His town hall is streaming on CNN.com. He's about to go into details about it now.
Comments are below the fold, but you can watch it yourself.
* He was surprised at Bush hitting a new low.
* Presidents don't play with domestic politics when abroad.
* Obama is linking Bush to McCain now, and pointing out where McCain was being inconsistent in saying he'd play nice in the morning and continuing the nonsense in the afternoon.
Obama is being forceful and pretty angry (albeit controlled). It's good to see emotion.
"If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate on protecting America, that's a debate I'll be glad to have happen."
*Now linking Iraq to the problem, and continues to talk about Bush and McCain as one person policy-wise. It's effective.
"Those are the failed policies that John McCain wants to double down on." He still hasn't spelled out one substantial difference he has with Bush on foreign policy. Just keep tying them.
He called McCain on the video that is linked here!
"Our Iran policy is a complete failure... I'm running to change course, not continue George Bush's course"
Bush's SoS calls for talks with Iran, "I don't know if George Bush is calling his own SoS an appeaser."
He mocked McCain on his 2013 prediction because McCain didn't say how the troops are coming home.
The difference between Obama vs Clinton and Obama vs McCain is huge.
OK, we're now talking about domestic issues. Obama's rebuke was powerful. He might lose, but he will NOT be swiftboated.
There was a lot about farm policy, and now we're into the town hall part of the meeting.
Question 1 - How can we balance the budget?
Answer: George Bush ran up almost as much debt as all of the rest of the presidents combined. Not going to be easy. Going into Pay/Go. He gave a lot of examples to explain how that works. You want to know why I love this candidate? He kept talking about trade offs. If you want X, you have to sacrifice Y. It's like we can be trusted with rational arguments. Step 2 is ending the Iraq war. Step 3 - earmarks.
Question 2 - Helping women who want to care for their children and still work. How can you maintain optimism?
Answer - Equal pay for equal work (which got a huge cheer). Women carry more of a burden with childrearing because men don't help as much as they think; we need more childcare.
Heh, while talking about pay inequality with CEO's, he got interrupted with an air raid siren. He blamed Bush for the timing. He just praised Clinton (Bill) again.
Question 3 - Gas prices and something rambling about unions.
Answer - Explaining why the gas tax holiday won't work.
...sorry for the lack of updates, but I had to get some work done here. The one thing that I want to point out here though is that Obama is leading the Republicans into a trap. I think they really believe that Obama is an empty suit. Once you get him into a town hall setting though, he can talk in detail on pretty much anything.