Obama is getting desperate. He’s now trying to malign John McCain because he owns several houses, insinuating that because he’s wealthy he’s too different from and out of touch with the typical American, so he shouldn’t be trusted. This, folks, is typical socialist propaganda. Hate those who have more. Don’t trust those who have more. And it’s pretty ironic coming from a man whose charitable giving as a percent of his income doesn’t come close to McCain’s, as Jay Tea pointed out earlier today.
Well, thanks to their having released their tax returns, we have a pretty good idea.
In the years 2000 through 2007, Barack Obama donated between 0.4% and 6.1% of his net income to charitable causes.
McCain released his 2006 and 2007 tax returns, and in those years he gave 28.6% and 27.3% of his income to charitable causes.
So it seems to me that Obama’s saying that America should be more like John McCain, and less like Barack Obama.
It certainly does.
With Obama’s “hate John McCain because he’s rich” ad, he’s insinuating that owning a number of houses – in realty, the McCains own a variety of investment properties, which accounts for John McCain’s not being able to give precise number – is somehow a character flaw. I couldn’t disagree more. I would argue this is a character flaw: allowing your brother to whither away in a hut in Nairobi, Kenya, while you’re living the good life in America.
Contrast that with John and Cindy McCain who, fifteen years ago, adopted a 5 week old baby girl with a cleft palate from Sister Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. From the Wall Street Journal:
[I]n 1991 Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands. The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life, so Mrs. McCain brought the child home to America with her. She was met at the airport by her husband, who asked what all this was about.
Mrs. McCain replied that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation. “I hope she can stay with us,” she told her husband. Mr. McCain agreed. Today that child is their teenage daughter Bridget.
I was aware of this story. What I did not know, and what I learned from Doris, is that there was a second infant Mrs. McCain brought back. She ended up being adopted by a young McCain aide and his wife.
“We were called at midnight by Cindy,” Wes Gullett remembers, and “five days later we met our new daughter Nicki at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport.” Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. Mr. Gullett told me, “I never saw a hospital bill” for her care.
Obama’s attempt to smear McCain as being unfit to be president because he owns a number of investment properties is more of a reflection on Senator Obama and how out of touch he is with the typical American. How so? I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that the vast majority of Americans who own real estate bought it themselves, just like the McCains, instead of with the help of convicted felons like Tony Rezko.
Update: Mark Hemingway at The Corner thinks Obama’s ad in which he brings up the McCains’ homes isn’t the best tactic for him:
But again, why does Obama want to make an issue of McCain’s houses? He’s just opening himself up. McCain (or Cindy at least) paid for his houses — Obama bought his with help from someone who was just found guilty of six counts of wire fraud, six counts of mail fraud, two counts of corrupt solicitation, and two counts of money laundering.
Update II: Scrapiron has the retort of the day:
Simple answer for McCain. I own dozens of homes, none of which was purchased with the assistance of organized crime.
Update III: La Shawn Barber makes a great point about Barack and his brother George:
Assuming he didn’t know how his brother was living (benefit of the doubt, and all that), I wonder what Barack Obama will do to help him now, in light of his “we still don’t spend enough time thinking about the least of these” lecture on Saturday at the Saddleback Civil Forum.
