It started raining last night. It has been raining steadily for 20 hours and it’s still going strong. At work, there are two groups of people. One group is gloomy and miserable because of the weather. The other group has aerated and seeded their lawns in the last two weeks. A solid day of rain means that even with our perreniel drought, the new grass has a chance to take and grow. Happy happy rainy day!

Matt Yglesias had a smart post about Palin as the metacandidate, always talking about how she’s going to say things or who she’s saying them to instead of you know, saying them.

I noticed this last night with McCain also.

And, again, I know those situations. I’ve been in them all my life.

And I’ve been supporting those and I know how to fix this economy, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, and stop sending $700 billion a year overseas.

But the point is that I know how to handle these crises. And Senator Obama, by saying that he would attack Pakistan, look at the context of his words. I’ll get Osama bin Laden, my friends. I’ll get him. I know how to get him.

I’ll get him no matter what and I know how to do it.

I’m sure I could find more examples from the transcript if I spent more time.

While Obama is laying out plans and ideas, McCain is telling us how he has plans and ideas. He’s telling us that knows how to make a plan and execute a plan and that’s all fine and well but what is the plan? If I ever tried to fake my way through a presentation at work by talking about what a good presenter I am and reminding people of all the other presentations I’ve done and how my next presentation will be amazing but I can’t tell you know because it’s a secret — let’s just say it would not be pretty.

I think that’s part of why voters don’t respond to many of McCain’s answers. Even when he’s right (ferinstance he does have a history of reaching across the aisle) it sounds like petulant whining to simply say how much you know about issues without ever sharing that knowledge.

Update: As always, Matt says it better.

If McCain knows how to get Osama, I can understand his reluctance to describe the details of the plan to a globally televised audience. But couldn’t he have taken the opportunity sometime over the past seven years to tell George W. Bush?

Points against McCain:

BROKAW: Health care, energy, and entitlement reform: Social Security and Medicare. In what order would you put them in terms of priorities?

MCCAIN: I think you can work on all three at once, Tom.

Way to duck the question John! This is an interesting response from the man who is unable to deal with voting on the bailout bill without suspending his campaign. At that time Obama said, the next president needs to “deal with more than one thing at once.” I guess McCain came around. (Obama did obliquely say his priorities were in the order of Energy, health care, entitlements.)

Points against both of them:Entitlements is clearly third on the list. Entitlements is composed of two parts, Social Security and Medicare. I won’t rant about Social Security here, but search this blog for links on it, it is not in trouble. The much larger problem is Medicare. And this is a problem that is solved to a large degree by reforming health care.

Why do we want universal health care anyhow? There are two very different reasons. One is the medical/societal/fairness plank – government should ensure that all of it’s citizens lead long fulfilling lives wherever it can. This is the liberal normative critique, that we should do this because that’s the kind of world we aspire to live in. The other is economic. The current health-care system is a drain on our resources. Currently, we spend more money for less value. Universal health care solves both problems to a large degree. It obviously makes the country a more better, more fair, more secure place to live. But a good universal health care system also saves huge amounts of money. The GOP scuttled attempts to allow the government to negotiate drug prices, this is an area where we could save huge amounts, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. Universal health care will dramatically decrease the needed funding for Medicare/Medicaid, reducing the entitlement problem. I wish either candidate had spoken to this.

Points against Obama: Only one part really bugged me, a tactical error. After the answers on McCain, Obama said he wanted to break the format to rebut McCain. He said:

OBAMA:…Look, I — I want to be very clear about what I said. Nobody called for the invasion of Pakistan. Senator McCain continues to repeat this.

What I said was the same thing that the audience here today heard me say, which is, if Pakistan is unable or unwilling to hunt down bin Laden and take him out, then we should.

Now, that I think has to be our policy, because they are threatening to kill more Americans.

This was a fantastic answer. It calls McCain a liar, gives the accurate facts about his beliefs quickly and concisely. But then he kept gong with the Bomb, Bomb, Iran quote and rambled on about some other stuff and distracted from the core message. He should have stopped after those twenty seconds. His continuation allowed McCain a couple minutes to rebut instead of only having twenty seconds against an extremely powerful message. Obama turned a home run into a single.

Points against Castellanos: (This only make sense if you watched on CNN) Calm down Alex! We don’t need a final analyst score of 172-86-32-6721. It’s simply not necessary to award that many points. Why don’t you take a five minute break?