Some People Fight Fire with Fire, but Professionals Use Water

Just as I predicted yesterday, the McCain campaign revved up its personal attacks on Barack Obama. John McCain is raising questions about Obama's background and truthfulness in an attempt to move away from the country's current economic crisis - a crisis he couldn't help solve and a crisis that his politics helped create.

Every politician stretches the truth. They generalize the position of their opponent to illuminate general political differences. Both camps in this campaign are guilty as charged for these types of actions. What McCain is doing now, and what I am glad that Obama is throwing back in his face with his "Keating Five" commercial, is despicable and dishonorable. He is attempting to tie Obama to a former radical, bringing up Revered Jeremiah Wright again and claiming that the people need to know what Obama has accomplished in politics.

Here is what Obama has done in the United States Senate:

• Senator Obama has sponsored or co-sponsored 570 bills in the 109th and 110th Congress.


• Senator Obama has sponsored or co-sponsored 15 bills that have become LAW since he joined the Senate in 2005.


• Senator Obama has also introduced amendments to 50 bills, of which 16 were adopted by the Senate.

Most of his legislative effort has been in the area of Energy Efficiency and Climate Change (25 bills), health care (21 bills) and public health (20 bills), consumer protection/labor (14 bills), the needs of Veterans and the Armed Forces (13 bills), Congressional Ethics and Accountability (12 bills), Foreign Policy (10 bills) Voting and Elections (9 bills), Education (7 bills), Hurricane Katrina Relief (6), the Environment (5 bills), Homeland Security (4 bills), and discrimination (4 bills).

McCain is the lead sponsor of 38 pieces of legislation during the 110th Congress, none of which have been referred to the Banking panel, according to a review of Thomas, a congressional website. Obama, on the other hand, has introduced 130 measures during this Congress. Five of Obama’s stand alone bills fall within the Banking Committee's jurisdiction, including 1) calls for bolstering housing assistance for veterans, 2) amending the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 to provide shareholders with an advisory vote on executive compensation, 3)halting mortgage transactions that promote fraud, 4) authorizing local and state governments to crack down on companies that invest in Iran's energy sector and 5) authorizing a pilot program to prevent at-risk veterans from becoming homeless. So, who's really trying to accomplish something and who is just collecting a salary from the American people?

Governor Palin said this on the campaign trail recently: "Because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that - with, I don't know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn't get up and leave - to me, that does say something about character." Really? What about your character? Your husband was a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party from 1995 to 2002 and you both submitted a video greeting for the AIP's convention this year despite the fact that the AIP founder said this: "I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."

Politicians run into all kinds of people in their line of work - some of them are sane and some are demented, some are manipulative and some are manipulated. Just because Obama knows a political radical from the 1970s doesn't make him a militant any more than Governor Palin's association with a group that would like to secede from the United States makes her a traitor.