Dartblog

A dear friend in Manhattan attended a Columbia symposium on economics on Monday. What, you ask, set this one apart from the dozens other economic symposia offered, daily, in corners of New York? At Columbia on Monday, it was John McCain’s economist versus Barack Obama’s economist.

The common citizen, politically engaged as the season demands, gathers, at the moment, that the only difference between the Obama and the McCain economic policies is that John McCain wants to give tax breaks only to “big corporations,” while Barack Obama wants to give them to “95% of Americans.” They can be forgiven this misapprehension: Barack Obama persistently, intentionally, and convincingly misrepresents his own philosophy, after all. In point of fact, as was revealed Monday night in New York, the policies of Barack Obama are far, far more radical than he lets on.

My correspondent writes:

A friend of mine who work in the economics department at Columbia organized a high-profile debate between the chief economic policy advisors to the two presidential candidates. This took place last evening at Columbia in front of a full house of New York “intelligentsia” and the media.

As you will see, Obama’s advisor is completely divorced from a grounded understanding of economic principles, but I was especially encouraged by the performance of McCain’s advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who used to run the Congressional Budget Office, as well as the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.

You don’t have to watch the whole thing - definitely fast forward through Lee Bollinger’s introductory remarks — but you might especially appreciate the last third of the exchange, in which Holtz-Eakin does an amazing job attacking Obama on NAFTA and gives very compelling closing remarks.

I feel much, much more enthusiastic about my McCain vote, which I am proudly casting via absentee ballot today.