Republican Follies

Obama is extraordinarily lucky in his selection of opponents this time around. Though hard to believe, the Republican Party is more internally divided than the Democrats, though the individual divisions have more ideological and participatory coherence than their counterparts in the Democratic Party.

Money, Morality and Mittens

I've been following some of the back and forth in the MSM and the blogosphere about Mitt Romney, what did or did not happen with Bain and what it tells - or fails to tell - us about the Mittster. The crude analysis is that Bain robbed a certain company blind in the 90s and this tells us Romney is a Bad Guy, a vulture capitalist. OMG even Newt tells us it's true!!!!!

To me, it's another round of reducing political judgment to matters of morality.

Republican Choices

It's a good thing I had some parsnips to roast for dinner so I'd have something sweet to go with the bitter reporting by the Incomparable One.

Voices in His Head

A member of my family is paranoid schizophrenic. As I read about Jared Loughner, I think of this relative. There are many points of congruence - the decent but incomplete education, a fascination with intellectual discourse, a seemingly coherent exterior, a deep core of paranoia.

A familiarity with firearms.

No Such Thing as an Innocent Leak

One of the problems with the hoo-hah surrounding the release of the State Dept. documents is that there has been little attempt from any quarter to distinguish the different effects resulting from the same acts. As long as everything is connected to everything else and thus is declared good/bad as a piece, we won't understand the real impact of this event.

Let's make one thing really clear - the documents have been released. They are not just on wikileaks. Every government with an internet connection has downloaded the complete set (Just in time for the holidays!), there are mirrors, copies, bit torrents, etc., available for anyone with a modicum of computer savvy, and there are now malware emails out there enticing the unwary into clicking on the link to get the documents and actually getting some lovely bit of malicious software instead. That's how you know you've arrived - you're famous enough to be used as spam-bait. No power can reverse this distribution of information. For good or ill, they are now part of the public discourse. What remains is to analyze what has been set in motion.

Oh, Happy Day!

The Bug Man has been convicted.

Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress -- was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.

Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname "the Hammer," used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.

Such a nice thing to read in the paper.

Anglachel

The San Diego Experiment

San Diego, California, is a place to keep an eye on as it serves as a laboratory for Movement Conservative experiments in economic malfeasance and runaway plutocracy, helped along by a marvelously kleptocratic and corrupt Democratic contingent. This is the mess Pete Wilson built. The biggest experiment underway right now is how to use Republican controlled major municipalities to eliminate any kind of retirement for workers except 401(k)s. They just might get away with it.

The City of San Diego stopped participating in Social Security system in 1982, when Pete Wilson was mayor, in exchange for a city-funded retirement pension and health care package. City employees do not pay into Social Security or Medicare. The current retirement system is a slightly better than Social Security deal for ordinary long-term employees. Short term employees (less than 10 years of employment) are not vested, so it is a worse deal. For a small number of very long term employees who are at the top of the civil service ladder, especially those in Police, Fire or Life Guard positions, it is a much better deal than Social Security. The people at the top have more opportunities to game the system and maximize their eventual payout. In short, business as usual for the oligarchic kleptocracy.

Primary Objective

I've been reading lots of yak-yak in the blogosphere about how there needs to be a primary challenge to Obama. OK, let's talk about that in some real terms. For shits and giggles, we'll toss in 3rd party/independent challenges, too. This gives us two different modes of challenge, one internal to a party and another intended to cut across institutional coalitions.

There are a few models of what an internal challenge can look like. The classic is a moderately powerful insider taking a run at an incumbent who is clearly failing or is perceived to be weak. In recent times, that gives us Teddy Kennedy's challenge to Carter, Bill Bradley's challenge to Gore, who, as Vice-President, was the default choice for the nomination on the Democratic side, and Ronald Reagan's 1976 challenge to Ford and Pat Buchanan's 1992 challenge to Bush I for the Republicans.

Dependencies

If the Incomparable Bob Somerby were truly just a "crank", as the Blogger Boyz would have you believe, then they would not feel so threatened by him.

Bob is not an easy blogger to read. He has an ornate, almost baroque, manner of writing that grates. He is repetitive and could benefit from an editor to help him get to the point. Sometimes the connections to Gore are a bit of a stretch. The sarcasm gets laid on with a trowel instead of a butter knife.

But what makes me wade through the stylistic annoyances is the simple fact that Bob Somerby is incomparable because he always tells the truth. With documentation. And he tells the truth about all participants in the media atrocities, even those ostensibly on his side, the nominal allies.

Somerby has a fundamental argument about the treatment of liberals (aside - I love that Somerby is unafraid to say "liberal" as a solid and respectable political stance.) and the Democratic Party by the media that he alludes to, but does not flatly state, preferring to demonstrate than to assert. He does it again in his rejoinder to Kevin Drum in todays post, "We’ll tell the truth starting now, Kevin says. To our mind, that isn’t enough," where he gives Kevin Drum sincere praise and then uses Drum's excuses to get into his real concern (My emphasis throughout):

If we’re talking about media treatment of Gore, “occasional passing references” won’t really be “fine;” most often, such references will be met with incomprehension by voters who have never heard a word about any such episode. ... In this way, the liberal silence of the Clinton-Gore era—a silence Kevin doesn’t explain—has created a world where it’s very hard for liberals to mention such matters. And of course, it wasn’t just the War Against Gore which fell down the well of career liberal silence; a long string of Major Dems have been treated rather oddly by the mainstream press in the past sixteen years. (Or do you believe that the Clintons are murderers?) Before the Drum-acknowledged “War Against Gore,” we had six or seven years of pseudo-scandals directed at Bill Clinton—and at his wife. But uh-oh! Career liberals ran and hid then too—and they ran and hid in 2007 when Hillary Clinton was subjected to a good deal of mainstream attack. Tim Russert had been field-dressing Big Dems for years when he waylaid Clinton during that October 2007 debate (along with his helpmate, Brian Williams). But career liberals had rarely mentioned such conduct—and few career liberals mentioned the trashing Russert gave Clinton that night.

Especially given the history which followed, the mainstream press corps’ War Against Gore has turned out to be the most consequential chapter in this unfortunate story. But career liberals rolled over and died in the face of such conduct, right through this year’s primary season! In fact, career liberals have an extensive history of rolling over and accepting such conduct. Their acquiescence extends well past the War Against Gore, right up into the present. ...

For reason Kevin didn’t explain, career liberals sat out the War Against Gore—and the wars against both Clintons, and much of the nonsense aimed at John Edwards. Career liberals also stared into space as the mainstream press corps spent a decade making a hero of Saint John McCain; christened Giuliani as “America’s Mayor;” and kept insisting that Bush 43 was a plain-spoken fellow who says what he means, a pose it maintained until his dissembling and gruesome judgment had largely destroyed the known world. On the whole, the career liberal world sat and stared during all these mainstream press misadventures. By way of contrast, we discussed them in real time. We started discussing the War Against Gore the week it began; simultaneously, we discussed the sanctification of McCain in detail. In all candor, this makes it a bit rich to be lectured by Kevin—whose work we do in fact greatly admire—about the best way for the liberal world to move ahead now with these themes. How about a little straight talk? Kevin has now worked for two journals which did and said virtually nothing about these matters in real time. We’d prefer to see him explain this abject past silence, rather than lecture us about future strategies—lecture us, the ones who were right, by his own (gracious) admission.

Yes, it’s hard to raise these matters now, several years after the fact. Kevin tells us that “occasional passing references are fine.” But someone needs to tell Naomi Judd (and a hundred million others) about her country’s actual history. Let’s be clear: When Kevin discusses the War Against Gore (or the preceding war on the Clintons), he’s discussing essential American history—history his colleagues avoided like the plague when it was actually happening. In our view, it falls to Kevin and his colleagues to figure out how to adjust for that error—the error which Kevin acknowledges. (For the record, he wasn’t a journalist at the time.) But make no mistake: This is major, consequential American history—history which changed the course of world affairs. It just doesn’t work for Kevin to say that it’s too late to bring it up now.

We’ll tell the truth from now on, Kevin says. We don’t think that’s quite enough. ...

Here’s the thing you must understand if you want to see how this syndrome works: Your career liberal world is closely tied to the world of the Village press corps. They want to work and play (and be paid) in that world; they want to be honored as Village citizens. As a result, they keep their mouths shut when Palin is pimped—like the great Saint McCain before her. You will not see them challenge Robinson, or ask him why he wrote such nonsense. Nor will you see them write the history of a perfect cretin like Matthews. You see, they want to play Hardball too. It’s the way career libs build careers.

We know, we know—you want to believe that you play on a one-for-all liberal/progressive team. But you have been sold, a million times, by Kevin’s colleagues (we don’t include Kevin, out on the far coast).

They want to play Hardball, too.

Somerby is talking most directly about the Blogger Boyz, but his criticism is not limited to PB 1.0. He is talking about the people who are the regulars on the talking heads circuit. He's talking about the second tier bureaucrats who traded pseudo-scandal for insider notoriety. He's talking about the columnists in papers and magazines, particularly the political magazines and politicized culture purveyors. He's talking about the current leadership of the party.

His thesis is simple and devastating: There can be no liberal politics as long as the public voices and faces of liberalism, the career liberals, want to be "honored as Village citizens." They place Village citizenship above actual citizenship, allying themselves with this power elite against the nation.

This is a deeper problem than mere careerism. If it were only the case that the Josh Marshalls and Young Ezras and Big Media Matts of Left Blogistan wanted to move out of their cheap digs and get paying jobs with health benefits and 401(k) plans, that would be easy enough to isolate. Kiss up, kick down, good riddance to ya.

What Bob identifies is that the career liberals, those people whose business it should be to describe, define, and implement a liberal vision for the nation, have no critical distance from or desire to remain independent of The Village, the clique and culture that is enamored of winners, power, and domination, and who regard national politics as their personal playground. The career liberals willingly place themselves in a dependent relationship to that power elite and mold their behavior, opinions and goals to be in accord with what The Village is willing to tolerate.

Hence Somerby's emphasis on Gore. Gore's stolen presidency has changed the course of human affairs dramatically for the worse. This was an enormous historic event, one that had devastating consequences for the nation and the world, and the career liberals have done their best to sweep it under the rug. Don't be sore losers! It's old history. Nobody cares about that stuff anymore. The focus on Gore is the stand in for a focus on the fate of the nation. Here was one of the finest people our nation has produced, and he was reduced to the butt of jokes by his nominal allies in exchange for the opportunity to munch cocktail weenies with Tim Russert. The trashing of the Clintons, who Somerby has less emotional attachment to, is coming to greater prominence in his posts as he limns an identical pattern of behavior. We know this narrative, we know how it is used to dismantle our institutions and the fabric of our government and, this time, we knew full well what we were doing.

The willingness of the career liberals to throw away the criminal treatment of three of the strongest actors in liberal politics Somerby attributes to the careerists' willingness to set aside truth to gain entry to the Village. How does Somerby formulate it? "The instinctive refusal to tell the truth lies at the heart of their culture."

This is not merely a description of the MSM. This is Bob's diagnosis of the disease that has claimed the ostensible left.

Kevin kinda gets it when he says we need to complain about media misbehavior today, but not bother with trying to defend Gore "in the last century," as if we were discussing newspaper articles about Al Smith. Gore remains a potent national figure who could very well have run in 2004 or this year, but who would have been subjected to exactly the treatment Kevin rolls his eyes at. It is exactly the behavior we saw this year against Hillary, so it isn't old news at all. It isn't news - it is a pattern of behavior, an aggressor/appeaser dependency between the right-wing owned MSM and the career liberals who want to be Kewl Kids and not be villified in the papers.

The liberal left needs to establish an oppositional relationship with the MSM, just as the Movement Conservatives have done, and treat them not as allies, but as adversaries.

Anglachel

Krugman on Brown and Paulson

I got the Monday column a little early. The Krug is enthused about the measures PM Gordon Brown is taking for the UK and wonders why our government can't get its act together. He has a very nice summation of why the bursting housing bubble is causing such widespread damage:

What is the nature of the crisis? The details can be insanely complex, but the basics are fairly simple. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to large losses for anyone who bought assets backed by mortgage payments; these losses have left many financial institutions with too much debt and too little capital to provide the credit the economy needs; troubled financial institutions have tried to meet their debts and increase their capital by selling assets, but this has driven asset prices down, reducing their capital even further.

Short and sweet. He then explains why HOLC/HOME alone cannot get us out of this pickle:

What can be done to stem the crisis? Aid to homeowners, though desirable, can’t prevent large losses on bad loans, and in any case will take effect too slowly to help in the current panic. The natural thing to do, then — and the solution adopted in many previous financial crises — is to deal with the problem of inadequate financial capital by having governments provide financial institutions with more capital in return for a share of ownership.

So, fast action by pumping in capital with strings attached to get the banks ready to begin cleaning out the Augean Stables of their mortage realted activities. In my opinion, the only reason to buy the actual assets is to stitch mortgages back together from the securities and make the speculators eat the loss when HOLC/HOME gets underway.

My suggestion is that the mortgages that get written down are flagged in some way such that if the property is sold prior to the end of the mortgage, the government gets to take any appreciation on the house up to the amount of the original loan that got the lender in such trouble. Why, especially if the loan has been renegotiated? To address moral hazard and prevent profiteering. You have to hold the asset full term or else you pay a big penalty on profits, kinda like a 401(k). By making it end with the completion of the contract, you enable to owner to pass on the increased value to the next generation or reap the benefits of their own patience. Thus, wealth building without rewarding bad behavior.

Back to Krugman. He talks about what Gordon Brown is doing (go read the piece, it's got a lot of interesting observations) and then hauls up Hanky Panky Paulson for some general slapping:

As I said, we still don’t know whether these moves will work. But policy is, finally, being driven by a clear view of what needs to be done. Which raises the question, why did that clear view have to come from London rather than Washington?

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Paulson’s initial response was distorted by ideology. Remember, he works for an administration whose philosophy of government can be summed up as “private good, public bad,” which must have made it hard to face up to the need for partial government ownership of the financial sector.

I also wonder how much the Femafication of government under President Bush contributed to Mr. Paulson’s fumble. All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn’t making sense.

I think that's a pretty good bet. Incompetance rising to the highest level concomitant with complete devotion to the greed mentality of the Bushies. But I think there's another reason running around here which is the desire to shit the bed so badly that nothing can make it useable again. The more I look at the Hanky Panky, particularly with the more recent rumors that Paulson will not buy preferred shares when injecting capital, wanting to give his Merry Bankster buddies all the money and none of the accountability, the more I think this cannot be by accident. This is about leaving a broken and bankrupt system behind with the government's hands tied.

You don't have to be smart to be vindictive.

Anglachel

Downticket

I can't offer any better thinking about the economics side of the Hanky Panky than can be had on Calculated Risk, Krugman, RGE Monitor (Roubini), Interfluidity, naked capitalism and Angry Bear (just to name my favorites), so I won't try. Also, the crew at Corrente is keeping the political commentary coming fast and furious, so pop on over for a smorgasbord of write ups.

In most cases, these various analyses tend to focus on the leadership and their machinations. I want to look a little more closely at the rank and file of the House and what the vote there may indicate.

I've been studying the interactive map at the New York Times, counting up not just how many votes were cast by which party members, but also at geographic distribution. After all, November is not a national election day. It is a day of elections across the nation. Variations between states and regions of states matters.

First let's start with the observation that 19 seats is what the Republicans need to gain to take back the House. As noted by Lambert, there are 31 contested seats in the House this year (not all held by Democrats, of course) and this vote was pretty damn important to the millions of extremely engaged citizens keeping tabs of on the proceedings. There were a truckload of nervous Congress critters on both sides of the aisle this morning.

I took numbers off the NYT map (and I'm having a little problem getting my numbers to add up exactly from the map count. I have one too many Dem yes votes, 2 too few Rep yes votes, 1 too few Dem no votes and one too many Rep no votes) to look at the information from various perspectives.

Of the four regions, only the Northeast (CT, DE, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT) with 72% of their representatives being Democratic voted more than 50% for the measure, voting 65% yes and 35% no (I'm rounding).

The table shows the % of representative by regions by party affilaition, the total percentage of yes and no votes for that region, then the percent of each party what voted yes or no.

Region	Dem	Rep	Yes	No	%Dem Yes	%Dem No	%Rep Yes	%Rep No
Northeast	75%	25%	65%	35%	73%	27%	43%	57%
South	42%	58%	41%	59%	60%	40%	27%	73%
Midwest	50%	50%	43%	57%	57%	43%	28%	72%
West	58%	42%	44%	56%	47%	53%	39%	61%

The Northeast Democrats held their percentages best with the least vote defections. This makes sense given the dominance of the New York delegation. What is perhaps suprising given the hatred the Unity Democrats have for Southerners, the Southern Democratic delegation held its numbers next highest, though 13% below the Northeast delegation. In the Midwest, the Democrats saw a greater decline among their numbers compared to the South than did the Republicans. This says to me that Democratic support in the Midwest is softer than support in the South, and representatives feel a greater need to cater to constituents than do Southern representatives. The shocking defections were in the West, where Republican opposition was only a few percentages higher than in the Northeast, while Democratic defections were 26% higher than their Northeastern counterparts. The majority of Western Democratic representatives voted against the measure.

The take away from this data for me is that Democrats in the Midwest and West are vulnerable and feel a need to shore up support. Any perusal of the comment threads on econoblogs show a significant percentage of posters declaring that they will vote against critters who voted "Yes". As I pointed out in the debate post a few days ago, these are mostly Independent white male voters, the kind who are supposed to provide the margin of victory in elections.

What this tells me is that the Democratic leadership is risking losing their majority in the House by forcing such an unpopular and incendiary measure to a vote 5 weeks before the election. The bill will be kept in the public eye with votes for at least another week, and it will be the single most salient issue in the final campaign push nationwide. People are very aware of the connection between the big banks and the foreclosure epidemic. In San Diego, foreclosures and short sales dominate the housing market. The rental market is also affected as landlords lose the houses to foreclosures and renters face a contracting pool of available units. The mortgage meltdown is real, is hurting a lot of people who are not necessarily home owners (anybody whose income depended on home sales), and is going to motivate voters more than culture clash issues.

Simply put, when I'm going broke, I don't like the people who ripped me off to get bailed out.

If the Harry and Barney and Hank and Nancy movie insists on forcing senators to cast a vote on this bill, they are asking for trouble. A "Yes" vote by a Senator facing an election might cause a voter backlash. A "No" vote is a no confidence vote against the leadership, though it might please constituents. A "No" vote for a Republican in a contested seat is a no-brainer - there is virtually no downside and a potentially huge upside if it can garner them just a few percentage points at the polls. What Lambert calls a vacuum at the top is actually some fairly cagey behavior by The Precious to kiss his Wall Street patrons' collective ass by handing them bags of money but be able to claim plausible deniability for the shit sandwich being prepared in the Congressional dining hall. The Democratic leadership is firmly behind Hank Paulson (Bush is a complete non-entity at this point) and the question is how to create a bill with enough lettuce and tomato between the bread and the shit that enough Democrats can be convinced that "organic" is good for them (Yay Whole Foods Nation!); much better to buy prepackaged than to try to assemble the meal themselves in such a short period of time.

Then there is this conference call between Treasury and Wall Street types that the great unwashed was not supposed to hear about. It pretty much confirms that the concessions "won" by the leadership are intentionally toothless, mere formalitieis to manuever around. What happens to candidates who have voted "Yes" based on leadership assurances and then find out it was all a farce and it is just as much a power grab as it was before? Paul Krugman may be assured that Obama will benefit at McCain's exspence with the crisis, but what if the bullshit and kissing up cost the Dems their control of Congress? What policies can we expect to see in that case? Is Mr. Bipartisan going to cave to the High Borderists and give in on more deals, sucha s keeping Hank around to "transition" the job?

It is more than the Republicans playing Lucy and yanking away the football from the hapless Democrats. It is that the Democratic leadership has willingly walked into a situation where cooperation means cooptation and where the populace is united in opposition to the proposed plan. They have cavalierly placed their downticket people at risk to avoid offending the Village rather than driving a real bargain (including delay of everything possbile until Hank has cleaned out his desk and departed in January) that would rebound to the Dems election efforts. Oh, and actually do some good for us peons.

The irony that the Dem majority may be maintained because of the recalcitrance of some whacko Republicans would be funny if it were not such an indictment of the ineffective and demoralizing behavior of our so-called leadership, right up to the guy at the top who doesn't even want to be a Democrat.

Anglachel

Prophylactic Measures

Slowly recovering from whatever has been dogging me the last few days and no longer feel so wrung out. I've been doing small chores all day, and reading over the econoblogs when I need to sit and recover.

There appears to be a consensus among the economists - the Hanky Panky is the financial equivalent of unsafe sex, indiscriminantly spreading way too many vital fluids with no way to track what was inserted where and with what devices. The only certainty is that the taxpayer is going to be thoroughly screwed, and not in a good way.

The divergence (and there's not much) is what is the best response to corral the public health threat. There is general consensus that there is no way to actually keep Hank from screwing around until he can be removed from the street corner he's working. At best, we need to insist that he wear a condom to keep the worst of the Hanky Panky contained, which means oversight. He hates it, it cramps his style, some customers won't agree to the terms, it reduces the sensations they feel and doesn't give them the satisfaction they crave.

After that, there seems to be another consensus - not much we can do until Bush is out of office. Until the madame running the operation is finally hauled off, we're stuck with the situation.

Krugman: On the other hand, there’s no prospect of enacting an actually good plan any time soon. Bush is still sitting in the White House; and anyway, selling voters on large-scale stock purchases would be tough, especially given the cynical attacks sure to come from the right. And the financial crisis is all too real.

Stiglitz: No one expects [Congressional Dems] to address the underlying causes of the problem: the spirit of excessive deregulation that the Bush Administration so promoted. Almost surely, there will be plenty of work to be done by the next president and the next Congress. It would be better if we got it right the first time, but that is expecting too much of this president and his administration.

There is also agreement that some actual treatment of the disease itself in the customers must be undertaken in the form of equity shares, kind of like penicillin to treat the clap, in the hopes of correcting the undercapitalization of the market. The big problem here is that the Hanky Panky is not really interested in changing the terms of the transaction, just getting somebody else to front the money and then take it up the, well, orifice of your choice, almost like asking new hookers to pay the customers for the honor of servicing their diseased and insatiable forms.

The trouble here is that whether the plan is passed in its current form (unlikely) or with a lot of lipstick, a new set of fishnets and a pocket full of Trojans (more likely), or even with a public health worker standing there, not passing judgment but saying you have to swallow the pill before you get the Panky (not gunna happen), the business is left intact, without fundamental modifications and with the restrictions all on the Treasury side.

That is what gets passed down to the next administration. What guarantees do we have from either side that they won't be perfectly happy to let the business go on as it has, with the taxpayer constantly on the hook for buying the latest social disease and curing it? What happens to the idea that we need to build a public health clinic, have better job opportunities so people are not left gambling their long-term safety in this market, and so forth? We're already hearing Unity Dems saying we can kiss pretty much the entire social safety net good-bye because we have to bail out Wall Street.

What we need Democrats to commit to is radical restructuring of the terms of the power relationship, so the public is no longer being prostituted by the government for the sake of the corporate johns.

Anglachel

Wildly Liberal

Obama certainly doesn't sound like a populist, outraged at our economic crisis.
Persecuted Comrade Anonymouse - commenter on Calculated Risk

I didn't watch or listen to the debate last night partly because I was coming down with something (Um, anyone I was emailing last night, sorry for the incoherence, I really felt like shit) and partly because my own mind is made up about these two clowns.

Instead, I wandered over to Calculated Risk and read the live blog window and (when CR shut down the window) the Haloscan comment thread. The reason I did this was to get away from the opinions of the political blogosphere, which have settled into their respective camps and cliches, and observe what an audience of swing voters had to say.

The readers and commenters on the economics blogs, which I also follow, is much more like the profile of the typical independent voter that each side needs to swing over to win the election - predominantly white, male, libertarian-leaning, anti-political, of varying levels of economic expertise but thinking they are the bomb when it comes to such matters. Here are some quotes I transcribed from the live blog, which was shut down within 20 minutes for lack of substantive discussion of economic issues by the candidates:

- Both of these guys should be thrown out.
- Neither looking presidential
- Turning it off now
- Shady Property Obama and Seven Houses McCain
- Who is less prepared?
- This is a train wreck
- They both lose my vote

In the regular comment thread, I was struck by the quote I used at the start of this post, and by this one: Obama: "Quite [sic] calling me a liberal." That was in response to this answer from Obama, taken from the CNN transcript of the debate (Thanks to Lambert for finding it for me):

Tom -- or John mentioned me being wildly liberal. Mostly that's just me opposing George Bush's wrong headed policies since I've been in Congress but I think it is that it is also important to recognize I work with Tom Coburn, the most conservative, one of the most conservative Republicans who John already mentioned to set up what we call a Google for government saying we'll list every dollar of federal spending to make sure that the taxpayer can take a look and see who, in fact, is promoting some of these spending projects that John's been railing about.

Quit calling me a liberal. Lack of outrage. They both lose my vote. Obama protesting against being called a liberal and finger pointing (as well as sounding like a moron - set up what we call a Google? No, you may call it that, but "we" say "set up a Google search".) (I misunderstood the context - correction h/t Swift Loris) that the other guys spend money, too.

McCain was at least somewhat true to the bastardized Republican legacy of opposing expansion of the Federal government by talking about tax cuts, reduced spending and less government (except for more military), even as it is the absolutely wrong way to go given our national condition. No one expects McCain to say anything different or do any better. What I observed was a keen sense of disappointment that Obama wasn't stronger, more direct, with better responses, offering something concrete on any of the topics discussed.

The consensus in the discussion thread was that the candidates were both crappy, out of touch and mostly incoherent, but that McCain was more successful with his attacks on Obama than the other way around. A number of people commented that if this was the best that Obama could do after intense coaching for the debate, it did not speak well of the candidate. Least prepared presidential debate ever was also said in one form or another several times.

Here's the problem. Why isn't the Democratic candidate prepared to go in there swinging? It's more than just that Obama the individual is not inspiring or prepared (though it is true on both counts). It is that he is a perfect representative of the Unity Democrats' political philosophy. This is not just him up there being a milquetoast whiner. He is as much a reflection of his faction in the Democratic Party as McCain is of the dominant strands in the Republican Party.

What we should have seen was in fact someone who was outraged, who was "wildly liberal" in substance and style, who did not count it among his successes that he worked with extreme conservatives to set up a nickle and dime watch list to try to judge Congress critters on dollar amounts, and instead would blast McCain on the substance of their respective politics.

But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? There isn't that much daylight between the way the Unity Pony types are willing to allow the government to operate and the the way Movement Conservatives want to run it - privatizing risk of all kinds (physical, economic, medical) for individuals and socializing protection for the elite at the top. Think of all those campaign contributions and kick-backs, mmm-mmm good!

If you fundamentally believe things are OK in this country, if you don't diverge that much from the substance of your opponent's political approach and think that the real problem is some partisan troublemakers who need to be more argeeable, this is what your politics will look like.

Me, I could do with somone who is wildly liberal.

Anglachel

Doing the Hanky Panky

Hat tip CR. Nouriel Roubini has been one of the most consistently pessimistic and consistently correct economists on the scene for years. Even The Krug misses stuff that Roubini picks up. Here is an extended quote from a post Roubini made today about the utter, cynical ratfucking failure that is the Hanky Panky (my emphasis):

The Treasury plan (even in its current version agreed with Congress) is very poorly conceived and does not contain many of the key elements of a sound and efficient and fair rescue plan. ... It is a disgrace that no professional economist was consulted by Congress or invited to present his/her views at the Congressional hearings on the Treasury rescue plan.

Specifically, the Treasury plan does not formally provide senior preferred shares for the government in exchange for the government purchase of the toxic/illiquid assets of the financial institutions; so this rescue plan is a huge and massive bailout of the shareholders and the unsecured creditors of the firms; with $700 billion of taxpayer money the pockets of reckless bankers and investors have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession. Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money.

Moreover, the plan does not address the need to recapitalize badly undercapitalized financial institutions: this could have been achieved via public injections of preferred shares into these firms; needed matching injections of Tier 1 capital by current shareholders to make sure that such shareholders take first tier loss in the presence of public recapitalization; suspension of dividends payments; conversion of some of the unsecured debt into equity (a debt for equity swap).

The plan also does not explicitly include an HOLC-style program to reduce across the board the debt burden of the distressed household sector; without such a component the debt overhang of the household sector will continue to depress consumption spending and will exacerbate the current economic recession.

Thus, the Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown.

So where is the Democratic response to get us these necessary policies and plans?

I have to agree in part with Arthur here that Paul Krugman's column yesterday was seriously underwhelming, though I don't think Mr Shrill is quite the shill for the ruling class as Arthur makes him out to be. However, Arthur's right to slap The Krug upside the head for the lame metaphor of "grown-ups in charge" Which then makes me ask, why Krugman, who pulls no punches with Bush, ends up plaintively calling for someone to be a grown-up and make the Hanky Panky go away?

Because the Democrats have played hanky-panky with the election and the voters for the last year:

han·ky-pan·ky /ˈhæŋkiˈpæŋki/ [hang-kee-pang-kee]–noun Informal.
1. unethical behavior; deceit: When the bank teller bought an expensive car and house, they suspected there might be some hanky-panky going on.
2. illicit sexual relations.

The grown-up was forcibly shoved out of the way by some decidedly juvenile power brokers who were so sure that a Democrat could not lose this year that they could nominate their favorite suck up and win. And now we are stuck with a contest between the His Petulance, The Precious and Old Grandpa Creepy, with Gaffaholic Joe and Soundbite Sarah bouncing along in their surly and shallow wake.

The liberals and party stalwarts are left between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Krugman has to argue in a round about way in support of a plan he himself doesn't like at all because the other guys are even worse. He (and Roubini and a whole host of other top economists) won't say flat out that the Democratic modifications to the plan are also trash and the Democrats need to quit being such mealy-mouthed wankers and present their own plan.

You know, act like the majority party and like leaders who expect to take the White House shortly?

As tonight's pitiful debate demonstrated tonight, there is no leadership at the top of the Democratic ticket. Obama mumbled and whined and waffled his way through the discussion of economics and financial policy. His best points were taken wholesale from Hillary's speeches. He has been 100% ineffectual on this crisis, a spectator to one of the biggest political opportunities in decades. His response has been to cave on every point of contention and preemptively declare of course he'll support whatever sausage comes out of committee. This vaguely centrist let's all sing Kumbayah position has meant he has lost a substantial part of the Democratic base and people like Krugman can't give him a shove for fear of damaging him enough to make him lose the tiny margin he must retain to win the general. He is as fragile politically as McCain is physically.

Hillary is the only political figure of any stature who is standing up to the money grab by the Bushies and offering something beyond a bandaid to staunch the hemorrhaging and let us stagger a little further down the economic road. Again, it's not that Hillary said this, but that she is saying the kinds of things all of the Democratic leadership should be saying. As I've pointed out in my recent posts about her statements over the last year, not just the last week, she has been going after the roots of the problem, which is the structure of power relationships between the financial industry and the individual consumers. You can't merely recapitalize, as necessary as that may be to staving off severe recession. You also have to reoganize and shake these bastards off their perches. If you don't you simply encourage more behavior like this (from Bloomberg):

Unprecedented Power

Erik Brynjolfsson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, said his main objection "is the breathtaking amount of unchecked discretion it gives to the Secretary of the Treasury. It is unprecedented in a modern democracy."

Advocates for a rescue plan this week point to a seizing up of credit markets, reflected in elevated inter-bank lending rates, as reason for action. Some economists are unconvinced.

"I suspect that part of what we're seeing in the freezing up of lending markets is strategic behavior on the part of big financial players who stand to benefit from the bailout,'" said David K. Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies liquidity constraints and game theory.

This is what playing fast and loose with electoral outcomes does, bargaining away vision and capability to face severe, systemic crisis to be able to put up yet another out-of-touch soulless bipartisan nebbish because Democrats "can't lose" this year.

Actually, they can even win the White House and still lose very, very big because they will not have the will or the leadership to take on the systemic problems facing the nation. They will be saddled with all of Bush's failures and not have a clue of how to get out of it because they see nothing wrong with playing the game.

Hanky panky is what they do best.

Anglachel

Proactive Thinking

James Galbraith has an article in the Washington Post this morning, A Bailout We Don't Need, going into detail on how we don't have to engage in any Hanky Panky to address the financial crisis because it is fundamentally a crisis of confidence, but we do have to address the real structural deficiencies that have led to the discomfiture of the privileged because of the misery of the many. We need an FDR response:

Now that all five big investment banks -- Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- have disappeared or morphed into regular banks, a question arises.

Is this bailout still necessary?

The point of the bailout is to buy assets that are illiquid but not worthless. But regular banks hold assets like that all the time. They're called "loans."

With banks, runs occur only when depositors panic, because they fear the loan book is bad. Deposit insurance takes care of that. So why not eliminate the pointless $100,000 cap on federal deposit insurance and go take inventory? If a bank is solvent, money market funds would flow in, eliminating the need to insure those separately. If it isn't, the FDIC has the bridge bank facility to take care of that.

Next, put half a trillion dollars into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. fund -- a cosmetic gesture -- and as much money into that agency and the FBI as is needed for examiners, auditors and investigators. Keep $200 billion or more in reserve, so the Treasury can recapitalize banks by buying preferred shares if necessary -- as Warren Buffett did this week with Goldman Sachs. Review the situation in three months, when Congress comes back. Hedge funds should be left on their own. You can't save everyone, and those investors aren't poor.

With this solution, the systemic financial threat should go away. Does that mean the economy would quickly recover? No. Sadly, it does not. Two vast economic problems will confront the next president immediately. First, the underlying housing crisis: There are too many houses out there, too many vacant or unsold, too many homeowners underwater. Credit will not start to flow, as some suggest, simply because the crisis is contained. There have to be borrowers, and there has to be collateral. There won't be enough. ...

The second great crisis is in state and local government. Just Tuesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced $1.5 billion in public spending cuts. The scenario is playing out everywhere: Schools, fire departments, police stations, parks, libraries and water projects are getting the ax, while essential maintenance gets deferred and important capital projects don't get built. This is pernicious when unemployment is rising and when we have all the real resources we need to preserve services and expand public investment. It's also unnecessary. ...

Next, let's think about what the next upswing should try to achieve and how it should be powered. If the 1960s were about raising baby boomers and the '90s about technology, what should the '10s and '20s be about? It's obvious: energy and climate change. That's where the present great unmet needs are.

So, let's use the next few years to plan, mapping out a program of energy conservation, reconstruction and renewable power. Let's get the public sector and the universities working on it. And let's prepare the private sector so that when the credit crunch finally ends, we'll have the firms, the labs, the standards and the talent in place, ready to go.

Some will ask if we can afford it. To see the answer, don't look at budget projections. Just look at interest rates. Last week, in the panic, the federal government could fund itself, short term, for free. It could have raised money for 30 years and paid less than 4 percent. That's far less than it cost back in 2000.

No country in this situation is broke, or insolvent, or even in much trouble. For once, Wall Street's own markets speak the truth. The financially challenged customer isn't Uncle Sam. He's up on Wall Street, where deregulation, greed and fraud ran wild.

Shorter Galbraith: We do not need to follow the irresponsible and greedy response put forward by the Bush administration. We need to do what is right by the country, not hand over the public treasury to Wall Street so they keep their profits and the rest of us pay for the swindle. The country has greater needs than making sure Bush's base is protected.

Hello? Are there any Democrats left in Congress?

Anglachel

Partisans and Pigs

I am elbow deep in a project that is consuming most of my free time, so I doubt I'll be posting much this week. Here are a few thoughts on the evernts of the day.

First off, I'm walking back some of the cattiness about Chris Dodd in the last few posts. He has come back with a stronger plan (see Krugman and CR for more knowledegable commentary than I can provide) than I gave him crecit for doing, and has three key points that I think should be non-negotiable for the Democrats:

1. Equity warrants if the assets purchased are bogus. Krugman thinks this is extremely important. Basically, the government gets it's money back through sales of the assets or equity in the company.
2. Executive pay and benefits get slapped around by limiting the compensation of the companies that are taking public funds.
3. What I think is the most significant because it will affect consumers directly, "grant[ing] bankruptcy judges the authority to modify the terms of primary mortgages, a step aimed at helping homeowners at risk of foreclosure." (NYT)

The last provision is the one the administration is shoving back on the most, of course. There are numerous points of oversight, reporting, and regulation in Dodd's proposal, though still probably not enough. Looking at Paulson's "plan", it seems pretty clear to me that it is little more than a bailout of Paulson's own buddies on Wall Street on the one hand, and another bald-faced power grab attempt by the Bush/Cheney administration on the other, making for a breathtakingly pure example of the motivation of the Movement Conservatives - grabbing it all for themselves.

But even Dodd's effort to beat back the demons of stupidity is still failing to redefine the issue on the Democrats' terms. They are not moving boldly, as Hillary has advocated, to redefine the power relationships of the priviliged few to the government and to the rest of us. The Democrats are getting suckered, once again, by the earnest entreaties of the High Borderists to be "bipartisan" and to "set aside politics" to address the crisis as quickly as possible. Shorter Broderism - give Hank what he wants and quit being obstructionist! The Democratic leadership is afraid to challenge Bush and the Republicans directly this close to the election, allowing their consent to be bought through "concessions" on a plan that was moronic on the face of it. The Dems are, as usual, trying to mitigate the shit sandwich presented by the Republicans instead of whipping up a tasty pastrami on rye with a side of jicama slaw in opposition. All they can do is drag the proposal slightly less to the right and get their hands covered in the effleunt oozing from the sandwich.

And they are screwed. If they have nothing significantly different of their own to offer (and Dodd's proposal is pedestrian, good mostly in comparison to Paulson's deposit on the great shitpile), then they have tied themselves to Bush's toxic administration in yet another way. Their partisanship can be priced - it is the revolving credit line on $700 billion less the depreciation of assets and a few mostly symbolic cuts to CEO pay. Compare this to the McCain strategy, as discussed by Ed Kilgore, "The GOP's Bottomless Crack Pipe":

The general expectation this week is that the Paulson Plan for avoiding a worldwide financial meltdown, with an uncertain number of modifications, is going to pass Congress overwhelmingly, and recede into the background in the presidential campaign.

I don't know about that.

Every Democrat should read Patrick Ruffini's post from yesterday at NextRight. He is, I strongly suspect, perfectly reflecting the game that Republicans, including Team McCain, want to play with the Paulson Plan:

Republican incumbents in close races have the easiest vote of their lives coming up this week: No on the Bush-Pelosi Wall Street bailout.

God Himself couldn't have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration. That's why I want to see 40 Republican No votes in the Senate, and 150+ in the House. If a bailout is to pass, let it be with Democratic votes. Let this be the political establishment (Bush Republicans in the White House + Democrats in Congress) saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt (more than the Iraq War, conjured up in a single weekend, and enabled by Pelosi, btw), while principled Republicans say "No" and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress....

In an ideal world, McCain opposes this because of all the Democratic add-ons and shows up to vote Nay while Obama punts.

History has shown us that "inevitable" "emergency" legislation like the Patriot Act or Sarbanes-Oxley is never more popular than on the day it is passed -- and this isn't all that popular to begin with. All the upside comes with voting against it.

Ruffini is exactly right about the politics of this issue, especially for Republicans. Think of this as like one of those periodic votes on raising the public debt limit. It has to pass, of course, but there's zero percentage in supporting it for any one individual. The speculative costs of the legislation actually failing are completely intangible and ultimately irrelevant, while the costs it will impose are tangible and controversial from almost every point of view. For McCain and other Republicans, voting "no" on Paulson without accepting the consequences of that vote is the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe: it will please the conservative "base," distance them from both Bush and "Washington," and let them indulge in both anti-government and anti-corporate demagoguery, even as Democrats bail out their Wall Street friends and big investors generally. You simply can't imagine a better way for McCain to decisively reinforce his simultaneous efforts to pander to the "base" while posing as a "maverick."

Democrats are right to demand significant substantive concessions before offering their support for the Paulson Plan. But just as importantly, they need to demand Republican votes in Congress, including the vote of John McCain. If this is going to be a "bipartisan" relief plan, it has to be fully bipartisan, not an opportunity for McCain to count on Obama and other Democrats to save the economy while exploiting their sense of responsibility to win the election for the party that let this crisis occur in the first place.

What, get McCain to agree to be bipartisan and vote in a way that hurts his electoral chances? What do you think he is, a Democrat? Kilgore falls face first into the bullshit trap that is "bipartisanship", namely, that it means Democratic capitulation to Republican demands. For Republicans to refuse to concede shows that they are committed to principle, can't be bought, standing up for what is Right, and other gag-inducing cliches.

Pelosi-Bush Wall Street Bailout. Bingo. Bush drags us into the sewer, Democrats frantically try to drag the nation back to shore, and the Republicans get to both have their political obstructionist cake and eat their financial giveaway pie, too. But I think it is even more ugly than that.

1. The Democrats labor away at patching the worst of the holes in the Paulson plan, to which Hank "reluctantly" agrees, secretly chortling away at how many goodies he gets to have. They get the few provisions Dodd has set out.
2. Anti-Bush (yes, Bush is "too liberal" for these folks) Republicans refuse to vote for the pig (with or without lipstick), screaming about government bailouts. It allows them to look like they give a crap about ordinary people. Many people will object to the plan as too much money for the underserving Wall Street types.
3. McCain distances himself from Bush and reinforces the "Maverick" brand. Spends the next few news cycles talking about the love affair Wall Streeet has with Obama. Says he wants (mumble, mumble, mumble) to help the ordinary citizen.
4. The Democrats and a few Republicans pass the pig, and it hits Bush's desk.
5. BUSH VETOS IT. Says that is is full of Democratic pork barrel politics, and that he can't sign it. Demands it get rewritten to take out the "special interest" "political" measures. Bemoans the Democrats' unwillingness to forego politics "for the good of the nation."
6. Democrats lack the the votes in Congress to over-ride the veto.
7. It is now October. They look weak, ineffectual. McCain rails against "buy outs" and "kissing up to Wall Street." Can't actually offer anything of his own, but that's not the point.
8. The Village starts the bipartisan haka, terrified at the sight of their dwindling portfolios. Wall Streeet is threatening to withhold their checks from The Precious, screaming that won't they just please get this crisis resolved?
9. The Democrats are left holding the bag, unable to pass something that will actually help people, unwilling to go down fighting for something that is unapologetically FDR Democratic.
10. Just weeks before the election, they shamefacedly walk back their few partisan measures and agree to most of Paulson's original plan, reserving just a few of the oversight measures.

Thre's nothing besides the bankruptcy judge provision that Bush can't actually live with and it is not enough of an issue on which to hang an entire rejection of the plan - which, like GLBA, they don't actually object to all that much.

The key for me here in Kilgore's analysis is that McCain can play to his base with opposition to the bill, but the Democrats won't decide which of their bases they actually want to appeal to, the Whole Foods Nation (WFN) types and upper class technocrats populating the white collar world or the middle and working class Main Street folks who may have a crappy little 401(k) tucked away somewhere, but whose wealth is spiraling down the drain on depreciating home values. A real solution that does help the homeowners would also, in the long run, help the technocrats.

Both of these groups have speculated in markets, trying to make up for the economic ground lost under Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, and both made risky investments. For the Whole Foods shoppers, they are looking at a future earnings loss that they want their legislators to forestall with this intervention. For the IGA shoppers, they are now being thrown out of houses when the investment failed to appreciate, their losses very much of the moment. The line is not so neatly drawn, of course, many WFN people having made bad real estate purchases, more than a few IGA shoppers coldly intending just to skim cash from NINJA loans. But for many, this was a chance at real wealth, the kind they could not get through their 9-to-5 shifts and trying to raise three kids. The paper losses of the upper middle class may not be recovered (And the capitalist pigs will oink, oink their way to new wealth), but they are still that much higher up the ladder than those who have zero wealth outside of their property. Even a total FDR response to the crisis is going to hurt this group badly, but it should leave them with better prospects than what they face now.

This is a world historic moment. It is an opportunity for Democrats to get their mojo back and draw a bright clear line in the sand between restructuring for a more egalitarian and sustainable economy and limping along trying not to fall into the trough where the pigs are gobbling down the swill.

When the powers that be are trying to make you buy the farm, pitchforks are in order.

Anglachel

Krugman on Why We Should Demand More from Paulson

The Krug sums it up nicely. The problem isn't the current crisis, but how to prevent the "solution" for the current crisis from becoming a huge profit-grabbing boondoggle for Bush's "base":

Thinking the bailout through

What is this bailout supposed to do? Will it actually serve the purpose? What should we be doing instead? Let’s talk.

First, a capsule analysis of the crisis.

1. It all starts with the bursting of the housing bubble. This has led to sharply increased rates of default and foreclosure, which has led to large losses on mortgage-backed securities.
2. The losses in MBS, in turn, have left the financial system undercapitalized — doubly so, because levels of leverage that were previously considered acceptable are no longer OK.
3. The financial system, in its efforts to deleverage, is contracting credit, placing everyone who depends on credit under strain.
4. There’s also, to some extent, a vicious circle of deleveraging: as financial firms try to contract their balance sheets, they drive down the prices of assets, further reducing capital and forcing more deleveraging.

So where in this process does the Temporary Asset Relief Plan offer any, well, relief? The answer is that it possibly offers some respite in stage 4: the Treasury steps in to buy assets that the financial system is trying to sell, thereby hopefully mitigating the downward spiral of asset prices.

But the more I think about this, the more skeptical I get about the extent to which it’s a solution. Problems:

(a) Although the problem starts with mortgage-backed securities, the range of assets whose prices are being driven down by deleveraging is much broader than MBS. So this only cuts off, at most, part of the vicious circle.
(b) Anyway, the vicious circle aspect is only part of the larger problem, and arguably not the most important part. Even without panic asset selling, the financial system would be seriously undercapitalized, causing a credit crunch — and this plan does nothing to address that.

Or I should say, the plan does nothing to address the lack of capital unless the Treasury overpays for assets. And if that’s the real plan, Congress has every right to balk.

So what should be done? Well, let’s think about how, until Paulson hit the panic button, the private sector was supposed to work this out: financial firms were supposed to recapitalize, bringing in outside investors to bulk up their capital base. That is, the private sector was supposed to cut off the problem at stage 2.

It now appears that isn’t happening, and public intervention is needed. But in that case, shouldn’t the public intervention also be at stage 2 — that is, shouldn’t it take the form of public injections of capital, in return for a stake in the upside?

Let’s not be railroaded into accepting an enormously expensive plan that doesn’t seem to address the real problem.

The problem is that the proposed "solution" is not actually addressing the underlying causes of failure, and it increasingly looks like an attempt to have the taxpayers foot the bills for the financial malfeasance of Wall Street.

Here are more helpful links to keep track of analysis of the issue:

Krugman:

• Uneasy feelings
• Follow the money
  Doubts about the rescue
• No deal
• Authorization for the use of financial force

Calculated Risk:

• Some Thoughts on the Bailout
• NY Times Makes a Funny
• Bailout Eligibility Expanded to Foreign Institutions

Anglachel

In Reagan's Shadow

Watching precipitous drop on Democratic popularity in the polls - from the anonymous Democrat to the presidential nominee - leaves me shaking my head at the sheer ineptitude of the people allegedly in charge of the operation. But even more it makes me want to take a long, hard look at why, in a political year that favors the Democrats more than any year since the FDR era, victory is being thrown away.

I'm with Pat Lang for the most part, though I'm much more critical of Obama than he is, probably because I have no investment in the candidate. I think he over-emphasizes racism as a point of resistance to Obama, but his evaluation of McCain and Palin are painfully accurate. They are, singly and together, disasters. Unlike other bloggers and a number of commenters on this blog, I think McCain is a revolting politician, a man of bad temper, questionable ethics, and reprehensible positions. Palin is worse. They are bad for the nation, not because of their marriages and family lives, knowledge of the internet, age or religion, but because their world views are fearful, ignorant and destructive. Their philosophy of government is authoritarian, no matter the window dressing of fighting corruption. I can admire their personal drive and dedication without thereby declaring their political objectives to be anything but inhumane. I can decry derogatory attacks on them on account of their gender, age, sociological backgrounds, etc., yet remain opposed to their political intensions. That the systems they work within force them into more moderate paths is the virtue of the institutions created to defend liberal democracy, not some insight into their alleged hidden moderate beliefs. They are talented politicians, after all, and know how to seem when in the public eye.

I can do this with a single phrase - They are Republicans and I oppose what the Republican Party, through its words and its deeds, stands for. That should be the first and last thing out of the mouth of every Democrat, yet is the formulation you just don't hear from Obama or the DNC. It's all about Hope™, Change™, and Bi/Postpartisan™ yadda-yadda. No one needs to explain to me or millions of other Democrats that the political opposition are, well, opponents; what requires explanation is how and why our own party has made itself into a different kind of opponent, one that is ineffectual against the Republicans but manages to insult and alienate its own constituencies with breathtaking precision.

I think there are two issues to examine, Obama's failure as a Democratic candidate and the aimlessness of the Democratic Party. The latter is the larger problem, without which the former would not exist. At root, neither are able to escape Reagan's shadow. This post I will focus on Obama, and save examining the party for the next round.

Obama has explicitly modeled himself on the popular backwards-looking image of Reagan - the positive, constructive, above-party guy who did spectacle well and inspired people to support him with a flash of his smile and the thrill of his oratory. He cites Reagan as an exemplar of the mode of politics he wants to engage in - telegenic, above the fray, sweeping political change and ignoring the critics. Even if he had not been trying so hard to dismiss Bill Clinton in order to minimize Hillary, Obama would still have been engaged in Reagan worship. Thus, the entire packaging of himself as a movement, swallowing hook line and sinker the hagiography of Saint Ronnie.

Charles Krauthammer is a hack and writes some of the most despicable commentary in American politics, but he wrote something truthful on Friday. He talked about the packaging of Obama (my emphasis throughout):

But Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain's Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama's meteoric rise was based not on issues ... but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer's remorse, was the Democrats' realization that the arc of Obama's celebrity had peaked -- and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

[Krauthammer discusses key speeches by Obama, then says] The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers -- the chants, the swoons, the "we are the ones" self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan's revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama's movement, the man is the transcendence.

Which gave the Obama campaign a cult-like tinge. With every primary and every repetition of the high-flown, self-referential rhetoric, the campaign's insubstantiality became clear. By the time it was repeated yet again on the night of the last primary (#3), the tropes were tired and flat. To top himself, Obama had to reach. Hence his triumphal declaration that history would note that night, his victory, his ascension, as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

Clang. But Obama heard only the cheers of the invited crowd. Not yet seeing how the pseudo-messianism was wearing thin, he did Berlin (#4) and finally jumped the shark. That grandiloquent proclamation of universalist puffery popped the bubble. The grandiosity had become bizarre.

Obama's Altitude Sickness

The Berlin speech was meant to invoke memories of JFK, but even more so of Reagan, to try to make a claim in images that could not be done in words - I'm just like the Great Communicator and you should respond to me in a comparable way.

Krauthammer points to the reason why Reagan, who was not nearly as popular as his idolators would have you believe, was able to so thoroughly dominate the political sphere. He had a foundation. He was a hard-line ideologue who had honed his political talents for decades and who was backed by what is still one of the best funded, most ideologically compact and politically determined groups in current Western politics - the Movement Conservatives. Regardless of what liberals may think of Reagan's political objectives (that they were crack-pot, inhumane, self-destructive, anti-American, etc.), Reagan offered something concrete to every constituency who supported him. Conservative judical appointments and breaking the barriers between church and state for the theocons, pumping up not just the military but the necessity of US hegemonic power for the neocons, deregulation and supply-side economics for the rest of the cons and crooks in the corporate suites. And he delivered. Even when he was forced to make strategic retreats, the rhetoric did not abate and the overall objectives were never abandoned. He was relentless in pusuit of his vision of how the world should be.

The backing from the Movement Conservatives is important. No matter how charismatic this actor, he was the head of a movement that preceded him and had an independent existence apart from him. It's still with us today. Reagan became the embodiment of this operation, not the operation itself. The Obama campaign's exuberant highs were based on nothing more than a cult of personality, which was at base little more than the frantic wish of his supporters to see themselves an ennobled by their support of him. The attacks aimed at his opponents - personal, vituperative, slanderous - probably tell us more about the insides of his supporters' heads than anything else, places awash in guilt over their very real racism, glee at being able to openly express their deep seated misogyny, accompanied by a big dollop of class resentment. Obama's own exhortation that his supporters should not think of themselves as anything but "Obamacans" is as clear a statement of the movement as anything else I've seen. The alpha and the omega of the campaign is the adulation of the man at the center.

It inverts the power structure that put Reagan where he was and put the nation on the road to disaster. An established, well-funded national operation that controlled major propaganda outlets, deliberately tapping into resentment and fear about changing socio-political institutions and structures, and has as its goal infesting the entire government from President to dog-catcher with its anti-democratic minions, selected a 100% loyal and massively effective partisan to be its face and drum up popular support. I'm sorry, but the Chicago Combine at its greatest expanse of powers, even if backed with every penny George Soros & Co. have ever earned, cannot compare.

When I look at the collapse of Obama, the Movie! (a fall well under way during the primaries), what I see is the level of support an ordinary Democrat might garner in a ho-hum year. The One, The Precious, is gone. Palin robbed him of the celebrity, the quality of being shiny and new, and what we see is Obama as an unadorned Democrat. His high points now are when the actual heroes of the party, Bill & Hillary, come out and offer reasons for us to vote as Democrats for the ticket.

The proper Democratic figure to compare to Reagan is Bill Clinton, particularly as Bill is actually more popular than Reagan with the general public. He did this by copying Reagan's substance, which was to identify constituencies and fight for them, and letting the style chips fall where they did. It helps that Big Dog is one of the most talented political speakers alive, able to convey complex political realities in direct, simple language, but oratory alone can be upstaged. He is beyond the shadow of Reagan because of his focus on what Reagan championed and how to push through liberal counter-measures in a way that doused the fires of resentment. His success was limited because he did not have the party and movement apparatus at his disposal that Reagan commanded and because the Right targeted him (quite correctly) as a very dangerous opponent.

Oddly enough, with the loss of celebrity, Obama ends up being the generic Democrat from central casting, promoted by a party actively jettisoning everything that makes it distinct. We have no signature issues for the campaign, only hopey-changey, we're not Bush (which worked so well for Kerry, as I remember...), don't vote for the guy who's stupid and out of touch (which worked so well for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis and Gore, as I remember...), we're all to blame for this Washington gridlock because Washington is the problem, etc., etc. There is nothing that looks, sounds or feels uniquely Democratic.

They are still running against the shadow of Reagan.

Anglachel

Electoral College Ranges and Distributions

Last week, the simulation map on 270 to Win was overwhelmingly favoring Obama based on the available polls. They warned that it would be a week before meaningful data would appear there, and they were right. I've been playing with the maps this evening (not wanting to run into any more stories about barnyard beasts or cosmetics) and have saved out six different maps showing narrow victories for each side, medium victories and large victories. The simulator itself currently reflects a 55% probability of an Obama win, with a median of 272 electoral votes. What I think the below maps illustrate is how little has to change for significant results.

(Click on images for larger versions)

Large Democratic win: 320 D/ 218 R. The key here is sweeping the upper Midwest plus picking up Florida. Colorado and New Mexico are not necessary to the scenario, but would likely be present if the win was this big. This was always the optimistic map for Dems. I think Iowa would go blue in a scenario like this and probably Nevada, too.

Medium Democratic win: 295 D/243 R. Colorado and Ohio go by the wayside, but Florida is salvaged. I actually think those combinations would be flipped in this scenario, but I also have doubts that Virginia would go Dem while Wisconsin went Republican. Flip those as well and you'll have roughly the same EC outcome.

Narrow Democratic win: 272 D/266 R. And I think the closest to a likely win this round, and is the result most likely in the simulator. Colorado and Florida go red, as does Ohio, while the party barely holds on to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Washington. Note that New Hampshire, Nevada and South Dakota could each be a deal breaker in this scenario. I think the party needs to be prepared for a solid red South.

Narrow Republican victory: 268 D/270 R. What is interesting in the simulator is that this scenario was far less likely than the bigger Republican wins. They lose by small margins but win by large ones. In this, the Dems retain all of the Midwest except Indiana, but the Republicans lose Ohio and Colorado, keep Florida, and pick up New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Minnesota and Washington. These are plausible pick ups. I think it more likely that they would keep Ohio and lose Minnesota, but they would need then either keep Washington or snag back Colorado. Note - compare this map and the narrow Dem victory one to the current map on electoral-vote.com. It has the same EC breakdown as this one, but has Washington and Minnesota in the Demo column, and Ohio, New Mexico and New Hampshire in the Republican one.

Medium Republican win: 250 D/288 R. I think this the most plausible winning scenario for Republicans. The West stays solidly blue, Colorado and New Mexico are blue but the south stays red and McCain squeezes out narrow victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. This is why the "Appalachian" vote matters. I doubt South Dakota would stay blue.

Large Republican win: 219 D/319 R. The key to this is winning the upper Midwest. Minnesota and Washington could easily be flipped in this scenario for much the same result. Can McCain take all of the intermountain West? I think it possible, though they would not be easy pickups. The simulator shows Washington going red more easily than Colorado, for example.

I find all of these combinations well within plausible expectations. For me, simply looking at maps and shifts, a bare handful of states will determine the EC, but the particular combination that will do so varies greatly. The focus tends to be on the larger battleground states, but undecided small states may suddenly shift and provide the 1-3 EC margin.

Visit 270 to Win and use the simulator to see the changing possibilities based on probabilities.

Anglachel

Darling is as Darling Does

I'm going to start with a proposition, that the only real darlings in the media are the media whores themselves, and that their opinion is that it is all about them. It's about who they talk to and who they are seen with and who gets into whose funeral and who is king of the world because he's the arbiter of who gets to be Preznit. What most concerns them is their appearance to the world - hip, cool, yet achingly authentic and straight-talking, summoning moral outrage over the terrible people who don't pay attention to them.

They all secretly (or not so secretly) think they are, personally and directly, the inheritor of Murrow, Cronkite and Woodward & Bernstein. (Even Woodward thinks this, missing the irony that he is not himself, if he ever was.) Their delusion is that they are the defenders of the public weal, and from that conceit a thousand fetid flowers bloom. They like candidates who make them feel like they are on the cusp of history. They worshipped Ronald Reagan because he was a spectacle, the visual personification of their own fantasies about themselves.

This is the mainstream media. The Movement Conservative media understands that what they are here to do is stay in power by any means necessary. They are the ones who set the political agenda on the public ariwaves, seeding the stories as they salt the political earth. They help Republican candidates work the refs.

I noted a few days ago the NYT story about McCain cutting off his old media buddies, which got him attention that he needed. [Note - following sentence rewritten to be readable English.] Now, via Shakesville's Mustang Bobby, the McCain campaign is shoving back on the media again, demanding that Palin be treated with deference by the press, and having her refuse to talk to the press if they won't capitulate to the campaign's demands. And it's working. The Republicans are, once again, kicking the shit out of the press, calling out legitimate bad treatment, like the invasive questioning about Bristol Palin, but quickly expanding it to cover all treatment.

The Incomparable Bob Somerby goes into detail on the way in which the flat-out lies by Palin - lies he could rebut with a small amount of research - are being allowed to cruise right through, such as the total horseshit that she "sold" Murkowski's jet on eBay. He then points out the difference between how Palin is being treated and what has been done to Democrats (my emphasis):

For the record, the “luxury jet” was 23 years old—and it doesn’t seem to have been all that luxurious (more below). But no: Palin didn’t “sell” the jet on eBay—and she didn’t make a profit. Indeed, she lost money for the state of Alaska when she tried to sell the jet on eBay—a procedure that had long been the norm when the state sold its assets.

In short, the eBay story is basically bogus, like the tale of the Bridge to Nowhere. But these stories exist for an obvious reason; they exist to define Palin as “a woman with a lot of guts”—with a ton of hockey-mom savvy. These stories are effective politics—but then too, they’re basically lies.

That brings us back to our basic question: Why can Republicans tell such tales? For two solid years during Campaign 2000, the press corps invented such embellished tales, then pretended that Gore had said them. They then savaged Gore for his vast dishonesty. How can Palin herself pimp such tales, with barely a peep from the “press?”

And this is why arguments about what Democrat will be trashed less than the others is a crappy way to pick a nominee. The press has a narrative about Democrats - they lie, they are morally corrupt, they are cosmopolitan hillbillies, elitist hicks who don't understand heartland, working class values the way we inside the Beltway, Boston-to-DC corridor Villagers do.

If you want to know how the SCLM got the way it is, look at the way WKJM prostituted himself and his reputation (rightly earned by taking on Trent Lott, and by setting up a protest to prevent SS privitization) for the opportunity at those awful, monstrous, racist Clintons and be patted on the head by the Village for helping take out the trash. WKJM is like a little Woodward & Bernstein, flush with his fame at exposing and helping bring down someone high and mighty.

Somerby's point, the one the Blogger Boyz don't want to hear because it interferes with their vision of themselves as the culmination of the great muckraking tradition (stuck as they are in their Cliff Notes version of Hegelian dialectics), when they are in fact mere pool boys at the parties thrown by the Jackie Treehorn's of the media, is that this same media is simply, thoroughly, incorrigibly corrupt. These people are also cowards, quickly coming to heel when the Republicans snap their fingers and threaten to send the naughty reporters off to put the stories to bed without any gossip, free lunches or insider scoops.

The DNC and PB 1.0 willingly colluded with the media to tear down other Democrats, trying to be on the right side of the media by getting on the wrong side of liberal politics. The damage inflicted on their own side in this electoral round will, like the broadsides against Gore, come back to haunt the party for years.

Anglachel

(I completely rewrote the sentence about the push back on the press that I originally read in a post by Mustang Bobby. I apologize for the original mangled mess.)