Why I am looking forward to the debates

For once I think the debates are actually going to matter and I look forward to Obama locking in swing voters with solid debate performances. Why am I so confident that Obama will do well in the debates? Well I think it will give him an opportunity to highlight the glaring holes in McCain's arguments. For example today we have John McCain saying, 

 "Wall Street has betrayed us. They've broken the social contract between capitalism and the average citizen and the worker... This is a result of excess and greed and corruption...

"The first thing you do is you address this issue of the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. It was designed for the 1930s. Now we have an instantaneous financial system that's global in nature and it's not compartmentalized. Look at the Stock Exchange today as to what it was even 20 or 30 years ago. So you've got to fix that and also, very frankly, people were asleep at the switch. I don't think there's any doubt about that."

When John McCain says such a thing in the debates the response that should come from Barack Obama is very clear and very direct. Something along the lines of, "Well that's interesting because for the last decade John McCain has been one of the biggest proponents of handing over the safety net pensions for American workers (otherwise known as Social Security) to the very same people that he know decries as greedy and corrupt." 

There are other issues that resonate along these same lines as well, see health care.