Nature magazine recently published an article that analyzed the position on and approach towards science of the two major party presidential candidates.
As one excerpt, it’s interesting to compare Obama’s Science and Technology team of advisers with McCain’s:
Obama’s:
Dan Kammen, University of California, Berkeley
Don Lamb, University of Chicago
Gil Omenn, University of Michigan
Henry Kelly, President, Federation of American Scientists
Sharon Long, Stanford University
Jason Grumet, Bipartisan Policy Center
Harold Varmus, (Nobel) Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
McCain’s:
James Schlesinger, Former secretary of defense
James Woolsey, Former Central Intelligence Agency director
Robert McFarlane, Former national security adviser
Carly Fiorina, Former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard
Meg Whitman, Former chief executive of eBay
On the one hand we have real scientists. On the other hand, former CIA agents and former CEOs.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Don // Sep 30, 2008 at 6:36 am
I like to think of them as scientists who were able to get ahead in life instead of being stuck in academia.
I suspect your source is leaving out some actual scientist on McCain’s team.
How about you post the financial advisers from both sides. Don’t forget to include Tony Rezko and that former CEO of Freddie Mac.
2 Daryl // Sep 30, 2008 at 3:44 pm
According to Bloomberg and other sites, the latest source of financial advice for the two candidates I can find are:
Obama:
Chief adviser: Jason Furman who served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy in the Clinton Administration, and Senior Economic Adviser to the Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Also, one-time Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who won praise a decade ago for helping avert other potential meltdowns, and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, credited with halting the raging inflation of the
late-1970s and early-’80s.
McCain:
Main adviser is Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin Former Director, Congressional Budget Office. He also gets advice from Harvard economics Professor Martin Feldstein, (a onetime adviser to President Ronald Reagan), Stanford University economist John Taylor and former Hewlett- Packard Co. Chief Executive Carly Fiorina.
With the exception of Fiorina who was fired from HP (and said “Well, I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation.“), they both seem like reasonable teams. In this case McCain is leaning more towards academia than Obama, but the advisers for both teams seem pretty strong.
When you said “Freddie Mac”, if you mean Franklin Raines of “Fannie Mae”, any significant connection between him and Obama has been thoroughly debunked.
Rezko was never an adviser to Obama. If you’re just trying to throw some more irrelevant dirt into the conversation, any wrongdoing by Obama has long been debunked.
That would be like me bringing up Keating, or Phil Gramm, or gambling, but I wouldn’t do that!
3 Don // Sep 30, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I can’t believe you’re linking to The Washington Post as a debunk link! Franklin Raines has been an advisor of Obama. Rezko helped Obama when he bought his house. And while we’re at it how about Jim Johnson who was a CEO of Fannie Mae and ended up stepping down from Obama’s VP vetting team.
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=75998
You know we can sling mud at each other’s candidate’s people until the election.
4 Daryl // Sep 30, 2008 at 10:29 pm
How did we get from Science Advisors to the VP Vetting team? I wasn’t really looking for a machine gun attack at either candidate.
I thought it was interesting to get an idea how the candidates were being advised on science. Personally, I prefer a team made up of scientists who spend their lives in research. I gather from your comments that you prefer non-academics.
As you say, we could sling mud at the candidates and their teams until and even after the election.
But let me ask you this: Do you truly claim that if Obama was one of the Keating Five that you would never mention it, or if McCain were the one who had had dealings with Rezko that you would complain about it? Or do you admit that you look for and emphasize things that favor your candidate and defame the opponent, almost exclusively?
5 Don // Oct 1, 2008 at 5:21 am
DUH! Now you’re starting to understand how the game is played. 😉
6 Don // Oct 1, 2008 at 7:28 am
And no disrespect intended. But yeah, that’s what most of us do. We tend to ignore the foibles of our candidates.
7 Don // Oct 1, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Another way to look at it is Obama has Scientists while McCain has Technologists.
8 Daryl // Oct 3, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I’ve started to reply to this about 3 times, but wasn’t sure whether I should respond with sarcasm, innocence or indignation. I’ve decided to go with sarcasm.
Silly, me! Now I understand. I had thought that we were presenting our understanding of “the way things are” filtered through our biases and ignorance, expecting that others with a different perspective would point out the errors or inconsistencies and agree with our strong points, with the goal of improving everyone’s understanding of reality.
Now I see that it’s more like being a sports fan, where your team is always right and to point out any failing in your athletes is to be the dreaded “fair weather fan”.
Or like a religious zealot who will stick by his faith no matter how much conflicting evidence is put in front of him.
Silly me!
9 Don // Oct 3, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Sarcasm was the ticket on that one. You hit it out of the park!