Obama, McCain speak to AARP
Posted on Sunday, September 7, 2008
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama criticized Republican John McCain’s approach to Social Security on Saturday, an approach he said would undermine the program. McCain said he would preserve Social Security.
Both candidates spoke via satellite to a gathering of the AARP, the nation’s largest group of older Americans.
Obama said McCain’s campaign has suggested trimming Social Security benefits, raising the eligibility age and privatizing a portion of the program.
“Privatizing Social Security was a bad idea when George Bush proposed it, and it’s a bad idea today,” Obama told AARP members in Newark, N. J.
He also said that McCain has called the way Social Security works “an absolute disgrace.” McCain has said he meant that he considered it disgraceful that young workers might eventually receive fewer benefits than current retirees.
McCain said repeatedly that he did not favor privatization of Social Security.
“I’m committed to protecting and preserving Social Security,” he said. “I will protect and preserve it. I won’t hand it off to an unluckier generation — a system that is broken.” McCain said that in seeking a solution, he would be guided by some basic principles: not to raise taxes and to insure that retirees and workers close to retirement would not be affected by any changes. “There may be a role for private investment accounts for younger workers as long as they are not a substitute for insuring the solvency of the system and [it ] does not affect the system,” McCain said.
McCain said he would bring Democrats and Republicans together to find an answer, much as President Reagan and the late House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill did in the early 1980 s with a commission that strengthened Social Security’s solvency for many years. He referred to Reagan as a liberal but quickly corrected himself to say “conservative.” “Every day we delay, the more radical the fix has to be,” McCain said.
Asked how he would save Social Security, protect workers’ pensions and at the same time help Americans save, Mc-Cain audibly sighed and said, “It’s a very tough problem.” All workers pay Social Security payroll taxes on the first $ 102, 000 of their annual income. The money pays for benefits for current retirees and for other government programs. Analysts say the program will begin running short of funds in a few decades if not changed. Obama cited his proposals to place a new Social Security payroll tax on incomes above $ 250, 000 and to eliminate federal income taxes for older people making less than $ 50, 000 a year. He also said he would “allow the government to negotiate with drug companies to lower costs for seniors, and we’ll allow reimportation of drugs from other countries and ensure their safety.” The Wall Street Journal reported in March that McCain’s top aides were “considering cost-of-living adjustment cuts and raising the retirement age as part of their Social Security plan.” McCain has not endorsed or rejected those ideas.
A SWIPE AT PALIN Obama made his first direct criticism of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on Saturday by saying she embraced federal spending earmarks but now says she opposes them. Speaking to 800 people at the Wabash Valley Fairgrounds in Terre Haute, Ind., Obama ridiculed McCain and his running mate, the Alaska governor, for describing themselves as agents of change at last week’s Republican convention. “Don’t be fooled,” Obama told the crowd surrounding him in a large barn. “John McCain’s party with the help of John Mc-Cain has been in charge” for nearly eight years.
“I know the governor of Alaska has been saying she’s change, and that’s great,” Obama said. “She’s a skillful politician. But, you know, when you’ve been taking all these earmarks when it’s convenient, and then suddenly you’re the champion anti-earmark person, that’s not change. Come on ! I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.” McCain has vowed to wipe out earmarks, targeted funding for specific projects that lawmakers put into spending bills. As governor, Palin supported earmarks for a controversial project dubbed the “bridge to nowhere.” But she dropped her support after the state’s likely share of the cost rose. She hung onto $ 27 million to build the approach road to the bridge.
Until Saturday, Obama had refrained from criticizing Palin directly and said only that she, like McCain, would continue the Bush administration’s policies.
The McCain campaign noted that Obama has steered numerous earmarks to his state of Illinois. However, Obama has not been the critic of earmarks that McCain and, more recently Palin, have been.
9 / 11 ANNIVERSARY McCain and Obama said Saturday that they will put aside partisan politics for a joint appearance at ground zero to mark the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The Democratic and Republican presidential nominees said in a statement that they will appear together at the World Trade Center site on Thursday “to honor the memory of each and every American who died” in the 2001 attacks. The campaigns already had agreed to suspend television advertising critical of each other on Sept. 11. The McCain campaign has said it will air no ads that day. “All of us came together on 9 / 11 — not as Democrats or Republicans — but as Americans,” they said. “We were united as one American family. On Thursday we will put aside politics and come together to renew that unity.” A group backing community service, MyGoodDeed. org, wants Sept. 11 to become a national day of voluntary service and had asked that Obama and McCain perform acts of community service instead of campaigning. Nearly 3, 000 people were killed after hijackers directed passenger airplanes into the two buildings in New York and the Pentagon. The death tally includes 40 passengers and crewmen aboard the fourth hijacked plane, United 93. It crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pa., as passengers rushed the cockpit, investigators believe.
PALIN’S POPULARITY The banners, buttons and signs said “McCain-Palin,” but the crowds said something else. “Sa-rah ! Pa-lin !” came the chant at a Colorado Springs rally Saturday moments before McCain took the stage with Palin, a woman virtually unknown to the nation just a week earlier. The day before, thousands at an amphitheater outside Detroit screamed, “Sarah ! Sa-rah ! Sa-rah !” In the short time since Mc-Cain called the 44-year-old f irst-term governor out of Alaska and to a national stage as his running mate, Palin has become an instant celebrity. And since her speech at the Republican National Convention, watched by more than 40 million Americans, she is emerging as the main attraction for many voters at their campaign stops.
McCain has sought to portray Palin as a bulldog who will help him “shake things up” on Capitol Hill.
Perhaps recognizing the excitement she is generating, the McCain campaign was planning to keep Palin with McCain for several more days, rather than dispatch her to campaign by herself, as had first been discussed.
On Saturday, McCain and Palin rode their post-convention wave into the competitive West, where Democrats have made recent gains in traditional Republican strongholds.
After a day of talking up economic themes in the Midwest, the pair attracted thousands at a rally in Colorado Springs, a city at the foot of Pikes Peak that is home to many conservatives and military families. The campaigners were to head later to New Mexico. Information for this article was contributed by Charles Babington, Terence Hunt and Sara Kugler of The Associated Press.
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