. McCain’s problem is not that he thinks career guys are not getting enough, but that shorties are getting too much?
So how are long-termers being injured if short -termers get the same college benfits?
The real issue that Bush and McCain have is the Bill’s effect on retention.
Based on what? The fact that he didn’t support the GI bill? Are people unpatriotic for challenging the patriot act, too?
That and the fact that he wants to leave them in Iraq for 100 years.
He may be against this bill for honest non-partisan reasons, but the tenor of his response is as ridiulous as the sputtering his campaign had against being told McCain had ‘lost his bearings’.
Err, Yeah. I guess I phrased that badly. I meant enlistments over a longer period of time.
But the sentiment is the same. Obama took a complex issue, and made it into. “How come you don’t want our veterans to be educated?” That’s typical political rhetoric from a guy who claims to be above it all.
It’s like when schools around here ask for a 20% increase in funding, and when they only get a 19% increase, they go around complaining that there funding was ‘cut’.
I disagree that it’s a complex issue and I disagree that Obama’s objections were unfair. McCain’s whole indignant routine is just a smokescreen. Why was it necessary to mention that Obama has not been in the military? How is that relevant?
McCain has projected an IMAGE of confidence and strength on military and veterans affairs. But he is actually weak in those areas because his actions don’t match his rhetoric. He’s shown poor judgement on Iraq and been less-than-generous to veterans and he can’t make that history magically go away by hiding behind his years as a POW.
Obama is exactly right to attack him on this. It strikes right at the heart of McCain’s argument for why he deserves to be President. Americans have already decided the Democrats know more about military affairs than the Republicans. It won’t take much to convince them that McCain is just as clueless as Bush.
Since is McCain has recently aligned himself with Bushian policies after maligning Bush for so long, and since it is on record that Bush and McCain think full scholarships are too generous, how is this off-base and anything other than calling out McCain on his playing of politics with this?
Additionally, it is also on the record that McCain wrote a letter a few years ago angrily avowing to never work with Obama again; I think this is signs of that avowal, sans examination of what was actually said and of what is actually at stake.
A few months ago, when Webb was trying to sit down with McCain to discuss his getting on board with with a co-sponsored GI bill, instead of coming right out and saying that he wanted to sponsor his own bill solo (which everybody knew about off course), he would not return any of Webb’s phone calls and actually came out and said Webb was holding up the progress.
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McCain did not vote against the bill, he skipped the vote in order to do some much needed fund raising for his campaign:
McCain misses vote on a new GI Bill, scorns criticism from Obama
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As far as why McCain would’ve voted against the bill, if he had voted: This past week I’ve noticed a lot of talk on the right about the terrible burden the bill would impose on everyone with adjusted gross incomes above $500,000, or $1 million for joint filers.
Apparently a rise in their tax rate of 0.5% is too large a sacrifice for these people to make for the GIs.
The NRCC’s taken down its article on tax-and-spend democrats. Here’s The bones of the issue.
The same reason it was necessary to mention that McCain was in the military. Ploy for sympathy
I thought the Pubs established in 2004 that any comparison of the candidates’ military service records is irrelevant.
Clearly, McCain DOESN’T want them to go to college, he wants them to re-enlist so that that they can fight in our stupid wars. If they manage to survive a couple of re-enlistments, THEN they can go to college.
Obama’s comment shows that the Dems have learned the Rovian concept of attacking the strength of the opposition. McCain may have learned strategy and tactics at the Naval Academy, but I doubt that he learned that much about GI Bill benefits, so this particular issue is one where he has no special advantage. Yes, the real issue is retention, but it is going to be hard to explain why you want to screw vets with “only” one stretch of service, and this might be calling attention to the shortage of manpower thanks to Iraq. Neither of these are going to go very well for the Republicans.
People may want a ballsy President, but I don’t think they want an angry one. Anger implies loss of control, not a good thing for someone with his finger on the button.
In any case, Obama’s statement is about being opposed to the sin, not the sinner.
This line from McCain is pretty galling:
So the Obama doesn’t understand the bill he is voting for? By what rationale does he make that claim? The whole diatribe is basically, “Obama isn’t a veteran so he just doesn’t really understand.” I guess that goes for the Republicans who voted for it, but what about Senator Webb himself?
I’ll also add that part of why McCain seems to have been caught flat-footed in this exchange is that the punch is coming from a direction that he didn’t expect. He though he could just coast on his military reputation and not worry about defending himself from attacks that question his competence in that arena. “I’m a decorated veteran! He wouldn’t dare!”
You think he would have learned a thing or two from watching how Kerry got schooled four years ago. Kerry didn’t think he had to defend his military credentials either and so was caught totally off guard by the swiftboat attacks.
Now I don’t think that Obama is swiftboating McCain. He’s attacking the man’s policy decisions, not merely trashing his reputation with lies about his conduct during the war. But the effect is the same. Obama is hitting his opponent in a weak spot he didn’t even know he had. Well played.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding here, but isn’t McCain in favor of a bill that alters the GI Bill in such a way that the rewards actually increase as a way of enticing career enlisted personnel?
I am in favor of that, completely. Obama needs to stick to the things he does best, which already likely outmatch McCain’s skill set. Obama should play to his own strengths rather than shoring up the strengths of his opponent.
That was my main problem with what McCain said. The underlying implication, in his entire response, was that since Obama wasn’t in the military he couldn’t possibly understand.
Here’s a portion of McCain’s response:
So, he does think it’s too generous for our veterans. And seeing as how it would help some veterans go to college, rejecting it does take away some veterans’ “chance to go to college.”
This particularly irks me. Especially since the military is sold so frequently as being a great stepping stone for advancing one’s career. If they want to recruit people for more long-term uses, perhaps they should consider using a different recruiting technique.