"Ladies and gentlemen, your kitchen table is like mine. You sit there at night before you put the kids -- after you put the kids to bed and you talk, you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's not a worry John McCain has to worry about. It's a pretty hard experience. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at."
For that kind of poor folk,I'm afraid the rest of us really can't help by cutting their taxes. So John McCain is just going to have to endorse the Obama proposal: cut taxes for everyone making up to about $125,000 a year, and let the billionaires cope.
"Meg Whitman, [the CEO of eBay]. Meg Whitman, 12 years ago, there were five employees. Today, they're 1.5 million people that make a living off eBay in America, in the world. It's one of these great American success stories."
Above is John McCain's answer to Pastor Rick Warren, in part, concerning who he'd take advice from. So let's match Ms.Whitman's former company -- she is now the former CEO of eBay and I'm eager to say she is a fine business leader -- against John McCain's tech policy.
Under McCain's plan, if eBay were to fire a thousand engineers doing R&D, it would still get a tax credit of 10% of wages of the remaining engineers doing R&D. In other words, eBay would be paid cash even while it was downsizing its work force.
I think the Rick Warren discussion/debate showed the following:
1. John McCain is not reluctant to discuss his POW experience; I don't think he should be, but I don't think reporters can write any more that he is reluctant to express himself on this topic.
2. Barack Obama is a Christian -- through and through. He has read and thought about Christianity and showed a deeper understanding of a Christian way of approaching his life and his goals than his opponent did. For example, the problem of evil and the notion of good are each topics on which his answers were more profound than John McCain's.
3. Barack Obama ought to be very acceptable as a President to the members of Rick Warren's community. Most of them are comfortable, I suspect, with the conventional nostrums of the Republicans: lower taxes, bellicose language about evil enemies, and so forth. But Obama, as opposed to McCain, talked about purpose, sacrifice, difficulty, community, caring, and a commitment to the world. In fact, these are the major emerging themes in Pastor Warren's community.
