Column: McCain's Debate Strategy: Slander Now, Secede Later

This story was written by Shane Springer, Indiana Daily Student

For those of you who watched the presidential debate last Friday, you no doubt witnessed firsthand the Straight Talk slandering express that is the McCain campaign.

The event was more of a long-running succession of campaign attack ads than it was a debate. A poster child for tax breaks to Big Oil, McCain once again showed the nation just how out of touch and out of date he is in respect to running this great country of ours.

McCain used the duration of the debate to hurl dozens of charges and allegations toward Barack Obama.

After researching some of these allegations, I discovered just as I expected that the allegations were largely untrue.

When the issue of tax burdens on middle class families arose, McCain stated, He has voted in the United States Senate to increase taxes on people who make as low as $42,000 a year.

And thats a fact, McCain said. You can look it up.

Look it up, you say? Well this columnist did just that. According to Factcheck.org, a political analysis Web site that offers the voting track record of every United States senator since their inception into office, my findings were just the opposite.

In March, Obama submitted a tax proposal that showed absolutely zero increases on taxes for anyone earning less than $250,000 a year.

McCain, on the other hand, proposed a tax plan that, according to the Center for American Progress, would grace oil companies with $4 billion in tax breaks by lowering the corporate income tax from 35 percent to 25 percent.

Come on, John! You had to have foreseen that one coming back to bite you.

When the issue of health care was brought up, McCain stuck to his straight talk of misleading by stating, I want to make sure that were not just handing the health care system over to the federal government which would ultimately happen under Senator Obamas health care plan.

Really, John? Did you even read Obamas proposal? You obviously did not, so let me help you out.

Obama proposed keeping the current private insurance system intact while creating a National Health Insurance Exchange to provide regulation and oversight. The sole job of the Insurance Exchange would be to regulate the private insurance market and publicize plan details and costs. And in case you havent been paying attention to the recent calamity on Wall Street, I think we all can agree a little regulation might not be such a bad idea.

These are just a few examples of the straight talk we can expect from the McCain campaign in the forthcoming presidential debates.

Unfortunately there is not enough room in this column to sort through them all, so please do a little fact-finding of your own. The results might or might not surprise you, but at least youll know the truth.