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Crisis and Opportunity

December 15, 2008 – 12:19 pm
To those who have plenty of personal opportunity, speak first about the environmental crisis. But to those who have plenty of personal crises, speak first about the environmental opportunities — and how solutions for the Earth’s woes can be solutions for their problems too.

— Van Jones
In This Week’s Sift:

  • The Big Picture on Bailouts. They can’t stop the recession, but that’s not the point. Avoiding a depression is the point.
  • The Next Time You’re in the Book Store… pick up The Green Collar Economy by Van Jones. Lots of authors have good if-I-were-the-dictator plans. Jones has a good since-we’re-a-democracy plan.
  • Short Notes. A bipartisan Senate report says that the blame for torture belongs at the top. A right-wing pastor wants courts to order gays into treatment. With a Democrat about to take office, the media goes back the Clinton Rules. Pakistan has multiple personality disorder. And Michael Ware is addicted to war.
The Big Picture on Bailouts

The current economic mess has so many sub-messes that it’s easy to lose the big picture. Let me reframe a little: The important thing to worry about is the potential for Great Depression II. We’re not there yet, but we could get there.

Most of what we’ve seen so far, painful as it is, is normal recession stuff: lost jobs, foreclosed houses, businesses cutting back or going under, and the market plummeting. That’s all very bad for the individuals affected, but from a society-wide point of view it’s just what happens. At the end of every business cycle, like clockwork, businesses get too bold. They overbuild and overexpand. Memories of the last recession get dim and big returns for little effort start to seem normal, so people forget to be skeptical of schemes that are too good to be true. When that happens, a recession has to restore the natural balance. It’s the yin/yang of capitalism: When greed seems to have totally vanquished fear, fear has to make a comeback.

The last few recessions have not been nearly this bad, but anybody who lived through the recessions of the mid-70s or early-80s should know what I mean. Things got nasty for a while, but the balance got restored in a year or so and a new cycle started.

But depressions have a feature that recessions lack — cascading bankruptcy. It works like this: You think your business is doing fine, but then I declare bankruptcy. When you factor in the likelihood that I’m never going to pay my bills, you realize that you’re bankrupt too. After you announce that, your creditors discover that they’re not solvent either. And on and on and on, like the chain reaction in an atom bomb.

That’s what the bailouts have been trying to prevent. Even if I’m a terrible businessman who deserves to go under, the government stepping in to pay my debts might allow you and all your creditors stay in business. Bailouts can’t fix the underlying recession — we still built too much and expanded too far and trusted people we shouldn’t have, and those chickens still have to roost somewhere — but the whole economy doesn’t have to go down the drain.

It’s important to realize that such bailouts are only a short-term strategy. Eventually, poorly-run businesses have to fail, and fear has to be allowed to have its day. Otherwise, you’re on your way towards a Soviet system — and we know how well that worked. But the legitimate role of a bailout is to keep a big, poorly-run business from failing so abruptly that it takes a bunch of well-run businesses down with it.
That gives some context for thinking about the proposed auto-industry bailout. In the long run, the world has more auto-manufacturing capability than it needs, and some of those factories are going to have to close. But if GM, Ford, and Chrysler go out of business tomorrow, then (as Dick Cheney says) “It’s Herbert Hoover time.” A lot of well-run businesses that supply the auto industry are going to go down too.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats are ready to let that happen. But each has its preferred way to keep the factory doors open. The Democrats want a special arrangement that gives the government a seat at the table as the auto industry re-organizes. The Republicans want the re-organization to happen through the ordinary bankruptcy process — the same way a bunch of airlines re-organized a few years ago.

The difference between the parties’ positions reflects their divergent visions of the economy’s underlying problems. Republicans believe that workers make too much money and have too much security; citizens get too many services from the government; rich people pay too much tax; capitalists are over-regulated; and markets will find the best solutions if government gets out of their way.

By contrast, Democrats believe that workers make too little money — the distribution of wealth has gotten too skewed; capital needs more regulation — otherwise it gets drawn into the kinds of schemes that created Wall Street meltdown; and the government needs to take the lead in some kind of integrated approach to our energy, environmental, and healthcare problems — the market won’t find the right solution on its own.

Republicans prefer bankruptcy court because a judge’s first responsibility is to the creditors. Because a bankruptcy judge can break union contracts, s/he could fix that awful problem of working people making too much money and having too much job security. Democrats prefer a “car czar” who would have broader responsibilities — not just to the creditors, but to the workers, communities, and the overall economy.
That stuff about UAW workers making $73 an hour is bogus. The people who keep repeating it know it’s bogus.
Has there ever been a less professorial Harvard professor than Elizabeth Warren? She heads the congressional panel overseeing the $700 billion bank bailout, but Warren’s interview with Rachel Maddow doesn’t sound like anything you typically hear on TV. Imagine the conversation two ordinary people would have if they were well informed and very, very smart.
An anonymous middle-school teacher in Kentucky explains how the economic crisis is starting to affect her classroom. And that post got an echo from this teacher.
Yields on 3-month treasury bills briefly went negative Tuesday. That ought to be impossible.
One leader of the opposition to the auto bailout was Louisiana’s Republican Senator David Vitter, the D.C. madam client. The leader of the Shreveport GM workers comments: “He’d rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers.”
The Next Time You’re in the Book Store …

… 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.

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.”

Short Notes

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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Recovering Our National Character

December 8, 2008 – 3:22 pm
Character is much easier kept than recovered. — Thomas Paine

In This Week’s Sift:

  • Returning to the Rule of Law. We’re coming to the end of an administration that has believed it is above the law. Is it enough that we got them out of office, or do they need to go to jail?
  • Cheap Gas: Energy Crisis Over? What is the market telling us when it prices gas at $1.75 a gallon? “Oh, never mind about that ‘peak oil’ stuff?” Why it’s probably not time to buy a Hummer.
  • Short Notes. Soft power has a new name. The Obama-birth-certificate myth is a poster child for conspiracy theories. Kagan and Kristol propose new wars. Bush sincerely regrets that other people have made mistakes. And we just have to talk about naked cheerleaders, don’t we?
Returning to the Rule of Law

People who don’t work for either the Bush administration, Fox News, or the Weekly Standard share a fairly widespread agreement that laws have been broken: torture is illegal, warrantless wiretaps are illegal, using political criteria to hire civil-service employees is illegal. The last eight years have seen a wide range of illegal practices, together with a few examples of more targeted crimes, like the possible conspiracy to prosecute Alabama’s Democratic Governor Don Siegelman.

But what should Obama do about it? Obviously, he should put a stop to any ongoing crimes as soon as he takes office. (If he doesn’t, that will be the first clear evidence that “change” isn’t all it was cracked up to be.) But should people be prosecuted, and if so, who? Do you start from the top (Bush and Cheney) or from the bottom (whichever CIA agent waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed)? Or somewhere else? (John Yoo comes to mind.) Or should we have something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which would just try to get the truth out rather than punish people?

One of the best articles on this topic is by Harper’s Scott Horton, who’s been on top of these issues for years. Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to Harper’s to see the article online. But the next best thing is Horton’s interview with Glenn Greenwald. (A link to the audio is at the bottom of the page.) Horton makes two key points. First, the Bush administration is unique in American history. Greenwald sums up:

We don’t have isolated serial cases of law-breaking; it’s really an ideology of lawlessness — a principle that was adopted that the president in general has the right to act outside the law — that distinguishes it from even the worst law-breakers that have occupied the White House and government agencies.

Horton elaborates by referring to the account (in Barton Gellman’s book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency) of

David Addington, with the authority of Vice President Cheney, telling individuals who are putting in their proposals, to make their proposals completely disregarding the law, including the criminal law restrictions. And indeed, they specifically solicited proposals disregarding the law, and they implemented them disregarding the law — knowing that they didn’t have legitimate legal arguments to avoid the restriction, that they could just do it by force and dint of power and authority.

His second point is that torture is different than the other offenses. Not torturing is a core principal of the United States, going back to General Washington during the Revolutionary War and reaffirmed by President Lincoln during the Civil War. The issue goes to the core of what kind of country we want to be.

Horton wants Bush administration law-breaking investigated by a commission similar to the 9-11 Commission, with power to demand documents and compel testimony. Their report could be followed up by specific prosecutions that might be based in the Justice Department or handled by a special prosecutor.

The key thing to remember is that any process has to be sold to the public. If conservatives can spin it as a partisan witchhunt — which they will certainly try to do — then it won’t matter who goes to jail. They’ll just be martyrs to the conservative cause, and they’ll be vindicated as soon as conservatives get back into power.

The bad example here is Iran/Contra. In the congressional hearings, Oliver North managed to cast himself in the Dirty Harry mold: the only person man enough to do what needed to be done. As a result, after North and John Poindexter’s felony convictions were overturned on technicalities, no further action was taken against them. The first President Bush pardoned six Iran-Contrarians, including Elliott Abrams, who went on to have a position in the administration of the second President Bush. Other people tainted by the scandal also got positions under Bush II, with no public outrage to speak of.

So if Obama doesn’t do this right, both legally and politically, the bad guys will come back to break the law again.

Other good discussions of this topic:

  • The Last Secrets of the Bush Administration by Charles Homans in Washington Monthly
  • No New Torture Probes in which Jack Goldsmith (former head of the Bush Office of Legal Counsel, who reversed some of the most egregious legal abuse by his predecessor John Yoo) argues in a Washington Post op-ed that Obama should let ongoing investigations in Congress and within the Justice Department move forward, but not push anything himself.
  • a Bloggingheads discussion between Jack Balkin (of Yale Law School and the legal blog Balkinization) and Eric Posner (of the University of Chicago Law School)
  • Progressivism and the Rule of Law by Senator Russ Feingold.
Digby discusses the case of Mary Beth Buchanan, one of the more politically tainted of the Bush U.S. attorneys, who is not planning to submit her resignation when Obama takes office.

When the US Attorney scandal broke, you’ll recall that there was a lot of wingnut chatter saying that because Bill Clinton had asked for the resignations of all US Attorneys at the beginning of his term, Bush had a perfect right to fire US Attorneys who refused to do political dirty work. They set the stage for this at the time. It was entirely predictable that the new administration would be held to a completely new standard — he would not be allowed to fire any US Attorney who had been appointed by Bush for any reason at all or risk being accused of using the Justice department for partisan gain. It’s how they roll.

The principle here really isn’t that difficult: U.S. attorneys are political appointees but shouldn’t be political operatives. There are legitimate policy changes from one administration to the next, such as how to allocate law-enforcement resources among street crime, white collar crime, drugs, etc. So a new administration should have a chance to assemble a team that is in agreement with its policies. But political interference in specific investigations is completely beyond the pale.

Biologist Olivia Judson makes a plea for honest government science. Remember when this was a complete non-issue? Not so long ago, really.

Cheap Gas: Energy Crisis Over?

I’ve heard a lot of muttering about gas prices lately. Nobody minds the price coming down to $1.75 or so, but it makes last summer’s $4 gas look all the more suspicious. Was all that talk about “peak oil” some kind of conspiracy or something?

Actually there’s an economic explanation, and it’s similar to why you can sometimes get plane tickets to London for $100 or some other ridiculous price. Both industries have high fixed costs and long lead times before supply can be matched to demand. Take the airlines: Once you’ve bought a plane, hired a crew, and rented gates at JFK and Heathrow, there’s no way to get that money back. Instead, you’ve got a fixed number of seats to sell, and you charge whatever it takes to fill the plane. If you have to sell a bunch of $100 New-York-to-London tickets, you lose money. But you’d lose a lot more money if you kept the ticket price high and flew an empty plane.

Ditto for gasoline. Once you’ve drilled the wells, built the pipelines, set up the refineries, and contracted the supertankers — that money’s gone. Now you’ve got the capability to produce and distribute some quantity of gasoline — way more than you can possibly store — and so you have to sell it for what people will pay. In other words, supply is fixed in the short term. (In the long term, the oil companies can adjust supply by doing more or less drilling; but that takes a long time to have any effect. Or we could bring down supply by invading Iran.) So the price has to gyrate up or down to make demand match that fixed supply. If demand is high, the price might have to go up to $4 to dampen it. If it’s low, you may have to sell gas for less than $2.

Things work differently for, say, the car companies. When demand crashes, they can close plants and bring supply down within a few weeks. That’s why you never get the kinds of deals on new cars that you get on airline tickets — no $5,000 Hummers, no matter how badly they’re selling.

The price of gas is down now because the recession has crushed demand. (Demand is down partly because people started buying smaller cars last summer, but a much bigger factor is that the unemployed don’t need to commute.) In the long run we’re still running out of oil. But in the short run we’re set up to produce gasoline faster than it can be sold at $4 a gallon during a recession.

It’s not getting nearly as much coverage as the possibility that our car companies will go under, but our major newspapers are in trouble too. The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, has filed for bankrupcy. Fortune speculates that the New York Times (which also owns the Boston Globe) will be next.

As we replace fossil fuels, we’ll probably have to change our industrial-age mindset. The industrial age was based on mass markets and one-big-solution thinking. So we have a tendency to look for One Big Thing that’s going to replace oil: nuclear or solar or clean coal or some other One Big Thing.

But maybe the new economy will be based on a whole bunch of little ideas that each have their own niche. Commuting by bicycle, for example, is always going to be a better idea in flat Amsterdam than in hilly San Francisco.

Think about electric cars. Right now they have a short range, so you wouldn’t do a one-for-one swap and replace your summer-driving-vacation family car with an electric. Now think about Hawaii. No oil of its own. A long way to ship gasoline. Lots of sunshine and wind. And no long distances to drive. Electric cars will need a lot of work before they’re practical in Texas. But maybe not so much before they’re practical in Hawaii.

I’m still working out what I think about an auto-company bailout, but it’s always interesting to test the vague impressions I get from the media against actual data. After watching the news, I’d assume that U.S. car-makers are getting whipped by the competition because their cars are too big and they have UAW workers with big contracts. But Emptywheel looks at the numbers on November car sales and notices some things that don’t fit: Year-over-year Honda and Toyota sales are down worse than Ford. And Prius sales are down 48.3% from a year ago, compared to, say, the Chevy Silverado, which is down only 22.5%.

U.S. auto companies have a lot of long-term problems, but their immediate problem isn’t unions or gas-guzzlers, it’s that people aren’t buying cars. And the reasons they aren’t buying are industry-wide, not something specific about the Big 3:

  • With gas bouncing up to $4 a gallon and back down to $1.75, nobody knows what kind of car it makes sense to buy.
  • Being anxious about their jobs, people don’t know what they can afford.
  • We’re in a credit crunch, so banks only want to give car loans to people who don’t need them.

Any bailout that works is going to have to do something about those problems, not just front the companies some money or beat down the unions.

Short Notes

Jim Arkedis wins the rename-that-concept prize. For years, liberals have been arguing that the U.S. needs to use its economic, diplomatic, and cultural influence more effectively, and that if we did, we might occasionally get what we want from other countries without invading them. Unfortunately, the most common term for all that non-military clout has been soft power, which makes us sound like a bunch of softies. Go on TV to make the point that we should use soft power on, say, Iran, and you might as well be Colmes arguing with Hannity. Karl Rove would accuse you of wanting to give therapy to terrorists, and that would be the end of the discussion.

The problem with most renamings is that they sound way too clever and puffed-up, like calling garbagemen “sanitation engineers”. But a good renaming is so natural that it can slip in without most people noticing. That’s what Arkedis’ does. So stop talking about soft power versus hard power; talk about civilian power versus military power. Why did we ever call it anything else?

Amazingly, the Obama-birth-certificate story is still alive. Salon has a good article using this as an example of how the internet keeps conspiracy stories going.

Like a bunch of other Obama rumors (he’s a Muslim; he’s part of some deep revolutionary conspiracy with Bill Ayers; etc.) it didn’t get much attention in the mainstream media because there’s actually no story. You see, unless something goes badly wrong at a newspaper, an article needs at least one fact — preferably a newly revealed fact that makes the story “news”. Nobody could find one here. But to the rumor-spreading community, this neglect just showed that the media was covering up an Obama scandal. (You can see the process at work in the comments of this conservative blog article.)

One of ongoing missions of The Weekly Sift is to provide simple rules for judging news stories and would-be news stories, so that you can decide whether they’re worth getting upset about. Here’s one: When you come across some media-coverup charge, look at the neglected story and try to imagine rewriting it as a news article. What’s your lead? When you break a story, you need to start your article with a fact — not an accusation, a rumor, a possibility, or an explanation of why some piece of countervailing evidence should be disregarded, but at least one relevant thing that you know to be true. If you can’t find one, or if the uncontestable facts you can find seem trivial or distant from the main thrust of the story, then you don’t have news. Chances are, you’ve just repeated the thought process that is going on in newsrooms around the country.

Because occupying two Muslim countries isn’t enough, neocon Robert Kagan proposes “an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas. … Would such an action violate Pakistan’s sovereignty? Yes, but nations
should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control
territory from which terrorist attacks are launched.”

Meanwhile, Bill Kristol wants to invade Somalia. I mean, why not? Other than our troops and the Somalians, who’d even notice?

In his interview with Charles Gibson, President Bush was asked if he would wish for a “do-over” of anything in his administration. Now, with the advantage of hindsight there are a hundred answers he might have given without accepting any real blame. For example, who wouldn’t wish that we had built up the levees in New Orleans before Katrina got there? Or that we’d implemented the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission before 9-11?

But even something like that is too self-critical for The Worst President Ever. So he wished that the intelligence services hadn’t given him bad information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In other words, he deeply regrets that other people made mistakes. He’s a victim of those mistakes, not a mistake-maker himself. (Maybe he should read the 150-page report from the GAO about the screw-ups he bequeathes to the Obama administration.)

Matt Yglesias and Eugene Robinson say what needs to be said. Tom Tomorrow imagines an alternate world in which Bush really doesn’t have anything to regret. And atom.com uses a Bush impersonator to make their own Bush exit interview.

Maybe Bush can’t regret his bad moves because he’s not done making them yet. Like this new “right of conscience” rule for medical service providers. Here’s my question: If a Catholic doctor can refuse to prescribe (or even mention) the morning-after pill to a rape victim, can a Jehovah’s Witness technician refuse to give me a blood transfusion? I mean “morally objectionable” is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?

In the email version of last week’s Sift, I spelled Barry McCaffrey’s name wrong. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald discusses NBC’s inability to grok McCaffrey’s conflict-of-interest, and Scott Bateman re-animates a McCaffrey interview with Chris Matthews.

Every now and then a story makes me realize that I never completely grew up — sometimes the teen world still makes more sense to me than the adult reaction to it. For example: this breathless CNN discussion of the high school cheerleaders who got kicked off the squad after they text-messaged nude pictures of themselves to their boyfriends (“sexting” is the new word) and those photos got forwarded all over the school. The segment is three minutes of hyperventilation occasionally interrupted by a total non sequitur. One CNN “expert” tells parents to “take a stand” by not letting their kids have camera-phones. (Yeah, that’ll solve it.)

Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems to me that the villains here are the guys who started forwarding the photos. In fact, everyone who looked at somebody else’s private message — including, say, the school officials — deserves a reprimand. As for the girls, they’ve learned the eternal Watergate-tapes lesson: Don’t make documents that you don’t want to get out. And I’ll bet they had already learned that lesson pretty well by the time the photos made it to the principal.

The folks at feministing have a similar point of view. Maybe they never completely grew up either.

Latest sign that global warming is real: The Northwest Passage is becoming commercially feasible.

Read any of the NYT’s ten best books of 2008? Me neither. Maybe I’d have a better shot at the ten worst books.

Didn’t you always want to see Jack Black play Jesus? Now you can in Prop 8: the Musical.
By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Is "trillion" really a number?

December 1, 2008 – 3:32 pm
No warning can save a people determined to become suddenly rich. — Lord Overstone


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.
The Scale of the Bail

From the beginning, the strangest thing about the economic crisis has been its scale. The amounts of money being thrown around to solve it are way out of proportion to the size of any suggested cause. And even those sums don’t solve it.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Tea-leaf-reading the Transition

Political analysts are at their worst when they really want to find an answer, but there just isn’t enough information to go on.

That’s what’s been happening with the transition these last few weeks. Blogs and mainstream pundits alike have put a lot of energy into analyzing what Obama’s appointments and rumored appointments mean, but it’s really impossible to say. Eight years ago some people looked at Colin Powell and foolishly got hopeful about Bush’s foreign policy. But how much was that insight worth?

Basically, Obama’s appointments are a Rorschach test. If you’re the kind of liberal who believes that we always get screwed somehow, and that the Establishment always finds a way to co-opt the will of the People, then that’s what you’re seeing. Conversely, if you have a basic faith in Obama to assemble the best people and do the right thing, then you’re seeing that.

Personally, I’m still in the faith-in-Obama camp, though I recognize that (like everybody else) I’m projecting my reaction onto events rather than genuinely reacting. My own decision-making philosophy amounts to this: You don’t always have to follow the conventional wisdom, but you should always know what it says; and when you don’t follow it, you should know why you’re not following it. Unlike Bush and all his heckuva-job-Brownie appointments, Obama is picking people who will know the conventional wisdom. I’m hoping they’ll also find reasons to violate it in a bunch of areas, but we’ll see.

The Bush administration’s push to politicize the non-political parts of government will continue right up to the inauguration. The Washington Post has been covering the process called “burrowing” — in which people move from political appointments they’re about to lose to permanent civil service jobs. Together with all the people already hired inappropriately for political reasons, these folks may form a Republican fifth column inside the Obama administration. The Bill Kristols and Rush Limbaughs should have a steady stream of embarrassing leaks for the next four years.

Media Corruption

One of my running themes is the media corruption we take for granted these days. For the most part, the pundits you see on TV or read on the op-ed pages are just saying what they want you to believe; it’s not clear they believe it themselves. Their future is tied to their partisan identity, not to the insight or information they bring to you. Karl Rove doesn’t plan to live on what Fox News pays him; he hopes to get back into power someday.

Well, sometimes the corruption goes way beyond this subtle where’s-my-true-loyalty variety and becomes ordinary give-me-the-money corruption. This fall Dick Morris used his position as a Fox News commentator to push for viewers to donate to GOP Trust, a PAC that ran Jeremiah Wright ads against Obama late in the campaign. Guess what? Morris was being paid not just by Fox News, but by GOP Trust.

Sunday, the NYT ran a long article on the vast conflict-of-interest that is retired General Barry McCaffrey. The system works like this: McCaffrey (like a few dozen other former officers) uses his influence as an NBC commentator to sell the Pentagon’s point-of-view to the public. This buys him influence with the Pentagon, which he uses to get contracts for Defense Solutions, a company that pays McCaffrey a whopping salary. Keep all this in mind the next time you see McCaffrey (or any retired general) on TV. He’s not working for you, he’s working on you.

Remember those reports that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent? Well, maybe that informed source wasn’t as informed as we thought. Just be patient, I’m sure Sarah will say enough stupid things that we won’t have to make any up.

As we get closer to taking action on greenhouse gases, expect to see more articles like this one in Politico: “Scientists urge caution on global warming.” The article refers to a “growing accumulation of global cooling science”, but doesn’t quote a single global-cooling climatologist or refer to a single study from this “growing accumulation”. (A meteorologist writing in the Old Farmers’ Almanac doesn’t count.) Maybe that’s because there actually is no story here, and the Politico was manipulated by industries that make money off of fossil fuels. Grist’s David Roberts debunks.

One of my favorite annual lists: Project Censored’s Top 25 Censored Stories. Important information is lying around, but nobody picks it up.

Short Notes

The biggest thing that happened this week was the Mumbai terror attacks. I’m not ignoring them, but in the Sift I try to restrict myself to topics where I have some insight to add. So far, I’m just watching CNN like everybody else.
I’ll confess to being glad that the attack happened before Obama takes office. There’s not a lot an American president can do about this directly, and if it had happened on January 21, Obama would look weak no matter how he responded.

The election still isn’t over in at least two states. The runoff in the Georgia senate race is tomorrow, and polls favor incumbant Republican Saxby Chambliss. In Minnesota, they’re still recounting ballots.
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.

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’.”

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.

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.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)

What It Means

November 10, 2008 – 3:10 pm
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. — Martin Luther King

The Weekly Sift is taking a two-week post-election vacation. The next Sift will appear December 1. In the meantime, if you happen to be in Quincy, Illinois, you can hear Doug Muder preach at the Unitarian Church on November 23.

In This Week’s Sift:

  • The Republicans. They’re working their way through the stages of grief, but most haven’t made it past denial yet. Eventually they’ll have to accept the reality that their jock/cheerleader ticket couldn’t beat a nerd. That’s a problem.
  • The Democrats. Is it “overreaching” to do what you told the voters you’d do? Pundits seem to think so.
  • Short Notes. I congratulate myself on my election predictions, then thank Nate Silver. The Constitution is back on top. Activist administrators in the Treasury Department hand bankers $140 billion Congress never intended. Why Obama is a headache for Iran. And more.
The Republicans

[I posted a snarkier version of this to DailyKos.]

As soon as the competition for votes ends, a new battle begins: The struggle to define what the election results mean.

To hear Republicans talk about it, Obama’s victory doesn’t mean much. They immediately began chanting “This is a center-right country” as if the Constitution said so and mere votes can’t change it. Most of these same people had been telling us (until Tuesday) that Obama is a socialist, so you’d think seeing a socialist carry states like Indiana and North Carolina would shake their world. But something about losing messes up your ability to draw logical conclusions.

The Kubler-Ross stages. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross called that something denial. It’s the first-stage reaction to extremely bad news, like Montana becoming a battleground state. So, for example, Christine Todd Whitman: “One pollster I heard zeroed in on people’s obsession with Barack Obama the person, not necessarily Obama the ideology, and I have to agree. When the dust settles, I don’t think we’ll find a liberal recalibrated nation on our hands.” (Somehow, Obama the person also elected at least six new Democratic senators and close to 20 new representatives. Maybe they’re just great people too.) Robert Novak: “[Obama] neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.”

Another form denial takes is to attribute losses — this is the second straight Republican thumping, remember — to one-of-a-kind causes that have no long-term consequences. So Charles Krauthammer can believe that the 2006 loss was all about Iraq, and 2008 was just the economic meltdown. And since the Iraq War and the meltdown are random acts of God, unrelated to Republican policies, nothing needs to change.

The folks inside McCain’s campaign probably knew weeks ago that they were going to lose, so they’ve moved on to the second stage, anger. How else to interpret their anonymous sniping at Sarah Palin? McCain aides charged the most incredible things about Palin: that she thought Africa was a country, didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA, spent even more than $150,000 of expense-account money on clothes, and lacked knowledge of basic civics. (That last one I had already figured out from her statement about the First Amendment. She thought it was supposed to protect her from criticism by the press, not free the press to criticize politicians like her.) Apparently an RNC lawyer has been dispatched to Alaska to retrieve Palin’s clothes. (No, that’s not a scene from Nailin’ Palin. It’s a news story. Really.) For her part, Palin charitably attributes the criticisms to “a small, bitter person” or to “jerks“.

Like most expressions of anger, these are appallingly self-destructive. If half this stuff is true, those same McCain aides have been lying through their teeth for the last two months about how qualified and capable Palin is. And their guy is the one who picked her to begin with, so they can’t sling mud at her without hitting him — and themselves.

The other odd thing here is that Fox News, the conservative movement’s version of Pravda, broke the story. And some folks on RedState.org, the flagship conservative blog, are so incensed that they are calling for a boycott of Fox News. Seriously. This can only mean a Republican civil war is starting, which you can expect more people to join as they get through the denial stage and move on to anger. (Should I make popcorn? With butter?)

The Wall Street Journal — always one of the most advanced conservative bastions — has made it all the way to the third stage, bargaining. They’ll accept that Obama has won on the condition that he agree never again to talk about racism in the present tense: “One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth
of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country. Mr.
Obama has a special obligation to help do so.” (The best answer I’ve seen to this point is from Episode 12 of Elon James White’s This Week in Blackness: “I hate that people are using the Obama presidency as a get-out-of-jail-free card.” He mentioned newscasters talking encouragingly about how white voters “looked past” Obama’s race and “still” voted for him. “If you have to work past it,” White said, “it’s still a problem.”)

It’s hard to tell when the fourth stage, depression, has begun, because the depressed tend to hide from public view. Personally, I hope it holds off until Obama’s first bills arrive in the Senate. I picture Mitch McConnell getting up to start the filibuster, then saying, “Oh, never mind. It’s all hopeless.”

Eventually, though, nearly all the Republicans will reach acceptance. (Around 2016, most of them.) Here’s the reality that they will need to accept if they’re ever going to get back to power: The 2008 results are even worse than the 53-46 gap between Obama and McCain shows, because of who voted against them and why.

Neither black nor white. The worst news for Republicans is that Hispanics have started to identify with the Democrats. Obama won them about 2-1, and that made the difference in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada — three states that used to be reliably Republican. (With a candidate other than McCain, Arizona might well have gone blue too.) Republicans wrote off the black vote when Nixon adopted his “southern strategy” in 1968; if the Hispanic vote (and the Asian and Arab vote, which also went heavily for Obama) hardens against them as well, they’ll start every campaign with a quarter of the country lined up on the other side. And that quarter is growing.

Worse, the racism-friendly (if not overtly racist) atmosphere of the Republican Party is precisely what energizes the conservative base. McCain had to back off of his reasonable immigration-reform position (to the point of saying he would vote against his own bill) because the electorate in the Republican primaries was so inclined to villainize Hispanic immigrants. Technically, candidates like Tom Tancredo only railed against the illegal immigrants, but they definitely appealed to the more general sentiment that there are just too many brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people in America today. And when Republicans talk about “real America” or Sarah Palin tells lily-white rural crowds that they are the “pro-America” parts of the country, Hispanics (as well as blacks, Arabs, Asians, and Jews) all get the message that they’re not wanted.

Young people. The second piece of Republican bad news is the under-30 vote, which also went 2-1 to Obama. If the under-34 vote goes 2-1 Democratic in 2012 and the under-38 vote does the same in 2016, Republicans are toast. I’m not saying that will definitely happen, but what’s going to stop it? Again, current base-rallying issues are a huge part of the problem. Scapegoating gays and lesbians, for example, turns off young voters, who have grown up in a much less prejudiced world than their elders.

Another Republican tactic that is ineffective among younger voters is the elitism attack. To Republicans, elitists aren’t trust-fund kids like George W. Bush or Cindy McCain, they’re people like Obama, who worked his way up by getting an education. An elitist, in other words, isn’t somebody born to privilege, it’s somebody who’s smarter than you are. In high school terms, the 2008 elitism attack amounted to this: McCain and Palin were a jock/cheerleader couple ridiculing the idea that a nerd could be president.

It didn’t work this time, as Nicholas Kristof notes: “Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?”

What changed? Well, pop culture for one thing. When 50ish people like me were young, action heroes were jocks. If the jock-hero needed smarts, he’d have a nerd sidekick. (Think Kirk/Spock in Star Trek.) But things started to flip around in the 80s. The second generation of Star Trek had Picard/Ricker — a nerd with a jock sidekick. In the 60s, Stan Lee created the comic-book Spiderman to be a hero for nerds. Now he’s a mainstream hero, the most successful movie action hero ever.

In the 21st century, in other words, smart can be cool. So when aging jocks and cheerleaders point to their opponent and jeer “He’s a nerd!” voters who were kids in the 80s (or later) say “So?”

Summing up. The Republicans face larger problems than just a bad candidate or a bad campaign. They can’t win in the future with the voters they currently appeal to, and the messages that best rally their current base turn off the new voters they need to reach. It’s not a hopeless situation, but it’s not going to fix itself.

If they’re smart — which they may not be — Republicans will run somebody like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in 2012. He’s a young non-white Rhodes scholar who did his masters degree in political science even though he’d been accepted by both law schools and medical schools. His conservative credentials are in order, and his biography alone would solve a lot of problems. Or they could nominate Sarah Palin and just underline everything they did wrong in 2008.

The Democrats
Related to the idea that “this is a center-right country” is the worry that the Democrats will “overreach” — go so far to the left that the country rebels and elects a bunch of Republicans in 2010, the way it did in 1994 after Clinton’s first two years. And I suppose I’ll even agree with this point if Democrats start talking about nationalizing the oil industry or confiscating all the guns. But so far “overreaching” seems to mean “doing what they promised the voters they’d do”.

Obama campaigned on these issues:

  • making the tax code more progressive by letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy and cutting taxes on everybody else,
  • doing something major to restructure how we pay for health care, with the goal of drastically reducing the number of people uninsured,
  • drawing down our forces in Iraq at a measured pace, until we have a much smaller “residual force” in about 16 months,
  • creating jobs by rebuilding infrastructure and pursuing green energy.
Trying to fulfill those promises cannot possibly be “overreaching”. He may or may not succeed, but he owes it to the voters to try.

BTW, Mike Lux on OpenLeft disputes the idea that the Democrats’ problem in 1994 was Clinton’s liberal overreaching. His interpretation says that the Democrats didn’t deliver for the working class, which then stayed home in the 1994 elections. Paul Krugman and E. J. Dionne give similar warnings: They worry that Obama will attempt too little, not too much.

One common opinion in the Washington establishment — a few months ago liberal bloggers started referring to it as “the Village” and establishment pundits as “villagers” — is that campaigns are meaningless because things really only work one way. And so the subtext of article after article is that Obama won’t really change things: Our troops will stay in Iraq. The middle class won’t get a tax cut. Health care reform will consist of a few modest changes, like expanding the S-CHIP program for children.

To hear the villagers tell it, Obama’s most important job is going to be to stand up to the Left. Obama’s real opposition, says the Wall Street Journal, will come from the Democrats in Congress, who foolishly will want to implement the policies that Obama campaigned on and the voters voted for.

The strangest part of this center-right fantasy is that Republicans have any interest in bipartisanship. Which Republicans will be receptive to Obama’s overtures? On which issues? What bipartisan solutions might they embrace? Bush’s attempt at bipartisan immigration reform was torpedoed from the right, not the left. Why does anybody think they’ll treat Obama’s attempts at bipartisanship any better?

Digby writes:

This is why this bipartisan fetish is so dangerous. It sets up an expectation among the villagers that actual politics can be like a DC cocktail part (or the CNN green room) where everyone has a spirited conversation and then pat each other on the backs agreeing that the only reason these things are so contentious is because the silly people out in the country just don’t understand how things really work. … All over television this morning the gasbags seemed convinced that Obama had been elected to stop the left from ruining the country. And when it turns out to actually be his supposedly cooperative new partners in governance — the right — that stand in his way, they will blame him for being too far left. It’s a trap.

Fundamentally, I think Matt Yglesias had it right the day before the election: Obama shouldn’t worry about whether his policies are perceived as centrist or leftist or whatever. He shouldn’t even worry about whether his proposals are initially popular. If they don’t work, the public will turn against them. If they do work, if people perceive the country as being in better shape, all will be forgiven. Gus Cochran: “The party that successfully gets beyond public relations and provides effective governance will be rewarded with a bright electoral future.”

Short Notes

Scorecard: I have been annoyingly smug this week about the accuracy of my election night simulation, which predicted that Ohio would be called for Obama between 9 and 10, and that we could all go to bed at 11 when the networks called California. I was surprised that Virginia took so long to resolve and that Pennsylvania came in so early, but otherwise I had it about right.

Other bits of self-congratulation from the campaign: Catching on early (December 9) to McCain’s comeback in the Republican primaries, and realizing right away (September 8) that Palin would alienate more Republicans in the middle than she gained on the right. But let’s not talk about my prediction that Obama would do better than expected in the New Hampshire primary.

The reason I could have it right on election night was that the polls had it right. No Bradley effect. Nate Silver’s meta-poll projection was so accurate that a less enlightened age would burn him as a witch. He projected the popular vote as 52.3-46.2%, when it actually came in at 52.6-46.2%.

TPM has spotted evidence of true radicalism in the incoming administration: The Obama transition team’s org chart puts the President back under the Constitution, and returns the Vice President to the executive branch.

Speaking of executive power, the Treasury Department has learned a trick from those Justice Department memos that made our laws against torture meaningless. It “reinterpreted” the tax code to say the opposite of what it really says.

The law actually says that profitable companies can’t avoid taxes by acquiring companies with losses. But the Treasury has said, basically, “Oh, never mind.” The change is worth an estimated $25 billion to banking company Wells Fargo, which just acquired failing Wachovia. The overall benefit to the banking industry is about $140 billion, in exchange for which the public gets … well, nothing, actually. Think of it as a going-away present from the Bush administration.

This is the ironic part of all that conservative rhetoric about “activist liberal judges” who supposedly make the law say whatever they want. (I critiqued this myth back in 2005.) There are no activist liberal judges in that sense, but it is quite literally true that the Bush administration has been full of activist administrators, who make policy and then interpret the laws to fit.

President Bush has been fond of saying that his first duty is to keep Americans safe. But what the Constitution actually says is: “He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” That’s what “executive branch” is supposed to mean.

It continues: AIG needs still more government money. Circuit City is bankrupt. GM stock hasn’t been this low since 1946.

On the environment, Matt Yglesias writes: “Simply declaring that the EPA is going to start following existing law … could make a huge difference.”

Relive the whole campaign in one big graphic.

A lot of conservative ink has been spilled raising the alarm that Democrats are going to kill right-wing talk radio by restoring the Fairness Doctrine, which used to require balance on the public airwaves. Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum have both tried to figure out what the conservatives are worried about and have come up blank. Talk on, Rush Limbaugh. It’s a free country.

The Carnegie Endowment’s Iran expert, Karim Sadjadpour:

If you’re a hard-liner in Tehran, a U.S. president who wants to talk to you presents more of a quandary than a U.S. president who wants to confront you. How are you going to implore crowds to chant “Death to Barack Hussein Obama”? … Obama just doesn’t fit the radical Islamist narrative of a racist, blood-thirsty America bent on oppressing Muslims worldwide.

Bill Ayers has finally spoken out on what it’s like to suffer the collateral damage of a negative political campaign.

Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others. The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.

David Letterman gets the last word with John McCain: “You don’t show up for me, America doesn’t show up for you.” Or maybe this was Letterman’s last word. Maybe.

The Onion News Network shows us the human cost of the Obama victory.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)

Reading the Signs

November 3, 2008 – 3:59 pm
Can you read this graffiti?
Can you decode this information?
Can you work out what they’re saying to you?
Can you read the signs?
— Shriekback, “Can You Read the Signs?”

In This Week’s Sift:

Why I Want What I Want

Anybody who has read the Sift before knows that I want Obama to win and that I want substantial Democratic majorities to come in with him in the House and Senate. I want this for a very simple reason: I think this country is very seriously on the wrong track, to the point that sometimes I can barely recognize America any more. Today, my government

  • believes that it has the right to torture people
  • makes up bogus reasons to invade other countries
  • asserts that it can imprison its own citizens indefinitely without trials
  • spies on its own citizens without warrants
  • believes that the solution to any conceivable economic problem is for rich people to pay less tax and corporations to be less regulated
  • doesn’t think that the increasing concentration of wealth is a problem
  • believes that every government activity — including science and law enforcement — should serve a partisan purpose
  • doesn’t believe in separation of church and state
  • wants to divide the country into real Americans versus the rest of us
  • doesn’t believe that the people — or even the people’s elected representatives — should be allowed to know what it is doing

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.

What’s Going to Happen

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.

Electoral College Math

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.

My Election-Night Simulation

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.

Short Notes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)

Home Stretch

October 27, 2008 – 2:28 pm
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. — Archbishop Dom Helder Camara

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Unlikely Truth About Polls. Those likely-voter models are pretty unlikely.
  • Vote Suppression Update. The latest from Ohio, Indiana, and Georgia.
  • Obama = Armageddon. Calling Obama a “socialist” is starting to look tame. Rhetoric on the right is really going over the top as they realize that they’re going to lose.
  • “Not Because They’re Racists” Fox News’ executive VP is the shameful character in a story that otherwise is just sad: the white female McCain worker who invented a story about being attacked by a big black Obama supporter. She’s 20 and probably not wrapped too tight, but what’s his excuse?
  • Short Notes. I kind of went wild on Notes this week. My favorite is probably Vlad and Boris singing a Russian love song to Sarah Palin. They can see her house from there.
The Unlikely Truth About Polls

At about this time in every campaign season, failing politicians are saying something like: “I don’t believe in the polls. The only poll that count is on Election Day.”

This year you have to wonder if that might be the right attitude. Should we believe these polls?

The worrisome thing about them is how scattered their results are. On Thursday, for example, the IBD/TIPP national poll had Obama’s lead shrinking to a mere 1.1%, while the CBS/NYT poll had it growing to 13%. Something like that happens almost every day. How is that even possible? If the polls are all measuring the same underlying reality, shouldn’t every poll be within the margin-of-error of every other poll?

It turns out that’s not what margin-of-error means. A poll’s MoE is really only the measure of one kind of error, known as sampling error. That’s the easiest kind of error to measure, but it’s just the beginning of what might go wrong with a poll. MoE measures what you might think of as the pollster’s bad luck. If they do everything else right, but they get unlucky and talk to people who are unrepresentative for no foreseeable reason, the results might be off by as much as the MoE.

But pollsters today do more than just ask people questions and report their answers. They do a lot of number-juggling that brings some of their background knowledge into the results. If they do this right, their polls become more accurate. So, for example, if your sample voters turn out to be 56% male, but you know that the electorate is only 49% male, you might count each male response as only 7/8 of a vote, and so get your gender balance closer to what you know is right. You might also re-balance according to age or party registration or race. Different pollsters balance for different things, and so they might report different results even if they interview the same people and get the same responses.

MoE doesn’t account for that.

And that’s just if different pollsters are bringing in different background knowledge. It gets crazier if some pollsters bring in background knowledge that turns out to be wrong. What if, say, you re-balance your age distribution according to the results of the 2004 elections — implicitly assuming that Obama’s effort to register more young voters will fail? Or you use 2004 or 2006 to give you the party-distribution balance, ignoring the number of new Democratic registrations this year?

The toughest leap to make is between people who register and people who vote. Pollsters started modeling “likely” voters because the half of the population that actually votes is a little different than the half that doesn’t. In general, voters feel more empowered and more identified with society than non-voters. Voters are richer, older, whiter, more educated — and in most years more Republican — than non-voters. If you don’t account for that in your poll, you’ll have a Republican surprise every year.

Every election cycle, some candidate says they’re going to get massive numbers of votes from people who usually stay home. They never do. But in the primaries Obama made that prediction stand up. If he can do the same in November, then everybody’s likely-voter models are obsolete. Some pollsters have tried to adjust and some haven’t. Nate Silver has a great article about this. Another interesting but less readable article is here.

So here’s the gist: The polls that say the election is close are the ones that haven’t changed their likely-voter models. If they’re right — if Obama’s huge registration and get-out-the-vote efforts make no difference — then the election probably will be close. If, on the other hand, turnout is massive and includes more young and non-white voters than have ever shown up before, then Obama could have a landslide.

Vote Suppression Update

This week brought both good and bad news about the longstanding Republican effort to harrass new voters.

Let’s start with Ohio: There are 600,000 new voters registered in Ohio this year. This is a state that Bush carried by a little more than 100,000 votes in 2004 — after considerable chicanery. About a third of those registrations do not perfectly match other state databases. The vast majority of those mismatches are probably trivial: leaving out a middle initial, listing an address as 17 Pine rather than 17A Pine, a data entry error that has nothing to do with the voter, and so on.

Republicans want the Ohio Secretary of State (Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat — that’s the big difference between this year and 2004; Democrats swept the statewide offices in 2006) to provide those 200,000 names to the local election boards, so that the mismatch voters can be challenged at the polls. Probably they’d be forced to file provisional ballots, which only count if the voters go through a process that the Republicans can turn into a long enough hassle that many voters will give up.

So basically, this is a plot to prevent 200,000 Ohio residents from voting, based on the idea that some undetermined (and probably very small) number of them might have registered fraudulently.

Republicans sued Brunner, but the Supreme Court refused to make a ruling. So far, so good.

Now President Bush has stepped in, and is asking the Justice Department to look into the issue. It’s not clear where this goes, but what is clear is that this is exactly what the U. S. Attorneys scandal was about: using the Justice Department in a partisan way to help in a voter suppression effort.

Indiana also has a voter supression case, and here the news is entirely good. Republicans sued to shut down early-voting centers in Democratic parts of Lake County, charging that the centers would increase the likelihood of vote fraud. (As far as I can tell, they provided no evidence vote fraud was actually happening.) Democratic officials offered to open more early-voting centers in Republican parts of the county, but that didn’t resolve the issue.

This exchange between Judge Diane Kavadias-Schneider and Republican lawyer R. Lawrence Steele is classic:

Judge: “What of those who have already voted?”
GOP lawyer: “Maybe those votes should be discarded.”

We’re talking about throwing out votes already cast, the vast majority of them by people whose right to vote is entirely unchallenged. The Judge didn’t buy it.

Not clear what’s going to happen in Georgia, where 50,000 voters have been purged from the rolls. CNN follows one, a college senior who registered legally, who didn’t receive notice of her disenfranchisement until the deadline for contesting the decision had passed.

Obama = Armageddon

Some really amazing science fiction has been coming out of right-wing political types as they anticipate losing this election. The wildest piece is a letter-from-the-future that Focus on the Family has received from “a Christian in 2012”.
It turns out that President Obama got to make four quick Supreme Court appointments (Scalia had an unexpected health problem), so the Court suddenly had a 6-3 liberal majority. Then all the Left’s anti-Christian plots really came to fruition. Most of these plots had something to do with homosexuality (because, as we all know, if you can’t legally implement your bigotry against gays and lesbians, your Christian faith counts for nothing). So

  • the Boy Scouts disbanded rather than allow gay scoutmasters
  • all real Christians quit their public-school teaching jobs because the government said they had to promote homosexuality to their students
  • Christian schools closed for the same reasons
  • Christian adoption agencies closed rather than place children with same-sex married couples
  • businesses had to provide equal benefits to same-sex couples (no word about whether all Christian businesses closed to avoid this)
  • reading the Bible over the airwaves is illegal because the Bible contains “hate speech” against homosexuals
  • Christian doctors are quitting because they can’t refuse artificial insemination to lesbians, and Christian lawyers who won’t take same-sex couple’s adoption cases are losing their licenses
  • Christian marriage counselors are quitting because they have to take same-sex couples as clients
  • homosexuals were given special bonuses to enlist in the military (to make up for past discrimination)
  • military chaplains who denounce homosexuality have been dismissed
  • Christian publishers have gone out of business because their anti-homosexual books were forced off of major-chain shelves.
Let’s see, what else happened? Doctors and nurses can’t refuse to perform abortions. Pornography is on TV at all hours of night and day. Guns have been banned in eight states. Home schoolers have to agree to use state-approved textbooks and not to teach their kids that homosexuality is wrong or that Jesus is the only way to God. Taxes are high, but we still have a huge deficit because all the productive people moved to other countries.

Al Qaeda took over Iraq. (They poured in from Iran, oddly, given that the Shiite Iranians hate the Sunni Al Qaeda jihadists.) Millions of American sympathizers are being put to death. We stopped wiretapping overseas terrorists without warrants and gave captured foreign terrorists full American-citizen rights, so we haven’t been able to stop terrorist attacks at all. Russia re-occupied all the former Soviet republics and satellites in Europe, and Obama did nothing. Israel got nuked by Iran and Obama did nothing. Communist revolutions are happening all over Latin America.

And who’s to blame for this endless list of disaster? “Christians didn’t take time to find out who Barack Obama was when they voted for him.”

While warming up the crowd for Sarah Palin, Iowa Rep. Steve King warned, “When you take a lurch to the Left, you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship.

The rants about California’s Proposition 8 (banning same-sex marriage) are perhaps even further off-the-wall. Former Watergate felon (now evangelical minister) Charles Colson describes that vote as “Armageddon”. He adds: “If we lose this, we are going to lose … freedom of religion.” (Maybe he also thinks that Christians will have to leave every profession rather than deal with same-sex couples.) And Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says Prop 8 is “more important than the presidential election. We’ve had bad presidents before, and we’ve survived as a nation” — he should tell that to the Christian from 2012 — “but we will not survive if we lose the institution of marriage.”

I’ve got to wonder if somebody somewhere is blaming the economic collapse on same-sex marriage. I mean, John Hagee blamed Hurricane Katrina on a gay parade, so why not? And we know that President Bush’s economic policies have been totally sound, so what other explanation could there be?

The rhetoric has got to go one way or the other, because same-sex marriage isn’t an abstract boogey-man any more. Massachusetts has been doing it since 2004, and unless you make these kinds of supernatural connections, it hasn’t caused any problems.

Speaking of Prop 8 (or Proposition Hate, as its opponents call it), I can’t figure out who’s ahead. But I continue to believe that it’s insane for a state to have a system where one simple-majority vote can amend the constitution.

“Not Because They’re Racists”

The weirdest event of the week was that young white female McCain worker in Pennsylvania who made up a story about being attacked by a big black Obama supporter. I think the whole event is sad and has little to do with either McCain or Obama, so I’m not going to repeat the woman’s name or link to a picture of her. But there is one peson here who deserves to be singled out for shame: John Moody, the executive vice president of Fox News.

Writing on the Fox Forum blog, Moody called the incident a “moment of truth” and a “watershed event” for the presidential race:

If [the woman’s] allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.

Both of these assertions are perverse. Taking the second one first: The incident has turned out to be a hoax, but the strange idea that McCain’s candidacy is over now has quietly vanished at Fox. Moody has not even done a what-was-I-thinking follow-up post.

Now re-read Moody’s first paragraph. If some black man in Pittsburgh really did attack a white woman, that would cause some voters to “revisit their support for Senator Obama.”

Other than racism, what could possibly connect those dots?

But explicit racism is not acceptable in America today, so Moody offers his readers a rationalization: If this incident makes you want to vote against Obama, you’re not a racist, you just “don’t know enough” about him — as if there were something you could “know” about Obama that would disconnect him from an event that only racism connects him to.

The New York Times provides a more honest look at people struggling with racism in western Pennsylvania.

Short Notes

You shouldn’t let desperate politicians distract you this week, but if you’re looking for a way to distract yourself, try Neil Gaiman’s new novel. Gaiman is a writer of twisted fantasy for all ages — just not all ages at the same time. He has written for children (The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish), youth (Coraline), and grown-ups (American Gods), and his 1990s series Sandman is legendary among comic-book readers. Well, what would happen if such a writer did a homage to Kipling’s The Jungle Book? The Graveyard Book, of course: Nobody Owens is an orphaned toddler who is adopted and raised by the ghosts from an ancient and all-but-abandoned English graveyard. With the help of a protective vampire and werewolf, the dead keep Nobody safe from those truly scary beings, the living.

We’re raiding across Iraq’s border with Syria and Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

If Sarah Palin can see Russia, maybe the Russians are watching her too. In “Song for Sarah“, Vlad and Boris sing of their unrequited love. And by the way, Palin isn’t the Republican front-runner for 2012. You know, there’s more Palin stuff to report, but I’m sick of it.

I’ve told a lot of stories about McCain/Palin supporters behaving badly, so I should point you to at least one where they behave well. And this video is interesting: The sane McCain supporters drive out the hate mongers.

The Chicago Tribune provides a little local perspective on Bill Ayers. Eric Zorn found 60 local-news references to Ayers during the 90s and concludes “the record shows that he just wasn’t a very controversial figure.” Mike Royko thought he was a jerk, but associating-with-jerks isn’t much to smear a guy with.

One of the cutest get-out-the-vote tactics I’ve ever seen: a customizable video blaming an individual voter for Obama’s one-vote loss. Send them to your friends.

Other fun political videos: The guys from the “Wassup” Budweiser ads have been through a rough patch during the Bush administration, but they’re feeling hopeful. Ron Howard, Andy Griffith, and Henry Winkler recreate Opie, Andy, Richie, and the Fonz to promote Obama. And here’s a satirical Gays for McCain ad.

You how they say that the stock market always goes up in the long run? Well, the Japanese stock market just hit a 26-year low. Imagine: You started investing in 1982 when you were a 39-year-old salaryman from Kyoto. You’ve regularly bought stocks for your retirement ever since. Today you’re 65 and you’re behind on every investment you’ve ever made.

The unitary executive theory is still bearing strange fruit. We’ve got to hope that the next president rejects it root and branch.

If McCain is elected, the guy overseeing his transition team will be John Lehman — a former Navy Secretary who participated in the now-infamous Tailhook parties, and complained that Bill Clinton was eroding the military’s “macho, tough, warrior culture”.

Think about how the Obama-Muslim smear feels if you’re really a Muslim.

More unlikely Obama endorsements: Former Republican Governor William Weld, 26 newspapers that backed Bush in 2004, neocon Ken Adelman, the Financial Times, the Anchorage Daily News, and former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

October 20, 2008 – 2:30 pm
Slivers and Fractures
 
You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don’t, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing. — Peggy Noonan

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?

It Gets Uglier

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.

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.”

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.

Endorsements

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.”

More on Vote Fraud and Vote Suppression

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.

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

Short Notes

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

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Mob Rule

October 13, 2008 – 2:29 pm
Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. — James Madison, Federalist No. 55

In This Week’s Sift:

  • The Bailout Evolves. Secretary Paulson is coming around to a more progressive plan for the bailout. The government should get equity for its money, not just the “toxic assets” banks want to get rid of.
  • Ugly Campaign Excites Some Republicans, Turns Off Others. When your party starts to look like a mob, thinking people start to leave.
  • Voter Fraud: More Hype than Substance. Republicans are always trying to raise the “voter fraud” issue, which appears to have zero impact on elections. This week they succeeded.
  • Troopergate Report: Hockey Mom is Power Abuser. The McCain campaign failed to derail the investigation or muzzle its findings until after the election. Does it surprise you to find out that Palin did something wrong? Or that she’s lying about what the report says?
  • Short Notes. Congratulations to Paul Krugman. And (for a different reason) to the state of Connecticut. Sean Hannity tastes his own medicine. Norm Coleman’s flack has a bad week. And you can be a racist without knowing it.
The Bailout Evolves

We just had the worst week in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average: down 18%. (During the 1987 crash it dropped 22.6% in a day, but rebounded a little the rest of the week.)

The good news is the Secretary Paulson is beginning to see the light about how a bailout should work: The government should inject capital into the banking system by buying stock, and not by sticking the taxpayer with whatever worthless debt the banks want to get rid of. This change puts the U.S. in line with the British and the other Europeans. It just makes sense: If and when the banking system is actually saved, the government will own something of value that it can then sell.

Asian and European stocks started this week with a rally, and the Dow crossed back over 9000 Monday.

The Republicans won’t give up on trying to blame poor people and Democrats for the economic crisis. Here’s some more debunking. And here.

Hard times bring out some investment-community proverbs you don’t usually hear. My favorite so far is attributed to Warren Buffett: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you find out who’s been swimming naked.” (Translation: When the market is going up, everybody looks like a genius. But when it goes down you find out who calculates their risks and who doesn’t.) But I also like this anonymous one about the relative worth of paper assets versus hard assets during an economic disaster: “Always own enough gold to bribe the border guards.”

Ugly Campaign Excites Some Republicans, Turns Off Others

The polls have turned sharply in Obama’s favor over the past two weeks, and the McCain campaign has gotten correspondingly uglier. McCain and Palin rallies have increasingly looked like angry mobs, where people yell out that Obama is a “terrorist” and make suggestions like “kill him” and “off with his head“. (And it’s not just one or two wackos. Check out this video of people waiting in line for a McCain rally.) While this mob energy electrifies some Republicans, others have found it frightening and a poor reflection on the party they once loved.

Either because he was becoming alarmed himself or felt that he needed to placate those who are, McCain took a step back Friday, correcting a questioner who said that Barack Obama is an Arab, and saying that Obama is “a decent person, and a person that you do not have to be scared as president of the United States.” The crowd booed him. Think about that. When have you ever heard a candidate booed at his own rally? (And don’t give McCain too much credit here. He’s still not willing to step back from a Republican official likening Obama to Osama. And now his campaign is trying to tie Michelle to Ayers’ wife.)

Rush Limbaugh is one of the people urging McCain to grab a torch and get in front of the mob: “You have a responsibility to defend this country. … It’s time to start naming names and explain what’s actually going on. Because, Senator McCain, the people of this country are dead scared about what we face if you lose.”

Obama supporters have a hard time grasping this fear, because we don’t hear (or can’t take seriously) the shadow narrative that’s inspiring it, the one that McCain and Palin are plugging into when they ask: “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

What is it that people like Limbaugh think is “actually going on” that requires McCain to “name names”? Various pieces of the shadow narrative have been circulating in those untraceable emails that people forward to their friends: Obama is secretly a Muslim who  was educated in a madrassa and only pretends to be Christian. His birth certificate is fake, and he’s not even really an American. Bill Ayers is Obama’s mentor. No, wait, Louis Farrakhan is. Or the mysterious Khalid al-Mansour. Obama’s Fight-the-Smears web site is devoted to debunking this kind of stuff.

But even those details don’t get you to the “kill him” stage. For that you need the full shadow narrative, with all the dots connected. You can find it in the October 6 episode of Hannity’s America on Fox News: An anti-American/terrorist/black-Muslim/socialist underground has been grooming Obama since college. His presidency will be the culmination of a decades-long plan and lead to some kind Hugo-Chavez-style takeover of America, turning us into a socialist dictatorship.

CNN’s Glenn Beck puts forward the same basic notions (in a form he can claim is just humor) in his “Obama National Anthem” video.

OK, imagine that you’ve been hearing this kind of stuff from various people and weren’t sure whether you believed it or not. Now you hear McCain ask, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” and see an ad saying that Obama is “too risky for America.” Sounds different now, doesn’t it? (This technique is known as the “dog whistle” — a message that sounds harmless to one group of people, but says something very different to a group that has been prepped with another message.)

The attacks on ACORN and the trumped-up accusations of vote fraud (see the next article) now take on a different cast. If the election is close, if it hangs on a few votes in some key state, then an Obama victory won’t be an election, it will be a take-over, a coup. The Republic will be in danger. Digby sums up:

what we are really seeing is the beginning of a right wing story line about the next president of the United States — he is a drug user, a foreigner, a terrorist and a traitor. And the importance of that is that it gives permission to the right wing machine to do anything and everything to destroy him. He will not really be president, you see. He will be illegitimate — a usurper.

It was not just liberals who got scared watching McCain play with this fire. A number of Republicans from the Dwight Eisenhower/Nelson Rockefeller/Gerry Ford tradition — people who admired the John McCain of 2000 — were horrified.

Some of the Republicans and conservatives who backed away from McCain this week:

  • Ex-Michigan governor William Milliken. “He is not the McCain I endorsed. He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question ‘Who is John McCain?’ because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.” Millken also describes the prospect of Palin becoming president as “disturbing, if not appalling.”
  • Ex-Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee (same link). He denounces McCain’s swing to the right and his “divisive strategy” saying “That’s not my kind of Republicanism.” Palin? “Totally unqualified.”
  • Christopher Buckley, son of conservative intellectual icon William F. Buckley. “This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic.” On Palin: “What on earth can he have been thinking?” He used to admire McCain, but laments that if he goes out “losing ugly” it will be “grafitti on a marble bust.”
  • Columnist David Brooks focuses his ire on Palin rather than McCain, but he turns the standard conservative “class warfare” charge back on the Republican Party itself: “What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. … No American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the ‘normal Joe Sixpack American’ and the coastal elites.”
  • Christopher Hitchen, who isn’t an across-the-board conservative but describes himself as a “single-issue voter” whose issue is terrorism, is supporting Obama now.
  • Senator Hagel’s wife and President Eisenhower’s granddaughter are planning to endorse Obama Tuesday.
  • Frank Schaeffer, an author who worked for McCain in 2000. “You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.”
John Deeth reports a very weird prayer at the beginning of a McCain rally Saturday in Davenport, Iowa: “There are plenty of people around the world who are praying to their god, be they Hindu, Buddah, or Allah, that (McCain’s) opponent wins. I pray that you step forward and honor your own name.” So this election is sort of like Elijah competing against the prophets of Baal or something.

This Obama-in-a-turban billboard is on U.S. Highway 63 in Missouri.

Asked about the mob mentality at McCain rallies, campaign manager Rick Davis starts talking about McCain being a POW.

McCain’s ads have become almost 100% negative, compared to a nearly even positive/negative mix for Obama. CNN points out that since Obama is outspending McCain about 2-1 on advertising, the sheer number of negative ads is about the same. But it’s hardly fair to equate a negative Obama ad to a negative McCain ad. Take this Obama ad: Unravel. It’s negative; it tells you why you might not do well under McCain’s health care plan. Compare that to McCain’s Ayers ad, or the other “too risky for America” ads. They mention no Obama policies, but instead try to raise your anxieties about Obama as a person. It’s a little like the difference between criticizing your haircut and calling you ugly.

Voter Fraud: More Hype than Substance

This week has seen a lot of coverage of the voter fraud issue. Fox News always hypes it before an election, but it’s also getting attention on CNN and the other networks. CBS reported:

Whether simple error or outright fraud, the charges surrounding ACORN are already raising doubts about the integrity of the upcoming election in key parts of the country.

ACORN is a liberal-leaning independent group that registers a lot of voters, and is the focus of Republican voter-fraud charges, including a police raid on its offices in Nevada.

I was going to write a long deflation of this voter-fraud hype, but fortunately Josh Marshall already did. The key point: Although some bogus voter registrations do slip through the system, they hardly ever result in actual fraudulent votes. (You think a joker who registers as Mickey Mouse is going to show up at the polls, identify himself as Mickey Mouse, and try to vote?) The Bush Justice Department has pushed hard to get arrests and convictions on voter fraud, and has come up empty. That’s largely what the U.S. attorney’s scandal was about: firing Republican appointees who weren’t working hard enough to push bogus or trivial voter-fraud cases.

A closer-to-the-ground view comes from Will Reynolds, who has registered voters in Arkansas and Illinois for Project Vote, which sometimes works with ACORN. He explains where bogus registrations come from.

My office didn’t pay on a per-registration basis, but we did require people to be fairly consistent about how many registrations they brought in on a work day. Otherwise you’re paying people to do nothing. … We warned workers about the consequences of submitting false registrations often enough that most people didn’t try. But, I did have to fire one person for falsifying forms.

False registrations, in other words, are frauds that lazy workers perform against organizations like ACORN, not frauds ACORN perpetrates against the voting system.

Even if ACORN suspects a registration is a fraud, by law it has to submit the form. (Imagine if they didn’t: Your real name sounds bogus, and you think you’ve registered to vote, but ACORN threw out your registration form.) So it’s easy to write an ACORN-submits-bogus-forms story. You don’t even have to sift through ACORN’s forms to find the bogus ones: They deliver the ones they think are suspicious in a separate pile.

Troopergate Report: Hockey Mom is Power Abuser

Ten minutes after Sarah Palin was first announced as John McCain’s VP,
anybody who knew how to use Google knew that she was under
investigation by the Republican legislature — for misusing the power
of her office to pursue a personal vendetta against her sister’s
ex-husband. But McCain apparently either didn’t know, thought he could
suppress the investigation until after the election, or expected the investigation to clear Palin.

Guess again, John.

Friday, after the Alaska Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch attempt to stop the investigation and the Republican-dominated legislative council voted 12-0 to release the investigation’s 263-page report, the report was released on schedule. The upshot: While the governor has the right to fire the public safety commissioner for whatever reason she wants, pressuring him to enlist in her personal vendetta is an “abuse of power” that violates the state ethics law.

Hilzoy pretty much nails my reaction:

This is, at bottom, a story about the rule of law, and the rules governing the exercise of political power. … If you don’t accept the rule of law, you might think that taking political power allows you to take any kind of vengeance you want on anyone who crosses you.

And isn’t that just the mavericky attitude we need from our vice president? Or did we get enough of that already from Dick Cheney?

From Time’s more cynical perspective, the shocking thing the report reveals is how amateurish the Palin administration is. “Disturbingly so.” Again and again, the report presents Palin aides who seem not to understand their jobs. The head of personnel needs to be reminded that personnel matters are confidential. Monegan has to warn the attorney general that their conversation about Wooten has legal implications. And apparently nobody tells Todd Palin that he’s not an official of the State of Alaska. The report “paints an extralegal role for Todd Palin that would have made the Hillary Clinton of 1992 blush.”

And how does Palin respond to the report’s findings? By lying about them. She appreciates “being cleared of any legal wrongdoing or unethical activity at all.” And what color is the sky on your world, Governor?

Oh, and let’s not forget those problems with the Palins’ tax returns.

After watching the first McCain/Obama debate in a bar (and presumably seeing Joe Biden on all the networks afterward), where did Sarah Palin watch the second debate? A pizza place.

Short Notes

On October 28, Connecticut will become the third state (after Massachusetts and California) where same-sex couples can marry. Friday the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled the state’s civil-union law unconstitutional. “To decide otherwise,” wrote Justice Richard Palmer, “would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others.”

California’s proposed Proposition 8 (up for a vote in November) would end same-sex marriage in that state. The polls are close, but I think the same-sex-marriage defenders have found a good slogan: Don’t eliminate marriage for anyone. But the anti-gay forces are working hard. Whatever happens in November, the long-term trend is clear: After five years, the sky has not fallen on Massachusetts. The longer that goes on, the harder it is to keep telling scary stories about same-sex marriage.

Al Franken is supposed to be the comedian in the Minnesota Senate race, but last week a spokesman (Cullen Sheehan) for his opponent (Republican Senator Norm Coleman) had two press briefing so bad they’re funny. In the first, Sheehan responds (or rather, doesn’t respond) to the rumor that a rich friend buys Coleman’s suits. In the second, he goes round-and-round with reporters who want him to resolve an
obvious contradiction in Coleman’s statements about Social Security. It would be amusing enough if these were examples of the attack-dog liberal media harassing a hapless conservative operative. But in each case, the reporters are literally begging Sheehan to stop making such a fool of himself.

Here’s how you turn the tables on Fox News. Sean Hannity’s account of Obama’s community organizer days leans heavily on Andy Martin, labeled “Author & Journalist” at the bottom of the screen. Hannity made no criticism or challenge to Martin, and even promoted Martin’s book about Obama. Well, it turns out Martin is a well-known anti-Semite who once ran for office on a platform pledging to “exterminate Jew power in America.”

After Tuesday’s McCain/Obama debate, Hannity interviewed Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. Hannity decided to ignore the topics discussed in the debate and instead go straight to the Bill Ayers guilt-by-association stuff. Gibbs gave it right back, and used guilt-by-association to accuse Hannity of being an anti-Semite. Fox News is not about debate, it’s about theater. Gibbs gave a great performance.

From now on, when I quote economist Paul Krugman I’ll have to quote Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

Nicholas Kristof had a great column about unconscious racism and its effect on voting. Unlike much of the talk about racism, Kristof mentions actual research. In one experiment, whites witness what appears to be a medical emergency. When they were the only bystanders, they called 911. But when there were other bystanders who might make the call, they called 75% of the time for a white victim and only 38% for a black victim. Most of the people who would call for a white but not a black express no conscious ill-will towards blacks. In another study, whites were more impressed by the resume of a white applicant than by the identical resume of a black applicant. Those who didn’t recommend the black found reasons — like his lack of experience — that didn’t bother them about the white applicant. Quite likely, they had no idea racism was involved.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

How Far is Down?

October 6, 2008 – 1:57 pm
What you believe depends on what you’ve seen, — not only what is visible, but what you are prepared to look in the face. – Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Economy: No Quick Fix. The $700 billion bailout has been passed, but the world’s stock markets are still plummeting.
  • This Week in Sarah. Do debates get graded on a curve? And I wonder if she knows that her closing Reagan quote was from his denunciation of Medicare.
  • Short Notes. We’re still losing soldiers in two wars. Polling is trickier than it looks. Apologies to Tom Paxton. Identity is not policy. The Bill Ayers innuendo. Using the Bible to argue for same-sex marriage. And more.
Economy: No Quick Fix

Anyone who was expecting the markets to turn around instantly after the $700 billion financial bailout (or “rescue” or whatever you want to call it) became law … well, that’s not what’s happening. European and Asian markets open before Wall Street, and most lost 6-8% today. (Russia was down 15% when they closed the market early.) The Dow broke below 10,000 — a level it first achieved in 1999.

It’s hard to assess what’s responsible for what, because the bailout is not the only financial news. We found out that the U.S. economy lost more than 150,000 jobs in September, bringing 2008’s job losses to 750,000. Banks are failing in Europe too, and the EU has not come together on a strategy for dealing with it.

In general, I think the mainstream media has done a bad job of explaining how the problems of the banks and the stock market affect ordinary people. So I’ll try. The underlying purpose of a money-and-banking system is to make sure that people cooperate economically. When the system fails, sensible cooperation fails with it. At the the height of the Depression for example, you had coal miners going hungry because the mines couldn’t find buyers for their coal. Meanwhile, farmers were burning corn to stay warm, because they also couldn’t find buyers. Any idiot could see that burning coal and eating corn made more sense. But to act on that insight, the idiot would need capital, and the capital system was broken.

That level of dysfunction is still a long way off. But there have been some worrisome signs pointing in that direction. Unfortunately, you have to learn some financial terminology to talk about those signs. The system by which big organizations borrow money to smooth out their cash flow is called the commercial paper market. It’s been shrinking. Another measure of the problem is the London Interbank Offered Rate (usually known by its acronym LIBOR). LIBOR is the interest rate that banks charge each other for short-term loans. Ordinarily, LIBOR is pretty close to the rate on short-term treasury bills, because banks consider other banks to be almost as credit-worthy as the U.S. government. The gap between LIBOR and the treasury rate is called the T-bill/EuroDollar (TED) spread. It’s usually small. Early in 2007 it was less than half a percent. Recently it’s been close to 4%.

Translation: Banks don’t even trust other banks to pay them back. So why should they trust you or your business?

The upshot is that when, say, Sears decides to build up its inventory for Christmas — that’s harder to do now. And the problem doesn’t just affect businesses. The State of California asked the federal government for $7 billion loan Friday, because (according to its treasurer) California “has been locked out of the credit markets for the past ten days.” Massachusetts made a similar request. If they don’t get it, paychecks may start bouncing. “Payments for teachers’ salaries, nursing homes, law enforcement and every other state-funded service would stop or be significantly delayed,” the California treasurer warned.

Think about that. The problem isn’t that teachers, nurses, and cops are no longer needed, or even that California’s residents are unwilling to pay for their services. (The spending has already been approved by the political process.) It’s just a question of getting the money from here to there. That’s what is locking up. Once such a lock-up starts, it propagates. Suppose you’re a business with state contracts; maybe you supply food to a UCLA cafeteria. You know the state still wants your services, and you know that (ultimately) the state is good for the money. It would make perfect economic sense to borrow to keep paying your workers until the state comes through. But borrow from who? And if you can’t borrow, then what happens to your suppliers, or to the people who were expecting your workers to pay their bills?

That’s what the bailout is about — getting money flowing again. It was never expected to fix the underlying economic problems. Instead, it is supposed to be like the shock paddles that restart a patient’s heart. The shock doesn’t cure whatever was wrong to begin with, but now the patient may live long enough for the doctors to figure something out.

If real economic reasons — overbuilding, competition from other markets, diminishing resources, and so forth — cause stocks to fall, businesses to go broke, and people to lose their jobs … well, that’s capitalism. The business cycle repeats about once a decade, and eventually things turn around. But if stuff is crashing because nobody trusts anybody else … that’s a political problem. And it needs a political solution.

The Wonk Room has one of those proverbial thousand-word pictures: A graph of the national debt relative to the size of the economy. The graph declines from World War II all the way to the advent of Ronald Reagan, when it shoots up. It declines again during the Clinton years, then shoots up again under Bush. Moral: If you worry about the national debt, you don’t want another Republican administration.

In trying to understand all the debates about regulation, I’ve been leaning on a sports analogy: In a game like football, you’ve got players, you’ve got referees, and you’ve got a committee that meets in the off-season to figure out if the rules need to change. (Non-fans may not realize this, but the NFL’s rules are subtly different each season.)

To Soviet-style economic planners, all the running, passing, and tackling is secondary. They want the rules committee to decide who’s going to win and the referees to implement those decisions.

Free-market fundamentalists, on the other hand, claim that all we need are players. They argue that players’ salaries ultimately depend on the health of the sport and the fans’ faith in the integrity of the plays, so we should trust the players to make their own rules and referee their own games.

But a sensible person understands that these are three different roles, and they’re all necessary. We need players (businessmen, workers, consumers etc.) to make the plays. We need referees (SEC, FDIC, etc.) to figure out what happened and to enforce the rules. And we need a rules committee (policy makers in the administration and Congress) to look at the results and figure out how the game needs to change. We need all three, and we need to keep each from encroaching on the turf of the others.

As I explained last week, in the Republican alternate universe the financial crisis was caused by excessive government regulation and intervention: Regulations pushed banks to lend to minorities, and quasi-government companies like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac went crazy. This explanation distracts attention from things like the rule-change exempting the big investment banks from capital requirements, and the government’s failure to regulate “the shadow banking system” of hedge funds, non-bank mortgage lenders, etc. If Fannie and Freddy were the whole problem, bailing them out would have solved everything. Instead, we’re looking at a similar problem developing around credit card debt and car loans, both of which were also a basis for complicated derivative investment vehicles.

Money Meltdown is a one-stop site for making sense of the financial crisis.

Humor never goes broke. Here somebody puts financial institutions into a elimination bracket, like the NCAA basketball tournament. The Joker critiques the bailout. Jon Stewart notices how similar Bush’s bailout speech was to his Iraq speech, and recognizes John McCain as “the only man who can impulsively over-react to something ten days old.” Scott Bateman annotates another Bush economic speech.

Some humor is unintentional. Here is a three-year-old post from the right-wing blog PowerLine, ridiculing Paul Krugman’s crazy notion that there is a housing bubble or that people should worry about it popping: “No matter how well the economy performs, Krugman’s bitter vendetta against the Bush administration requires him to hunt for the black lining in a sky full of silvery clouds.”

This Week in Sarah

Sarah’s big event this week was her debate with Joe Biden on Thursday. How she did depends on what you expected. Graded on the curve established by her Katie Couric interview, she got an A, maybe even an A+. She continues to look like a student taking an oral exam, but this time she was a good student: She had responses — though not always answers — to every question, she supported her points with relevant “facts”, and she never had long periods where she said nothing or strung words together incoherently.

If you had just dropped in from Mars and knew nothing about the build-up to the debate, though, you would think Biden won. (Polls agree.) He was generally sharper, and he did a better job putting forward his campaign’s central message (that McCain has been wrong about Iraq from the beginning and wants to continue Bush’s policies on the economy, while Obama offers a new direction on both). He also took better advantage of the short-answer format, which the McCain campaign had negotiated to protect Palin from extended follow-up questions. Biden always knew when the format was going to give him the last word on a question, so he closed with strong statements that left Palin no chance to respond. Palin did not appear to be strategizing on that level.

Palin was by far the folksier of the two, peppering her responses with colloquialisms (like doggone and you betcha) and facial expressions (like winks) that you don’t usually see in a national debate. I can’t tell how well this played. Neither could conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who clearly was turned off by it, but expected less educated people to eat it up. (Her fellow National Review columnist Rich Lowry did eat it up, but he sounds more like he’s reacting to a lap dance than to a political gesture.) I wonder how many people agree with comedian Elon James White (at about the 1:50 mark of Episode 9 of This Week in Blackness):

Why do people like this folksy nonsense? I don’t want my president, I don’t want my vice president, I don’t want anyone who has any power over me being folksy. OK? I don’t need to have a beer with you for me to feel comfortable with you running the government. Personally, if I could see myself having a beer with you, I’m probably not going to vote for you. It’s the opposite of what I want, OK? My friends, I drink with them all the time, I wouldn’t trust them with keys to my apartment.

I grew up in a working-class Midwestern area, where people sound like Larry Bird, use expressions like dumber than a box of rocks, pronounce our nation’s capital Worshington (the way McCain does), and talk about nuke-you-ler weapons (as Palin and Bush do). But I also was taught that you don’t do folksy in public, because people will think that your family is stupid. I don’t know if that taboo is still in force, but I imagine that at least a few older working-class folks were cringing as much as the educated elite were.

Remember Palin’s debate claim that she pushed Alaska to divest its investments in Sudan? I don’t know why I’m surprised that it’s not true.

Palin ended the debate with a moving quote from Ronald Reagan, warning that we could end up telling our children’s children “what it once was like in America when men were free.” I imagine such a future often in this Age of Cheney, but do you know what great threat to American freedom Reagan was warning us against? Medicare.

Palin: “It’s time that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.”

Wall Street Journal columnist and ex-Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan: “This left me trying to imagine Abe Lincoln saying he represents ‘backwoods types’.”

The Palins released their 2007 tax returns Friday. Mr. and Mrs. Six-Pack made $166,000 in 2007 and gave a whopping $2,500 of it to charity. And they didn’t declare the $17,000 in travel per diem the State of Alaska pays her when she works at home.

Palin is suffering collateral damage from the McCain/Letterman feud. And Tina Fey is still doing a Palin impression for SNL. I especially love the part where she brings out a flute for the talent portion of the debate.

Not only can’t reporters talk to Palin, they can’t talk to people at Palin rallies either.

The Troopergate report is scheduled to come out Friday. The McCain campaign, having lost at all lower levels, is going to the Alaska Supreme Court to block it. If the federal Supremes wind up getting involved, it will be time to talk about Bush v. Gore again. Meanwhile, some Palin associates have realized that subpoenas actually mean something and have decided to testify. The First Dude, however, is still defying the law.

Short Notes

In September, 25 coalition soldiers (all Americans) died in Iraq, and 37 in Afghanistan. American military deaths in Iraq are fairly stable: the last few months have seen 25, 23, 13, 29, and 19 after a spike to 52 in April. After the spring of 2007, when deaths were regularly over 100 a month, the American people seem not to notice 20-some deaths. The 37 in Afghanistan (equally invisible) is down from an all-time monthly high of 46 in August. After nine months of 2008, we’ve already lost more coalition troops in Afghanistan (236) than we did in all of 2007 (232).

If you obsess over the daily or weekly fluctuations in the polls the way I do, this is a calm-down message: Take a look at the demographic data at the very end of the 9/29 ABC/WashingtonPost poll. What you’ll see is that the demographics of the sample fluctuate in totally implausible ways. So, for example, the number of married people in the sample has been trending steadily upwards, from 53% in mid-June to 64% in the latest poll. It was 60% just a week before. Did 4% of registered voters really get married in the last week of September? (Were you invited? I wasn’t.) The percentage of white people was also up 5% that week. (So take a bow, all of you who have been phone-banking to convince people that they’re white.) Maybe the week-to-week support for Obama or McCain fluctuates for similar reasons, whatever they are.

Correction from two weeks ago: I was right that Arlo Guthrie sang “I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler” but Tom Paxton wrote it. To make up for this mistake, here’s Paxton’s Vietnam classic “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” which he updated in 2007 to “George W Told the Nation“. You know, a medley of Paxton songs could make a pretty good history of the last 40 years.

Matt Yglesias notices something that’s been bugging me about McCain: He consistently substitutes identity for policy. For example, he says: “I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I’ll take care of them.” Does that mean his policies back that up? No. Ditto for Palin and families with special needs. Is she pushing some particular program or policy change that will benefit those families? Of course not.

The Right keeps saying that the media won’t look into Obama’s relationship to ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers. Well, the New York Times just did, and found nothing remarkable. Obama and Ayers were politically active Democrats in Chicago, so they ran into each other from time to time. A thousand words later, the story ends.

Here’s why baseless innuendo is such a popular political tactic: If there’s no story to cover, you can usually count on the media not to cover it. (We never hear about all the reporters who investigate something and come back to their editors with nothing.) Then you can rail about how the biased media is hiding some horrible scandal. So I guess we should be grateful that this time the Times wasted a thousand words to verify that there really is nothing to say.

To repeat a point I’ve made before, the way you tell a real issue from a fake one is to ask: “What is the accusation?” Look at Troopergate, for example. There, the accusation is simple: Sarah Palin fired Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he wouldn’t help her pursue her personal vendetta against her sister’s ex-husband. Respectable people are willing to stand up in public and make that charge, which has a true-or-false answer. But in the Obama/Ayers or Obama/Rezko attacks, you’ll search in vain for anything so direct. Obama has “connections” or “associations” that are “suspicious”. It never gets any more specific than that.

Rolling Stone has a devastating retelling of John McCain’s life story. The L.A. Times also takes a look behind the myth. Apparently McCain destroyed more American planes than enemy planes.

I’ve been warning for months that McCain’s budget ideas only work if “entitlement reform” means massive cuts in programs like Medicare. The Wall Street Journal is starting to agree with me.

If you’re not watching Rachel Maddow’s new show on MSNBC, you’re missing out.

Here’s how you use the Bible in an ad for same-sex marriage.

33 pastors participated in a civil disobedience action sponsored by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund: In defiance of a 1954 law about the tax-exemption of churches, the pastors endorsed candidates from the pulpit on September 28. I can’t verify that they all endorsed McCain, but that seems to be the trend.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Pay the Fiddler

September 29, 2008 – 2:04 pm
If any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people’s money being used to pay the fiddler. — Abraham Lincoln

In this week’s Sift:

  • Bailout Deal: I Wish I Knew What to Tell You. But I don’t. The people who think they do all disagree.
  • Debate Reaction. McCain needed to back up his claim that he can lead and Obama can’t. He didn’t, so the tie goes to Obama.
  • Financial Crisis: The Brown People Did It. The ugliest meme around today is the one that blames the financial crisis on minorities and immigrants.
  • This Week in Sarah. Palin’s Couric interview panicked people all across the political spectrum. And part of it hasn’t come out yet.
  • Short Notes. Paul Newman. The difference between Christians and Christianists. What “freedom of the press” means in St. Paul. And neither George Will nor David Letterman is happy with John McCain.
Bailout Deal: I Wish I Knew What to Tell You

Last minute update (2:30 p.m.): The House defeated the bailout 228-205, with “less than a third” of House Republicans voting for it. The Dow is down 517 points.

Like every other recent weekend, this one brought big economic news that is hard to evaluate Monday morning. Congressional leaders and the administration have agreed on a $700 billion financial-system bail-out plan. The original 3-page plan has expanded to 110 pages (which I confess I haven’t read).

The original Paulson plan was almost universally denounced. There is general agreement that the current bill is an improvement, but it’s still not popular. The improvements:

  • Oversight. In the original, Paulson’s decisions would be final.
  • Warrants. The government is going to get an option to buy stock in the companies it helps. If their stockholders benefit, the taxpayers will capture some of that benefit.
  • Not releasing all the money at once. I’m not as thrilled with this as some people are, because the procedure for blocking the later chunks of money looks too cumbersome to work unless some gross malfeasance is happening.
  • Executive pay cap. Again, I’m not as excited as a lot of people. I’d be amazed if there weren’t a bunch of ways around this.

The House Republicans are still threatening to revolt against this deal. In theory, House Democrats could pass the plan without the Republicans, but it’s generally agreed that would be suicide: It would let Republicans run against Bush-and-the-Democrats. In other words, it undoes the theme of the Democrats’ whole fall campaign.

The obvious question, then, is why the Democrats would vote for this plan at all. The simple answer seems to be true: When the Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve come to you and say that we might be going into another Great Depression (and non-government folks like Warren Buffett agree), it’s hard to say no. Democrats have a lot of doubts about this program, but they don’t have the kind of certainty they think they need to oppose it. If that sounds a lot like the Iraq vote in 2002, well, yes, up to a point. But Hilzoy notes:

some people write as though we’re being asked to trust the Bush administration about the existence of a crisis. This isn’t true. It’s not like the runup to the war in Iraq, where a lot of the crucial information was classified and we had to take the government’s word for it.

Liberal bloggers and pundits are split. This isn’t the plan that Paul Krugman would have designed, but he believes we need to do something. So if the choice is yes or no, he says yes. David Sirota and Sterling Newberry say a resounding no. Josh Marshall, like me, doesn’t know what to think.

A lot of liberals would prefer that we follow the model that Sweden successfully used during its banking crisis in 1992. (The warrants in the current plan lean in that direction, but don’t go as far as the Swedes did in government ownership.)

As for what will happen if the bailout passes, it’s anybody’s guess. Barrons even claims the taxpayers will make money on the deal. Seems unlikely to me, but why not? I can’t disprove it.

Meanwhile, the dominoes continue to fall: Morgan-Chase picks up the failing Washington Mutual and Citicorp grabs distressed Wachovia. Next?

Very few articles make the connection between the credit crunch and stuff you can see. That’s why I thought this was interesting: McDonalds thinks it needs to reassure its franchisees that they’ll be able to get financing for the McCafe upgrade.

Debate Reaction

My immediate reaction to Friday’s Obama-McCain debate was more-or-less in line with the way the story has spun out since: There was no knock-out punch, which works to Obama’s advantage.

The danger of making experience your central issue and claiming that your opponent is “not ready to lead” (but you are) is this: When you finally debate your “unqualified” opponent, the difference needs to be apparent. If the other guy looks equally well prepared, he wins. That’s what happened Friday. (Biden needs to watch out Thursday with Palin.)

Nonverbal cues always play a big role in debates, and here the difference was clear: Obama looked at McCain, called him “John”, and acknowledged many times that McCain had made a good point. McCain didn’t look at Obama, called him “Senator Obama”, and acknowledged nothing.

How you read this difference seems to depend on your age and gender. (In post-debate polls, men gave McCain a small advantage while women overwhelmingly thought Obama was more impressive.) Older men (like David Broder) tended to interpret McCain’s behavior as dominant. The McCain campaign apparently saw it this way themselves, and compiled all Obama’s “John is right” statements into an ad reiterating that Obama is “not ready to lead.” Young people and women tended to read it the opposite way: Obama was secure enough to give McCain his due, while McCain could not look Obama in the eye. (Primatologist Frans de Waal: “A confident alpha male chimpanzee would never show studied
indifference. I have seen such behavior only in males who were
terrified of their challenger.”)

This nonverbal stuff harmonizes with substance: Obama’s willingness to look at McCain harmonizes with his willingness to talk to hostile world leaders — you don’t have to agree with people to face them. His acknowledgement of McCain’s good points reinforces his claim to be able to work in a bipartisan fashion. McCain’s looking away likewise harmonizes with his view that you don’t talk to foreign leaders unless they submit first, but it conflicts with his claim to be bipartisan.

DailyKos’ DemFromCT sums up the post-debate polling, which looks good for Obama.

Financial Crisis: The Brown People Did It

I wish I were more familiar with the works of Joseph Goebbels, so that I could use the words of the Master to express this basic propaganda principle: When you’re caught holding the bag, blame some group even more unpopular than you are.

So imagine that you’re a free-market conservative, facing the obvious fact that unregulated capitalism has brought us to the brink of disaster. What to do? I know — let’s blame the whole thing on blacks and Hispanics. Here’s how Investors Business Daily does it:

For those looking for a real start to today’s financial meltdown and government rescue, you need to go back — way back — to 1977, and the Jimmy Carter presidency. … The CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) forced banks and savings institutions — then far more heavily regulated than today — to make loans to poor, often uncreditworthy minority borrowers. … Banks became pliable, easy targets. No bank CEO wanted to be mau-maued as an enemy of the poor.

There are a zillion things wrong with this interpretation, most of which are detailed in an article in The American Prospect. For example: Why did it take 30 years for the CRA to cause trouble?

Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the “tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.”

And Rick Perlstein explains why non-performing mortgages are only the beginning of the problem:

none of the financial contagion — none of it — would have happened had not greedy financial institutions invented the risky securities that used mortgages as their foundation, via procedures that created economic incentives to write non-performing loans.

But why should facts stop conservatives from shifting the blame? The most outrageous version of this right-wing argument was made by Michelle Malkin in the New York Post.

But there’s one villain that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis.

Of course, nobody keeps statistics on mortgages to illegal aliens, so Malkin tries to support her claims by talking about Hispanics in general.

Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime. A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure. … A July report showed that in seven of the 10 metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, Hispanics were at least one-third of the population; in two of those areas — Merced and Salinas-Monterey, Calif. — Hispanics comprised half the population.

If you’re wondering what this proves — beyond Hispanics being disproportionately poor, and poor neighborhoods having more foreclosures — congratulations, you’ve seen through the fog.

But a lot of people won’t see through the fog. The state of our economy and the plan to bail out Wall Street with taxpayer money has made them angry, and so the Right is giving them someone to be angry at: blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, and poor people.

Those are our domestic troubles. The people you’re supposed to blame for our foreign troubles are Muslims. The right-wing Clarion Fund is distributing 28 million DVDs of the anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. Friday, distribution in Dayton was followed by someone gassing a mosque during Ramadan. Chris Rodda connects the dots.

This Week in Sarah

You know things are bad when your allies are asking you to resign and your opponents are starting to feel sorry for you. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker says this about Sarah Palin:

Only Ms. Palin can save Mr. McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country.

Moderates and liberals agree: Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria (“Is it too much to ask that she come to realize that she wants, in that
wonderful phrase in American politics, ‘to spend more time with her
family’?”) and the NYT’s Bob Herbert (“it would behoove John McCain and the Republican Party to put the country first — as Mr. McCain loves to say — and find a replacement for Ms. Palin on the ticket.”)

The New Republic’s Christopher Orr notes that Palin got worse between the Charles Gibson and Katie Couric interviews and wonders whether the McCain campaign has “broken” Palin:

I’m reminded of the situation you see every now and then in sports, when a talented athlete–which, conveniently enough, Palin was–gets a taste of heavy duty coaching and, rather than being built up, is broken down, losing confidence in his game, becoming tentative, second-guessing himself even to the point of paralysis.

The NYT’s Judith Warner looks into Palin’s frozen expression and feels sorry for her:

I’ve come to think, post-Kissinger, post-Katie-Couric, that Palin’s nomination isn’t just an insult to the women (and men) of America. It’s an act of cruelty toward her as well.

CNN’s Campbell Brown expressed a similar sympathy-with-a-twist when she railed against the McCain campaign for shielding Palin from the press and any hard questions.

Tonight, I call on the McCain campaign to stop treating Sarah Palin like she is a delicate flower that will wilt at any moment. … Allow her to show her stuff. … Sarah Palin has just as much right to be a real candidate in this race as the men do.

The cause of all this hand-wringing is Palin’s performance in the three interviews she has been allowed to have: Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and especially Katie Couric. Hannity is so pro-Palin that his interview has been called an “infomercial“, and Gibson and Couric are not known as tough interviewers. (By contrast, Obama has sat down with Bill O’Reilly.) None of them pushed her the way a hostile interviewer would —
on Troopergate, whether her daughter’s pregnancy has changed her mind about abstinence-only sex education, why her administration makes raped women pay for post-rape kits, her witch-hunting pastor, the cruelty of hunting wolves from the air, or a host of other issues. But in each interview, no matter how soft the questions, she could do nothing more than repeat canned talking points.

Somebody sent me this comment: “Sarah Palin is like an audio version of the Republican playbook magnetic poetry kit…that is, if you dumped the box on the floor and picked up random pieces and strung them together.” For example, this response to Couric:

But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to shore up our economy … helping the … it’s got to be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reduction and tax relief for Americans. In trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive scary thing, but 1 in 5 jobs being created in the trade sector today — we’ve got to look at that more as opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation — this bailout is a part of that.

“Did you get that?” CNN’s Jack Cafferty asked. “If John McCain wins, this woman will be one 72-year-old’s heartbeat away from being president of the United States. And if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, it should. … I am 65 and I’ve been covering politics for a long time, and that is one of the most pathetic pieces of tape I have ever seen for someone aspiring to one of the highest offices in this country.”

And Howard Kurtz warns: “the worst may be yet to come for Palin; sources say CBS has two more responses on tape that will likely prove embarrassing.”

So it’s not surprising that the McCain campaign is doing everything it can to limit Palin’s exposure to unscripted exchanges. After Friday’s Obama-McCain debate Joe Biden was on every network, while Palin watched the debate in a bar. The networks wanted to talk to her, but the campaign didn’t make her available. And she’s even getting into trouble talking to ordinary voters over a cheesesteak.

The silver lining in Palin’s dark cloud is the advantage she has in Thursday’s debate with Biden: If she doesn’t make any huge errors, she’ll have exceeded expectations. Here’s what I expect: On Thursday Palin will attack with all the stuff too toxic for McCain to say — Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, questioning Obama’s Christianity, and so on. The spin will be that this is fair play after all the attacks Palin herself has suffered.

Palin continues to be a godsend to comedians. If you don’t think Tina Fey’s portrayal of Palin is cruel enough, you should check out Sara Benincasa’s YouTube site. Ms. Benincasa has been doing a Sarah Palin video journal since the convention. After Matt Damon’s comment that Palin’s story sounded like “a bad Disney movie,” the folks at College Humor made a trailer for it. And 23/6 imagines Palin’s handler freaking out while watching the Couric interview.

Short Notes

The next time someone starts blasting the “liberal Hollywood elite,” remember to say a few words about Paul Newman. Liberal — yes; he took great pride in being #19 on Nixon’s list of enemies. Hollywood elite — certainly. But he was married to the same woman for more than 50 years and raised five daughters. He started a company that made more than $200 million, and he gave it all away. “I’m not running for sainthood,” he said. “I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what
he takes out.”

Tristero on Hullabaloo points out the important distinction between Christians and Christianists, defined as “political radicals who use the symbols of Christianity in order to gain secular power.” It’s similar to the distinction between Muslims and Islamists.

Onion Radio News: A laid-off zoologist went on a rampage with a tranquilizer rifle, “brutally sedating” 12 zoo visitors and two employees. (I guess guns don’t tranquilize people; people tranquilize people.) And the Onion’s print edition reports that a Darwin-shaped wall stain has appeared in Dayton, Tennessee. Thousands of evolutionist pilgrims have turned the site into “a hotbed of biological zealotry.”

McCain has lost George Will.

The city of St. Paul has decided to drop charges against the journalists who were arrested during the Republican Convention. With no apparent intention of irony, Mayor Chris Coleman said, “This decision reflects the values we have in St. Paul to protect and promote our First Amendment rights to freedom of the press.” (In this context “freedom of the press” seems to mean the freedom to leave detention after the news-making event is over.) This is a good time to go back and watch Amy Goodman’s account of her arrest.

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel was not surprised when McCain temporarily suspended his campaign: “For a man his age, it’s very difficult to maintain an election.” The main victim of the campaign suspension seems to have been David Letterman, who was not happy about it.

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