The Weekly Sift

… look at The Green Collar Economy by Van Jones. I can’t think of anything currently available that pulls together so many of the right ideas — environmental, economic, and political.

The book’s subtitle is “How one solution can fix our two biggest problems”. The two problems are saving the environment and our economy, and the solution is a Green New Deal, a massive re-orientation of our economy into a sustainable path that would along the way create large numbers of new businesses and new jobs.

Lots of books tell you about the environmental crisis or some unsustainable part of our economy and how something must be done. A few books go on to discuss one aspect of that something — windmills or conservation or locally-produced food or some other step in the right direction. This is the only book I know of that goes on to describe how all those somethings could get done — by building a green populist movement based on locally-visible issues, a movement that very plainly tells ordinary people how it will make their lives better.

The difference between Jones and a lot of other liberal writers is that he’s willing to face this problem: The Left is still largely segregated by race and class. As an activist from the San Francisco Bay area, one of Jones’ ongoing challenges has been to get the well-to-do environmental activists of Marin County and the working-class environmental justice movement in inner-city Oakland to work together. (In a nutshell — and stereotyping only a little — environmentalists wonder what global warming is doing to the polar bears; environmental justice is about why so many untreated chemical-waste sites are near poor, non-white neighborhoods.)

Environmentalism remains a niche issue because environmentalists are so easily stereotyped as elitists — driving expensive hybrid cars, eating expensive organic food, and vacationing in exotic places that they want to keep pristine. On the other side of the class divide, people may not like their job in the coal mine or in the factory that pollutes their air, but they have to pay the bills somehow. Images and slogans that motivate professional-class environmentalists often have the opposite effect on the less well-off. (That’s what this week’s opening quote is about.) If you’re wondering how you’re going to feed your kids until payday and still make your rent payment at the end of the month, the idea that you should also be trying to prevent some nebulous environmental apocalypse is likely to be more than you can deal with. It sends you into despair or denial, not into action.

In addition to the usual environmental-apocalypse dystopia, Jones adds a new dystopia he calls eco-apartheid: The rich live in unpolluted areas with easy (if expensive) access to wilderness and healthy food, while the poor lead increasingly unhealthy and unsafe lives amidst ugliness and degradation. His contrasting view is eco-equity: We have to build a new economy anyway, so this time let’s build one that doesn’t leave anybody out. Building the new economy is going to take a lot of work at all skill levels, from inventing more efficient solar panels to retrofitting homes and offices to be more energy efficient. Let’s make sure those are all good jobs that give people respect and a living wage.

Jones believes that any movement to achieve large-scale and lasting change (abolition, civil rights, and the New Deal are his models) has to be based on sweeping principles rather than ad hoc proposals. He proposes three principles for eco-populism: Equal protection for all; equal opportunity for all; and reverence for all creation. (That third principle is an explicit bid for religious support, which he thinks is necessary both to sustain the breadth of the vision and the breadth of the coalition necessary to achieve it.) And lest it get too abstract, the book is full of examples of existing programs, not just in liberal professional-class havens like Berkeley, but in Milwaukee and Chicago as well.

On a psychological level, Jones critiques some of the basic frames of left-leaning activism. He sees too many of us still trying to live out the David-and-Goliath story of a previous generation of activists. (Martin Luther King vs. the segregationists; Ralph Nader vs. GM; Woodward and Bernstein vs. the Nixon administration.) Would-be Davids come into a room looking for Goliaths — and find them. Instead, Jones proposes a Noah frame: We’re building something, and we need all the help we can get. If Goliath decides to pitch in, we’ve got some Goliath-sized jobs for him. He also recommends a frame he calls “the Amistad meets the Titanic” — if they can’t work together, the slaves and the slavers are both going down.

This attitude is reflected in the way Jones writes. He doesn’t expect anyone to be perfect, so he can criticize without villifying. (Chapter 2, for example, is a very good thumbnail history of the environmental movement, describing both what we owe people like Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir as well as how we’re still living with the effects of their mistakes and misconceptions.) And while he does not doubt that battles will have to be fought, he wants to avoid fighting the people who should be his allies, so that he arrives at the necessary battles with the largest possible coalition.

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I first became aware of Van Jones when he spoke at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June. (The first guy you see in the video is UUA President Bill Sinkford, not Jones.) He’s an incredible speaker, and at the end of the talk we cheered as if he were a rock star who might come back for an encore. My comment the next day in my online journal was: “The world is fortunate that he wants to use his powers for Good.”

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The lead in a Washington Post article Friday:

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

Invictus analyzes what it all means for prosecuting war crimes. Short version: The legal cover the Bush administration set up for itself was too late; the crimes were already underway. The Senate report verifies the basic story that Philippe Sands was telling in his Vanity Fair article The Green Light back in April.

And it was all for nothing. The interrogator who caught al-Zarqawi says torture doesn’t work. It’s enough to make you throw your shoes. (See the video.)

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The blog Gossip Boy punked right-wing Pastor Steve Kern by claiming to represent Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett. Apparently Cornett is seeking Kern’s suggestions for who to put on the county’s Library Commission — part of a plan to purge any gay-friendly material from the local libraries — so Gossip Boy posed as the staffer tasked with writing the mayor’s official recommendation. By using anti-gay slurs himself (“faggots” and “perverts”) GB made Kern comfortable enough to say this:

We have to … start curing those sinners. It’s past time that this nation stopped placating sin and start putting them in education programs. Courts can force drug offenders into treatment centers and violent people into anger management. There’s no reason our courts can’t do that with homos.

If you’re curious what Kern means by “curing” gays, I reviewed a book on the subject here. As you might expect, the treatment doesn’t even work on volunteers who really want it to work. Court-ordered “education programs” would be a little like the re-education camps Mao set up for his opponents during the Cultural Revolution.

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Joe Conason wonders if the media’s reaction to the Blagojevich scandal means that “the Clinton rules” are back: No negative speculation about a Democratic president is too unsupported to deserve attention. At Media Matters, Jamison Foser elaborates and names names:

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the media’s attempts to link Obama to the Blagojevich scandal has been the volume of news reports that are purely speculative — and not only speculative, but vaguely speculative. That is, they don’t even consist of conjecture about specific potential wrong doing. They simply consist of completely baseless speculation that Obama might in some way become caught up in the investigation at some point in the future, for some reason. It’s little more than, “Maybe Obama will be involved.” Well, sure. And maybe he’ll play shortstop for the Washington Nationals next year.

Associated Press reporter Liz Sidoti set the standard for pointlessly speculative news reports with an “analysis” piece declaring that “President-elect Barack Obama hasn’t even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him.” In the very next sentence, Sidoti had to admit that “Obama isn’t accused of anything” — but that didn’t stop her from continuing to offer ominous warnings that Obama could be implicated in the scandal, interspersed with concessions that he, you know … isn’t.

Meanwhile, (see the first Short Note) a new Senate report links high-ranking members of the Bush administration to war crimes — actual crimes and actual links, not just vague speculations about “associations”. How much coverage is that getting?

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In contrast to the Nobel laureates Obama is appointing, a former State Department official recalls the hiring practices of the Bush administration. After telling the story of an ambassadorial candidate being interviewed by someone who couldn’t pronounce the name of the country in question, law professor Thomas Schweich reports his own experience, which he describes as “typical”:

I had three jobs in the Bush administration: ambassador for counternarcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan, deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs and chief of staff of the United States mission to the United Nations. For two of these jobs, my appointment was preceded by an effort by a 20-something in personnel to place an unqualified friend in the job

In other words, Monica Goodling was the norm, not the exception.

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Juan Cole description of the puzzle that is Pakistan makes me think of multiple personality disorder. Whenever the powers-that-be in Pakistan have felt the need to do something inconsistent with their public persona, they have spun off some secretive, quasi-independent group to do it for them, like the “retired” intelligence officers who apparently trained the Mumbai terrorists. Once set up, these groups may even have their own funding sources — drug smuggling or private donors. The government may not remember that they exist, much less know how to influence them.

Now, countries like the U.S. also do nasty things in secret, but we’re more like a person who is just devious. No matter how hidden a program is from the public, it’s listed somewhere in a classified part of the budget, and the chain-of-command could stop it if they wanted to. But unlike a devious person, a multiple-personality case really doesn’t know how all these nasty things keep happening, and he feels helpless to stop them. That’s President Zardari.

Of all the links in Cole’s article, this one to Pakistani writer Irfan Husain is the most interesting.

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Men’s Journal just did a phenomenal article about CNN Iraq correspondent Michael Ware. I’m not going to stop watching him, but I’m going to feel a little bit guilty about enabling the war addiction that is wrecking Ware’s life.

In this week’s Sift:

• The Scale of the Bail. How can bailing out the financial system possibly cost this much money?
• Tea-leaf-reading the Transition. I’d love to tell you exactly what Obama’s appointments mean for the next four years, but I can’t. And don’t think anyone else can, either.
• Media Corruption. Wouldn’t it be nice to watch a TV talking head without needing to wonder who’s paying him?
• Short Notes. When I figure something out about Mumbai, you’ll be the first to know. It’s a tough winter for squirrels in Washington. The Evangelical sex problem. And Nixon as the father of modern Republicanism.

TPM took a whack at listing all the government bailout programs, being careful to separate out direct loans and investments from less direct stuff like loan guarantees. If you just blindly total it up, you wind up in the $5-$10 trillion range. Presumably a bunch of that will get paid back, and the government might even make a profit on some of it, but still it’s one of those size-of-the-universe numbers that’s hard to relate to anything. (For example, the total federal debt at the end of the Clinton administration was about $5.7 trillion. It took two centuries to run that up, not a few months.)

So what caused our many-trillion-dollars-so-far problem? Ask anybody and you’ll hear about the housing bubble, subprime mortgages, defaults, falling house prices, and so on. But the New Yorker did a long article on Fed chief Ben Bernanke recently, and gave this account of why Bernanke didn’t see the crisis coming:

Relative to the fourteen trillion dollars in mortgage debt outstanding in the United States, the two-trillion-dollar subprime market seemed trivial. Moreover, internal Fed estimates of the total losses likely to be suffered on subprime mortgages were roughly equivalent to a single day’s movement in the stock market, hardly enough to spark a financial conflagration.

In other words: When this started, all the mortgages in the United States were $14 trillion, including $2 trillion of subprime. As of mid-summer, about 90% of all mortgages had their payments up to date, and even the ones that will eventually default are not going to be total losses. The underlying houses are worth something, after all, even in cases where they won’t cover the outstanding value of the loan.

So let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation: Say the 10% of mortgages with late payments all end up in foreclosure. Ten percent of $14 trillion is $1.4 trillion. Now let say that the underlying properties are only worth 80% of the outstanding value on the loan, so there will be a 20% loss for the banks and investors to eat. That gets you a $280 billion loss.

The point of that calculation isn’t to be exactly right, but to establish scale. (Suppose another 10% of mortgages eventually go under; now you’re up to $560 billion.) Where do we wind up with a $10 trillion problem? To get a $10 trillion loss just from mortgages, you’d have to have all mortgages default, and then underlying properties only sell for about 30% of the value of the loan.

Well, there’s a reason for the scale, but it’s way more complicated than the people-bought-houses-they-couldn’t-afford version. (And, by the way, all those conservative attempts to blame the crisis on too much government regulation depend on the people-bought-houses-they-couldn’t-afford explanation.) The real problem isn’t in the mortgages themselves, it’s in what happened to those mortgages after Wall Street got hold of them. It’s a two-step process.

The first step is known as securitization. (Alan Greenspan attributed the current crisis to “not the subprime problem itself, but to the securitization of subprime.”) There’s a pretty good article about this on Wikipedia, along with a very good diagram, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. Here’s the important point: A mortgage-backed security can wind up being worthless, even if the houses the mortgages are based on still have value. This is because the mortgage pool gets sliced up in such a way that one set of investors gets first call on any payments, then the next set of investors gets paid, and so on down to maybe a fifth tier, who will probably lose everything.

Securitization re-arranges the losses and creates uncertainty that freezes the system. (Imagine throwing one poison M&M into a bag. Who’s going to eat anything out that bag?) But to blow the problem completely out of scale you need the second step: short selling. This is the part of the problem that most people don’t understand at all. Fortunately, there’s finally a good recent article about it by Michael Lewis, author of the book Liar’s Poker about the boom-bust cycle on junk bonds in the 1980s.

It a nutshell, short selling means selling something you don’t own. When you put it like that, it sounds like it ought to be illegal, but it goes back to the very beginnings of our market system. (If you’re the kind of person who learns stuff best from fiction, pick up the novel The Coffee Trader by David Liss. It’s set in the Amsterdam commodities exchange in the 1600s. You can also learn about short selling from the Eddie Murphy/Dan Ackroyd movie Trading Places. If I remember right, the film includes this pithy rhyme by 19th-century financier Daniel Drew: “He who sells what isn’t his’n // must buy it back or go to prison.”)

In 17th-century Amsterdam, the commodity traders would sell (for future delivery) the cargo of ships that hadn’t arrived yet. If a ship sunk, the trader would have to buy the commodity somewhere else to make his contract good. Eventually somebody noticed that you could sell the cargo of a non-existent ship, and if the commodity price dropped before the ship was supposed to come in, you could cover your contract for less than you got by selling it. (If the price went up, on the other hand, you had a problem.) Short selling was born. It continues to be completely legal on investment exchanges of all sorts.

So as a strategy, short-selling works like this: You believe the price of something is going to go down, so you sell it (even though you don’t own it). After the price goes down, you clean the slate by buying back the thing you sold. Because it costs less now, you made a profit.

Now imagine that you were one of the first people to figure out that these mortgage-backed securities were going to turn out to be worthless. (Such a person is the main character in Lewis’ article.) You could sell them short, and after the rest of the world figured out that they were worthless, buying them back would cost you nothing. 100% profit, in other words.

But trading doesn’t create value, so one person’s trading gain is another person’s trading loss. That means somebody bought a mortgage-backed security that never really existed in the first place and lost money on it.

And that’s why the losses might be so huge. Short-sellers walked away with vast sums of money, and the banks and investment banks — and now you the taxpayer — might wind up with losses that are far larger than the losses on the underlying bad mortgages. And the short-sellers aren’t even villains. They were just right. It’s as if Lehman Brothers took their clients’ money and made a vast bet on the Patriots to win last year’s Super Bowl (which seemed like a good bet at the time). The people who bet on the Giants (and wound up with the money) wouldn’t be the villains in the story. The villains would be the lax regulators (who let Lehman do it), the investment-rating services (who did the equivalent of guaranteeing that the Patriots would win), and Lehman Brothers themselves.

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Matt Yglesias raises a very good point concerning banks that are “too big to fail” and hence require government bailouts: Why don’t we rig the system to discourage such banks from forming in the first place? It wouldn’t be that hard and shouldn’t even require any Standard-Oil-type breakups. Just make it a rule of thumb that the bigger you are, the more stringently you’re regulated. If you’re a giant-bank CEO who finds the regulations oppressive, you just have to spin off some subsidiaries and get small again.

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So far it’s taking about $150 billion of federal money to keep insurance giant AIG — once a very profitable company — from going bankrupt. Probably if your on-the-job screw-ups were vying for a place in The Guiness Book of World Records, it wouldn’t occur to you to expect a bonus. But the economy works differently for the corporate elite. (The people who wrecked Wachovia Bank are dividing $100 million, just to give one example.) So AIG got a lot of good publicity by announcing that its top execs won’t get bonuses this year.

Except … it turns out that 130 AIG managers will get “retention payments” — in one case as much as $3 million. Naturally, there’s an explanation: If AIG loses these executives it might be harder to sell off the parts of the company they run, which is how AIG is supposed to pay the government back. So the retention payments aren’t just throwing good money after bad, they’re protecting the public’s investment.

I can’t decide whether I want this explanation to be true or not. I mean, if it’s false, then insurance executives are blatantly ripping off the taxpayer in full public view. I’d hate to think that’s happening.

But if the explanation is true, it means that AIG executives are in demand. They’re in such demand that we have to make special payments (over and above their already-high salaries) to avoid having them hired away (in this job market, no less) by companies who want to give their own stockholders the benefits of AIG-style management. Doesn’t that thought make you shiver?

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There’s a lot of discussion going on about what kind of stimulus package Obama should put together, and this given new relevance to academic discussions about the Depression and the New Deal. Paul Krugman has been arguing that FDR’s only mistake was not being bold enough: He worried too much about ballooning the deficit, and should have been more aggressive in spending on things like public works. Meanwhile, Price Fishback agrees that the New Deal wasn’t that big a stimulus (and that even World War II wasn’t that big an economic stimulus when you factor in the inflation hidden by price controls), but draws the conclusion that we don’t really know what ended the Great Depression. So he’s skeptical about the usefulness of a big stimulus plan in turning things around now.

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Sign of the Apocalypse: There’s a famine going on in the squirrel kingdom, and nobody seems to know why. Apparently the oaks around D.C. (and a few other parts of the country) didn’t produce acorns this year. First the mysterious disappearance of honey bees (it’s even got a name: “colony collapse disorder”), and now this.

I believe the traditional solution to this kind of situation involves the king’s son joining a squirrel and a bee on a quest. But maybe in this democratic and egalitarian age one of the Obama girls could do something.

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The best analysis of the Republican Party I’ve seen in a while was by Neal Gabler in Sunday’s L.A. Times. Most people tell the Republicans’ recent history ideologically, and trace the royal lineage from Goldwater to Reagan to W. Gabler focuses more on campaign tactics and identity politics, tracing the lineage from Joe McCarthy to Nixon to W. The pivotal role of Nixon is also the subject of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I will have to read soon.

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias (who has been on a roll lately, I find myself quoting him a lot) is not letting Republicans get away with their Bush-wasn’t-a-real-conservative spin. He’s running occasion historical pieces pointing out how syncophantic those same conservatives were when Bush was popular. I like this 2004 quote from The Weekly Standard: “It’s obvious not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special
quality; one might be tempted to call it ‘lunacy’.”

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In case you missed it: Keith Olbermann’s moving comment on same-sex marriage. Keith’s special comments are usually a little too overwrought for my taste — Rachel Maddow’s irony and dry humor work better for me than Olbermann’s seriousness — but this one is dead on.

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Evangelicals and sex — what could make a more interesting article? Basically, if you rely on abstinence education (which doesn’t work) and then you tell kids that condoms don’t work, and that it would be sinful to plan ahead about sex — you get a real mess.

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This, believe it or not, is the American government today. I think this is so wrong and so unendurable that I want the people responsible rejected root and branch. I don’t just want their party and their allies to lose in a wait-til-next-year way. I want them to lose in a fire-the-coach, trade-all-the-players-for-draft-picks, we-need-to-start-over way. I want the words “Bush administration” to be a conversation-stopper for generations to come. Whenever someone says, “They did it that way in the Bush administration” I want the response to be “Jesus! What was I thinking?”

Just so you understand where I’m coming from.

Now, I realize that John McCain has said, “I am not George Bush.” And I know that across the country, Republicans running for office are not asking Bush to campaign for them or even using the word Republican in their ads. But none of them have changed their basic conservative philosophy. And that — not some personal quirk of George W. Bush — is the problem. If we re-elect Republicans, none of those wrong-track things I listed above will change. And even if the Democrats have a squeaker of a win, those things will just change temporarily, until the wind starts blowing in the other direction.

Remember: The original core of the Bush administration — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and so on — came from the Nixon administration. The whole unitary-executive theory of government is a Nixon-administration notion. Dick Cheney has spent his whole subsequent career trying to undo the restraints Congress put on the executive after Nixon. And even though the American people rejected Nixon personally, and Carter squeaked out a win over Ford, Nixon’s people made their way back to power.

I don’t want Bush’s people to ever make their way back to power. If McCain and the Republicans win, or even if they lose in a woulda-coulda-shoulda way, Bushism will rise again. That should never happen. I want 2008 to be a silver-bullet, stake-through-the-heart election for the whole Bush-Cheney way of thought. No sequels.

Just so you understand where I’m coming from.

Finally, we come down to the personal contrast between Obama and McCain. I didn’t warm up to Obama right away. I didn’t vote for him in the primary in January. It wasn’t until February or so that I started to realize that this guy is something special. He’s something we haven’t seen in the presidency in my lifetime — a strategist. Back in 2006, he and his people laid out a plan for how he was going to win the presidency, and he has carried it out. At every stage, he has been like the pool player who doesn’t just sink one shot, he sets himself up for the next shot and the one after that.

Back in April, when Hillary Clinton was pummeling him with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, and appealing to hard-working white Americans, Obama’s supporters were begging him to hit back hard — to dredge up the Bill Clinton scandals, to make a big deal out of Hillary’s enemy-fire gaffe, and throw the kitchen sink right back at her. He didn’t, because he knew he was on track. The delegate totals were piling up, and he was going to win the nomination anyway. Down the road, he knew he was going to need the Clintons and their people. (He’s got them. I attended a rally in Nashua yesterday and shook hands with Bill Clinton.)

At the convention, people were begging Obama to make Hillary his VP. He didn’t, because he knew he was on track, and he was looking ahead. Biden will fit better in an Obama administration.

This fall, he has refused to bring his campaign down to John McCain’s level. His half-hour commercial didn’t even mention McCain. It was all about the people he wants to help and how he plans to help them. When McCain yelled “socialist” Obama didn’t yell “fascist” back at him. Because he’s looking ahead. He wants to govern.

Again and again, Obama has refused to demonize people, even if it would get him a short-term advantage. He isn’t appealing to 50%-plus-one and to hell with everybody else. He hasn’t labelled part of America as “real” and the rest as … something other than real. Because he’s looking ahead. He doesn’t just want to be president, he wants to lead a united country. He wants to be something that George Bush appeared to be for a couple of days after 9-11: the president of all the people, even the ones who didn’t vote for him.

I know it’s difficult, but try to imagine having a president who thinks ahead, someone with a strategic vision of where the country should go. As commander-in-chief, John McCain would react to the news of the day. He would respond to insult with insult, attack with attack. Barack Obama will consider where he wants events to go, and how he can drive them there. He won’t be thinking about this morning’s headlines or tomorrow morning’s headlines; he’ll be looking one year, two years, ten years down the road.

Remember the speech he gave about racism? The Wright controversy wasn’t just a bad news cycle he wanted to close off; it was a teaching opportunity, a chance to appeal to our better angels, a way to make progress on an issue that has been stalled for decades.

Imagine having a president who thinks that way. What if we’d had a president like that after 9-11? When the American people were asking “Why do they hate us?” we might not have been given the self-serving answer that President Bush gave to a joint session of Congress:

They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

Instead, we might have had a real discussion about the effects of our policies, all the devilish bargains we have made over the years, and all the reasons why young Muslims might choose Bin Laden over America. We might have learned something. We might have become a better country.

We didn’t. Filled with self-righteousness, we became a worse country. We became a country that tortures, a country that starts unnecessary wars, a country that makes excuses when our “collateral damage” kills innocent people. We became a cowardly country, one that has been willing to let the government scare us into giving up one freedom after another. We became a more callous country, one that shrugs when its citizens go without health care and its middle class slips closer to poverty.

It’s got to stop.

Tomorrow is the time to draw the line. Every single vote makes a difference. I don’t care if you’re someplace like Massachusetts or California or New York where Obama is sure to win without you, or someplace like Tennessee or Utah where he won’t win even with you. This isn’t about defeating the Bush administration, it’s about burying it. If your vote makes the difference between a national plurality and a national majority, that matters. If your vote turns a 999,999-vote margin into a million-vote margin, that matters.

Drive the stake. Shoot the silver bullet. Don’t ever let this stuff rise again.

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Obama’s going to win.

I know you’re hearing a lot of noise about how the polls are “tightening”. In reality, it’s not clear whether they are or not, and if they are, they aren’t moving nearly fast enough to turn the election to McCain. They tightened some in the week that ended with Obama’s half-hour commercial, and then they widened again until this weekend. Tremayne on OpenLeft dissects the undecideds-will-break-to-McCain theory.

In most polls, to get a McCain win you have to assume that he gets all the undecideds, plus the margin-of-error. It’s not going to happen.

Finally, there’s reason to believe that the polls favoring Obama are just better polls. Nate Silver has been looking at the cellphone effect: Of 15 recent polls, the top five for Obama all try to account for cellphone-only households, while the bottom six don’t. “Obama leads by an average of 10.0 points in the cellphone polls, versus 5.1 in the landline-only’s.”

For the reasons I gave above, that’s no reason to slack off. If we’re going to put this country back on the right track, we don’t just need a win, we need a big win. The bigger the better.

As for Senate races, Nate Silver thinks the only real cliff-hanger is Franken-Coleman in Minnesota, which he thinks tilts in Franken’s direction. He sees the Democrats picking up seven other seats: Warner in Virginia, the Udalls in New Mexico and Colorado, Begich in Alaska, Shaheen in New Hampshire, Merkley in Oregon, and Hagan in North Carolina. If Franken wins, that brings the Democratic total to 59 (if you count the independents Sanders and Lieberman, who currently caucus with the Democrats). To get to the filibuster-proof 60, Democrats would have to knock off either Chambliss in Georgia, McConnell in Kentucky, or Wicker in Mississippi, which Nate doesn’t think is going to happen.

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A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. The states carried by both Gore and Kerry amount to 248 electoral votes. Of those states, McCain has given up everywhere but Pennsylvania (21 votes). So essentially Obama starts with 227 votes in the bag.

Next look at the states won by either Gore (New Mexico – 5; Iowa – 7) or Kerry (New Hampshire – 4). OpenLeft’s poll-averager gives Obama a double-digit lead in all three states. The more conservative-leaning Real Clear Politics site has New Mexico at a 7.5% margin and the rest higher. Obama’s going to take all three of them, bringing his total to 243.

Now we get to the five states that Nate Silver believes decide the election: Virginia (13), Colorado (9), Pennsylvania (21), Ohio (20), and Nevada (5). Obama needs 27 votes out of this group. Any two of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio do the trick, and Virginia-Colorado-Nevada does it even if Obama loses Pennsylvania and Ohio. Pennsylvania-Nevada gets Obama to 269, a tie, from which position he probably wins in the House of Representatives.

OpenLeft (7.5%) and RCP (7.6%) both rate Pennsylvania as the most likely of these states to go for Obama. That gets him to 264. (These are the 264 “strong Obama” votes on Pollster.com as of Monday noon.) OpenLeft has Colorado (7.4%) almost as likely to put him over the top, but RCP has Nevada (6.2%), and then Colorado (5.5%). Both poll-averages give Obama an advantage in all five states. If he gets all of them, he’d be at 311.

Going outside that group you find Obama with a 2-2.5% lead in Florida (27) and even-or-better in North Carolina (15). He’s also got an outside shot in Missouri (11), North Dakota (3), Indiana (11), Arizona (10), Georgia (15), and Montana (3). This is landslide territory. If he got all of these states, he’d win 406-132.

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Using the DailyKos electoral-vote-tracking map and the Swing-State Project’s poll-closing map, I imagined how Election Night might go and what to watch for at various points in the evening. All times are Eastern.

On Tuesday night, look up results here. Nate Silver does his own hour-by-hour.

Before the polls close. Exit polls start becoming available to insiders well before the polls close. Now, in 2004 those early exit polls didn’t match the final vote tallies, so nobody is going to go too far out on the limb based on them. But they do generally say something meaningful. And while the TV talking-heads are committed to withhold the exit-poll results until the polls close, they’re not committed to say things that will make them look foolish later on. So you can sometimes get an idea what the exit polls say by listening to how the pundits hedge their bets.

This is a good time to listen to Fox News if you can stand it, because the big clue in this prior-to-closing banter is whether Republican pundits start setting up the spin for their loss. If moderate Republicans are talking about what a drag Palin was on the ticket or religious-right types are saying how McCain never really was one of them, you’ll know the exit polls are good for Obama. But if they’re all saying that it’s not over until it’s over, then the exit polls are good for McCain. If you can’t stand to watch Fox, listen for whether liberal pundits go on-and-on about Obama’s amazing “ground game“. That means he’s winning.

7 p.m. The real action starts at 7, when polls close in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Vermont, and Virginia. Vermont goes immediately to Obama, Kentucky to McCain. Which of the other three is called first is your first real sign of who’s going to win and how big. If Obama gets Virginia, it’s hard to see how McCain will stop him. If he gets it early and easily, Obama could have a landslide. But if Virginia is too close to call while Georgia goes easily to McCain and Indiana is leaning to McCain, it’s going to be a long night. My best guess: Fairly soon we see Obama 16, McCain 23; Indiana too close to call. If Virginia can’t close its polls on time because of heavy turnout, that’s a good sign for Obama too.

The Senate races in Georgia and Kentucky are important to watch. If they go Republican, probably the Democrats don’t get 60 votes in the Senate.

7:30 p.m. Ohio, North Carolina, West Virginia. None of them are called right away. If McCain loses any of them, it’s over.

8 p.m. A long list of states worth 171 electoral votes. Obama goes up by 95-61, with Pennsylvania, Florida, and Missouri joining the ranks of the uncalled. West Virginia gets called for McCain.

8:30 p.m. Arkansas goes for McCain. 95-67

9 p.m. A bunch of big easy states like Texas and New York. 172-127. Arizona and Colorado too close. Watch for who wins the Minnesota Senate race.

9-10 p.m. Some of the too-close early states start coming in. Ohio and Pennsylvania for Obama. 213-127. If that’s true, it’s just a matter of time.

10 p.m. Iowa for Obama. Utah for McCain. Montana, Nevada too close. 220-132. Indiana or North Carolina might come in about now, but I can’t guess which way they’ll go.

11 p.m. California comes in for Obama with its 55 votes. That’s 275. Obama wins. I plan to drink a glass of champagne and go to bed.

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The ugliest ad in the country this cycle has got to be the Elizabeth Dole “Promises” ad, where she tries to tie her Presbyterian Sunday-school-teacher opponent Kay Hagan to atheism. Fortunately, she got slammed hard for doing it, both by the North Carolina press and in a powerful counterpunch by Hagan: “My campaign is about creating jobs and fixing our economy, not bearing false witness against fellow Christians.”

North Carolina also has one of the funniest get-out-the-vote ads. The gist of it is that all those other idiots are going to vote, so you’d better vote too.

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One reason to stay up past 11 is to see how the California same-sex-marriage proposition comes out. The Yes-on-8 (anti-gay) forces make their case here and here. (It’s basically a natural-law argument. I’m generally skeptical of natural-law arguments, because it’s so easy to confuse what’s natural with how-I-was-brought-up. There was a time when people thought it was unnatural for women to vote.) Samuel L. Jackson does a No-on-8 ad. Far and away the creepiest ad of the campaign is this one.

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A close second to Dole’s atheist attack is McCain’s attempt to tie Obama to Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi. Unlike Bill Ayers, the only suspicious thing about Khalidi is that he’s an Arab. His books look at the Middle East from a Palestinian point of view, which is only objectionable if you believe that Palestinians have no right to have a point of view. (If I sound like I have an ax to grind here, I do. I covered the talk Khalidi gave to the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 2007. I liked it.)

Anyway, Obama and Khalidi were on the University of Chicago faculty at the same time, and Obama went to the going-away dinner held before Khalidi left for his current post as director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. Apparently they used to talk, though there’s no indication that Obama agreed with Khalidi about Israel/Palestine issues.

Juan Cole weighs in on this.

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Dick Cheney’s less-than-coveted endorsement went to McCain. Obama immediately put out an ad making sure the event didn’t go unnoticed.

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Add this to the list of things Sarah Palin doesn’t understand: the First Amendment. Media criticism of her negative campaigning makes her fear for the future of “First Amendment rights”. Steve Benen explains.

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The Justice Department, to its credit, ignored President Bush’s push to get involved in voter suppression in Ohio. TPM summarizes voter-suppression efforts state-by-state. Politico finally notices that there’s no evidence behind the vote-fraud charges that voter suppression is supposed to deal with. And Richard Hasan suggests that private organizations like ACORN could get out of the voter-registration business if the government would just do it right.

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Fun stuff: McCain on SNL. A human Obama logo in Anchorage. Two Canadian comedians play a prank on Sarah Palin, and another hockey mom sings an “Evita” song to her. A panel worries about losing the true meaning of Halloween. The James Rocket looks at the Obama logo and sees donuts and bacon.

In this week’s Sift:

• It Gets Uglier. Charges of terrorism, socialism, baby-killing, and vote fraud are starting to lead to violence. Does anybody think we’re going to be one big happy family again after this is over? Plus some humorous responses to it all.
• Endorsements. Obama’s getting some interesting ones from places like the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle. And Colin Powell.
• More on Vote Fraud and Vote Supression. Only one is a genuine threat to American democracy.
• Short Notes. Want to carve a Barack-o-Lantern?

Instead of substantive proposals for dealing with our country’s problems the McCain campaign has treated swing-state voters to this robocall:

You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home, and killed Americans.

Robocalls are an especially insidious way to run a negative campaign. Because they go by so quickly, they’re very easy to mishear. So while the sentence above is defensible in a word-for-word way — a decade ago Obama worked with a guy who decades before that had worked with some other guys who died when their bomb went off by mistake  — many voters will hear something else: that Obama was involved (and maybe is still involved) in terrorist bombings that kill people.

Senator Susan Collins, co-chair of the McCain campaign in Maine, asked McCain to stop the robocalls, saying “These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics.” When Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked the candidate if he would stop the calls, McCain responded, “Of course not.”

And the hits just keep coming. Now Obama is a “socialist” and a new robocall claims that Obama voted to deny medical care to babies. 

Rule #1 in a Karl-Rove-style campaign is: Never defend; always attack. So when confronted with this and his other punches-below-the-belt, McCain has been demanding that Obama repudiate a statement by Rep. John Lewis, a hero of the Civil Rights movement. In the third debate, McCain claimed that Lewis “made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace.”

One way to spot spin: Spinners characterize a statement instead of quoting it. Lewis in fact made the very apt point that it’s dangerous to create “an atmosphere of hate” because you don’t know how far other people will take it. “George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun.” But he stirred up the kind of people who did. That’s what Lewis accused McCain and Palin of doing — not of being segregationists, bombing churches, or killing children.

And people are getting stirred up. A man in the Cincinnati suburb of Fairfield has hung an Obama effigy in his yard as a bizarre Halloween display. A local reporter was assaulted at a Palin rally in North Carolina. Another Palin crowd in Florida shouted racial insults at a black sound man in the press area. ACORN offices have been vandalized in Boston and Seattle. Sunday a woman at a BBQ restaurant in North Carolina yelled at Obama himself “socialist, socialist, socialist — get out of here”. Also in North Carolina, tires on 30 cars were slashed outside an Obama rally. A California Republican newsletter printed an image of Obama on a food stamp together with watermelon, ribs, and fried chicken. A black Obama supporter in Arizona had swastikas and McCain slogans painted on his restaurant — including “no niggers 4 president“.

Al Jazeera reporter Casey Kaufman (yes, Al Jazeera covers America) interviewed people attending a Palin rally in rural Ohio and filmed statements like these:

• “I’m afraid if [Obama] wins, the blacks will take over.”
• “He must support terrorists.”
• “Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white and that he might hide that.”
• “He thinks us white people are trash.”

McCain, meanwhile, says that he is proud of the people who attend his rallies. The assaulted Greensboro reporter comments:

After today I’m wondering — and this is just wondering at this point — whether Republicans aren’t in some respect giving their supporters license for this sort of crap. If the story you peddle is that your guys are the good guys and all those who stand against them are the bad guys, and the “liberal media” is in that second column, might there be a message there — even if it is one that is misconstrued and carried to stupid extreme in some cases?

What Republicans really are telling their supporters is that Obama and other Democrats aren’t loyal Americans. Friday, Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann was pushing an Obama-is-anti-American line on Hardball when host Chris Matthews pointed out that Obama is a U. S. senator. How many other people in Congress, he wondered, did Bachmann suspect of being anti-American? Bachmann left the door open: “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” (Bachmann’s opponent has gotten $650,000 in contributions since.)

Sarah Palin says she likes to visit “the pro-America areas of this great nation.” (Numbers wonk Nate Silver analyzes the places Palin goes and notes that they are also the white parts of America.) And McCain surrogate Nancy Pfotenhauer said that McCain has support in “real Virginia” as opposed to the suburban northern areas of the state.

Actually, the McCain campaign is just making explicit something Republicans have been doing for years — denouncing parts of the United States. John Kerry wasn’t just a liberal, he was a “Massachusetts” liberal. Nancy Pelosi has “San Francisco values”. Democrats quite literally never do this. Bush is just a conservative; there’s no special invective in him being a “Texas” conservative. Places like Utah are never going to vote Democratic, but you never hear a Democrat say “Utah” with a sneer.

Emptywheel points out that this ugliness is not going to go away after the election. If you really believe that your country has been taken over by a vote-stealing, terrorist-loving, baby-killing, socialist revolutionary, are you just going to nod peaceably and go along? John Lewis is right: Bad things will come of this.

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In case you think any of this stuff is new, here’s a clip from 1954, where Senator Joseph McCarthy says that legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow “as far back as 20 years ago was engaged in propaganda for Communist causes. Now Mr. Murrow by his own admission was a member of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, a terrorist organization cited as subversive.”

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Keeping a sense of humor, some Obama supporter has spliced the McCain robocall into a scene from “The Matrix”. Neo’s terror is exactly what the call seems to ask for, and he has some very appropriate reactions: “How do you know all this?” and “This is insane.”

American Prospect’s Ezra Klein compares McCain’s guilt-by-association tactics to those the Penguin used when he debated Batman: “Whenever you have seen Batman, who is he with? Criminals!”

Onion News Network goes “Beyond the Facts” to tell us about an 8-year-old girl who sells cookies and lemonade to finance her anti-McCain attack ad. The adorably precocious blond says: “You can make a lie sound like the truth if you say it over and over again.” And ONN’s anchor comments proudly: “I’m sure we will be seeing horrible things from that little girl in the future.”

This video imagines what goes on in McCain strategy sessions.

Hayden Panettiere (the indestructible cheerleader from “Heroes”) makes a tongue-in-cheek McCain commercial (rated R for language). “He’s just like George Bush, except older and with a worse temper.” And this Women For McCain video is equally satirical, but with more bite. “I promise to let the government tell me what to do with my body if I get raped.” This video is related, but it’s not funny at all: a teen-ager who got pregnant after a rape tells Governor Palin that girls in her situation should have a choice.

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With two weeks to go in the campaign, newspapers have started making endorsements. No surprise that the Boston Globe went for Obama, and while the Washington Post was not a sure thing, that was no great shock either.

The interesting endorsements, however, came from newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, which has never before endorsed a Democrat for president. (“Is that chill coming from hell?” comments one reader on the Trib’s web site. “Do I see porcine aviation outside my window??”) The L. A. Times also hasn’t endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate in its long history — until now. The Houston Chronicle and the Salt Lake Tribune are red-state papers that endorsed Bush in 2004 — both are for Obama this year.

Vice presidential candidates rarely make a significant impression on editorial boards, but Interestingly Sarah Palin did — a negative impression. The Salt Lake Tribune’s take is typical: “More than any single factor, McCain’s bad judgment in choosing the inarticulate, insular and ethically challenged Palin disqualifies him for the presidency.” If you just can’t get enough of such sentiments, Daily Kos collects them from nine major newspapers.

The big endorsement news of the weekend wasn’t a newspaper, it was Colin Powell. Sunday on Meet the Press, Powell made a sweeping statement of the reasons to pick Obama over McCain. And it’s way past time somebody made Powell’s point about the Obama’s-a-Muslim smear: What if he were? “We have got to stop polarizing ourselves in this way,” Powell said.

Damn straight. Islam is a religion, and we have freedom of religion in America. Would we blithely accept people saying “He’s a Jew” in the tone of voice that people are saying “Obama’s a Muslim”? What if his middle name sounded Jewish — Menachem or Moshe — rather than Arab like Hussein? Would we tolerate speakers using it as a taunt?

Predictably, Republicans immediately turned Powell’s endorsement into a racial thing. Asked about the endorsement’s impact, George Will went straight into: “It seems to me if we had the tools to measure, we’d find that Barack Obama gets two votes because he’s black for every one he loses because he’s black.” And Rush Limbaugh put it like this: “I am now researching [Powell’s] past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed.”

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This week we started to get some appropriate perspective on the fraud/suppression problem. John McCain has already laid the groundwork for claiming fraud if he loses Florida. And in the third debate, McCain made the ludicrous claim that vote-registration group ACORN is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick examines that claim and concludes: “Large-scale, co-ordinated vote-stealing doesn’t happen.” AP’s Fact Check comes to a similar conclusion: Some ACORN registrations are fake — that always happens when you have a voter registration drive — but “in alleging voter fraud, McCain goes too far.”

Lithwick quotes Barnard College political science professor Lori Minnite, who explains the relative sizes of the voter fraud and voter suppression problems.

From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration
fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That’s 26 criminal voters — voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident — the voters that Republicans warn about. Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls.

Several people, including the Obama campaign, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, former Justice Department voting-rights official Gerry Hebert, and fired U.S. attorney David Iglesias started pointing out the similarities between the vote-fraud investigation of ACORN and the kind of politicized and politically-timed investigations that were at the root of the U.S. attorneys’ scandal. Igelisias: “Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it’s a scare tactic.”

In related news, the Supreme Court over-ruled a lower court ruling that would have forced Ohio to make available the names of 200,000 newly registered voters (out of 600,000 new voters total) whose registrations in some way differ from other state databases. All 200,000 would have been vulnerable to challenge at the polls, usually because some state database has a typographical error, or one database includes a middle initial and another leaves it out. (One voter with such a database mis-match is McCain’s buddy Joe the Plumber.) How these mismatches might lead to illegitimate votes being cast is a mystery, but forcing 200,000 Ohio voters to cast provisional ballots might lead to post-election litigation that would make Florida 2000 look tame.

Here’s the nub of the issue: If newly registered Ohio voters (most of whom are Democrats) become convinced that they’ll be hassled at the polls and their votes may not count, many may decide not to bother. That’s the whole point. The fewer people vote, the better it is for Republicans.

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Oh, and here’s another robocall: This one from the Ohio Republican Party warning people about the Democrats’ plan to “rig the election.”

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This is what a crowd of 100,000 people looks like. Not in Berlin, in St. Louis.

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538’s Sean Quinn relates a hilarious story about an Obama canvasser in Washington, Pennsylvania. I suspect it’s an urban legend, because I sort of remember hearing something similar during one of Jesse Jackson’s campaigns, but why ruin it?

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If you think a Barack-o-Lantern would just be the coolest thing to have on your porch for Halloween, check out Yes We Carve.

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What if our campaigns were comedy laugh-offs rather than smear-fests? You’ve probably seen clips from this already, but Obama and McCain were each very funny at the white-tie Al Smith Dinner in New York. McCain explained why he refered to Obama as “that one” at the debate, and said that Obama also had a pet name for him: George Bush. And Obama observed that from the doorstep of the Waldorf Astoria (where the dinner was held) “you can see all the way to the Russian Tea Room.”

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Josh Marshall explains one obscure bit of blogger slang: When reporters or pundits bend over backwards to give McCain the benefit of the doubt — like explaining how distressed the honorable McCain must be by the reprehensible tone of his own campaign — they are said to be “on the tire swing“. His post includes video of the original tire-swinging pundit.

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Remember how government spying on overseas phone calls was only aimed at terrorists? Well, maybe not. ABC’s Nightline reports on NSA whistleblowers’ accounts of listening in to ordinary people’s phone sex calls and all sorts of other things. Surprised? That’s one reason why the Founders were so down on the idea of unchecked, unaccountable power: It never turns out well.

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Slate’s Linda Hirshman discusses why we might not want pregnant 17-year-olds to keep their babies.

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Remember the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department? They’re the folks who interpret the law for the rest of the executive branch — the ones who said that the Convention Against Torture doesn’t really mean anything. Now they’re saying that laws that specifically ban groups who get government funding from hiring by religion — they don’t really mean anything either. Every bad thing conservatives say about the Supreme Court is true in spades (and in secret) about the Bush OLC. They make the laws say whatever they want.

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One snowy winter in Chicago, my friends and I realized we were all perversely rooting to break the snowfall record. One guy explained, “Nobody wants to live through the second worst winter in history.” Well, this year the federal government had the biggest budget deficit in history. Enjoy.

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In case you missed it, here’s McCain putting air quotes around “health of the mother” during the third debate.

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If you want some substance in your Sift rather than just politics, I sincerely apologize. I’m getting increasingly obsessed as Election Day closes in, and I hope to recover shortly thereafter. Here’s a helping of substance to tide you over: The Washington Post analyzes what really went wrong with the market meltdown. And Washington Monthly does a one-stop summary of all the major issues. Seriously.