Mano Singham's Web Journal

(Note: You are not currently on this blog's home page. To go there, click here.)

Entries in "Politics"

October 07, 2008

Brace yourself

Breaking news: Barack Obama is black.

It is quite remarkable how little salience that fact has had in the race so far considering that if he wins, the election of the first non-white president of the United States is an event of major historic significance. While his ethnicity is a complex one, he cannot escape (and has in fact wisely embraced) the shorthand description of being black. For his campaign to have insisted on accuracy would have been to draw attention to trivial questions of race and ethnicity that are at best distractions and at worst would make race too important an issue.

When Obama speaks in a debate or gives speeches or is interviewed, the fact that he is black is not the most prominent impression he makes, at least for me. It is just an incidental item that registers in the background, like that he is tall or slim. Obama is on his way to becoming the Tiger Woods of politics. Just as the latter is no longer 'the black golfer', Barack Obama has almost, but not quite, reached the stage of not being 'the black presidential candidate'. That is quite an achievement.

But the next month will see if he has made the complete transition to Tigerness. We are now entering the last stages of the presidential campaign, something I have been long dreading. With the McCain candidacy declining steadily in the polls and on a direct path to losing despite the Hail Marys thrown by them (selecting Sarah Palin and 'suspending' his campaign because of the financial crisis), you can expect them to now do desperate things.

By this I mean going well beyond the standard negative campaigning tactics of distorting your opponent's record, taking their statements out of context, impugning motives, and focusing on style in order to give misleading impressions. Those things have always been part of politics.

No, I expect them to go nuclear, throwing everything at Obama to make him into the stereotype of the dangerous black man, to seek to change his image from that of a Tiger Woods to more of a Dennis Rodman, to transform him in the eyes of white people from someone whom you would welcome into your home to the kind of person you cross the street to avoid.

The McCain camp has already telegraphed their disgusting strategy and Sarah Palin has started the process:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" because of his association with a former 1960s radical, stepping up the campaign's effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters.
. . .
Falling behind Obama in polls, the Republican campaign plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain's message in the final weeks of the presidential race.
. . .
Palin's remark about Obama "palling around with terrorists" comes as e-mails circulate on the Internet with suggestions that the Democratic candidate is secretly a radical, foreign-born Muslim with designs against the U.S. — even though Obama is a native of Hawaii, a Christian and has no connections to Muslim extremists.

McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis (himself now under a cloud because of revelations of his lobbying links to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) spelled out how such character assassinations are done.

The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don't agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter's basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate's natural supporters.
. . .
It's not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate's political weakness.

(Thanks to BarbinMD for the link.)

Ironically, when Davis wrote the above, he was accusing those in favor of George W. Bush of using those very same dirty tactics against McCain in the 2000 Republican primary campaign when Bush was losing to McCain. Bush went on to win. Since McCain has now hired many of those very same Bush operatives to run his 2008 campaign, we should not be surprised to see a reprise of those tactics, now used by McCain against Obama.

One important factor in a successful smear campaign is the ability to create an 'echo chamber' for these slurs, to get it widely circulated in the media. The current financial crisis has been getting banner headlines and has been used to scare people into voting for this huge bailout. Given that financial issues are using up so much media airtime, it may be harder to get traction for this strategy. I suspect that people are more likely to be swayed by extraneous things when there are no major issues gripping their attention.

So will the McCain-Palin attempt at raising so-called character issues at such a time work? Or will it be seen as fiddling while Rome burns?

Frankly, I am not a good judge of whether raising extraneous issues will succeed. I don't have a good feel for the pulse of the people. I really should get out more.

While I am very cynical of the way the government serves mainly the interests of the rich and powerful and influential, I am usually more hopeful about the good nature and good sense of people in general over the long term. Each election time I think that people will not be swayed by trivialities and will vote on the basis of what truly will affect their lives. And while most are like that, unfortunately there do seem to be some people who can be swayed by such appeals to their fears and intolerance.

Whether those numbers will be enough to sway the outcome of this election is something I cannot gauge.

Tomorrow: More on racial politics

POST SCRIPT: And now, live, the vice presidential debate!

Saturday Night Live had its by now obligatory Sarah Palin parody with Tina Fey, with the bonus of Queen Latifah playing moderator Gwen Ifill.

October 06, 2008

Government of the Dow, by the Dow, for the Dow

The recent financial crisis and the frantic (and finally successful) attempt by the government and Wall Street to strong-arm the public to provide immediate relief to the very institutions that caused the crisis is striking evidence, if anyone needed it, of exactly for whose benefit the government is run: Wall Street. You can ignore all the blather about how this bailout was needed to prevent ordinary people from financial ruin. That may or may not be true. What is indubitable is that if Wall Street interests were not at stake, nothing would have been done.

As was clearly evident in the past week, while the government can drag its feet for decades, say it is too expensive, and take no action to solve urgent problems like health care, when it comes to giving away nearly a trillion dollars to the financial industry, it can act with lightning speed. And you can be sure that when this money runs out (as it surely will as Wall Street institutions get their greedy hands on it) and next financial 'crisis' appears, we will be asked to cough up even more, and told that otherwise the sacrifices we have already made will be 'wasted'. This is the same argument given for continuing the war in Iraq.

Although I have written quite a bit in recent days about the crisis and the economy and think I have at least some understanding of how things work, one thing I don't understand is how the stock market works. I understand the mechanics of it, of course, but have long given up trying to understand what makes it go up or down on any given day.

It seems to me that stock prices are only loosely based on the actual health and performance of companies and the general economy, and more on expectations of what will happen in the future. It is not based on current data but on predictions of future data. It is closer to astrology or soothsaying than science.

I can pinpoint the very event that made me give up on the whole business as being hopelessly irrational.

Emperor Hirohito of Japan (1901-1989) was the symbolic head of Japan from 1926 until his death. He was revered by his people and considered by many to be a god-king. He was quite ill during the last decade of his life and close to death on many occasions.

I was intrigued and amused by the fact that the Japanese stock market would go up and down quite dramatically based on rumors about his health, and the news organizations would solemnly report with a straight face things like, "The Japanese stock market dropped sharply today on news that Emperor Hirohito's health had taken a turn for the worse."

This was, of course, absurd. The emperor was very old, had been ill for a long time, and was a purely symbolic head of state and had no say whatsoever on how the government or the economy was run. It would be like the British stock indices fluctuating on rumors about the Queen of England. The reaction of the stock market seemed to me then, and still seems now, to be hopelessly irrational.

Although I do not invest directly in the stock market (although my retirement funds are presumably invested in it), I do an experiment on days when there is some fairly big news event, either political or financial. After I listen to the news, I try to predict what that news will do to the stock market that day. I find that there is little or no correlation. If anything, I am more often wrong than right, that what I see as bad news for the economy sends the stock market up, and vice versa. It is clear that I will never get rich speculating as a day trader.

A couple of years ago, Bob Garfield on the show On the Media had a droll report on how the media and financial analysts try to come up with simple explanations to explain the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, usually based on nothing more than sheer guesswork or story-telling.

This is why I never take seriously those people who urge policies based on the stock market fluctuations. They are usually self-serving rationalizations for what they want to do.

For example, on Monday, September 29, the House of Representatives surprisingly defeated the Paulson bailout plan on a close vote. As you can see from the graph, the Dow Jones index immediately headed down, plunging 777 points, and that drop was blamed directly on the vote.

People were issuing dire warnings that it would continue that deep decline and we would all have our retirement funds disappear if Congress did not reverse itself and pass the Paulson plan immediately.

The next day the House was not in session due to a religious holiday and the Dow went up nearly 500 points. Did people conclude that sending Congress on vacation was good for the market? Of course not. They found some other fatuous reason.

Then the Senate passed a revised plan late on Wednesday evening and the market should have been happy on Thursday but it wasn't. (It feels so absurd to ascribe human emotions to the stock market, an institution that deals impersonally with billions of transactions daily but we now take such absurdities for granted.) The stock market declined steeply all through the day, losing about 350 points, for no reason that I could see.

Tension then mounted as the House came back in session on Friday to vote on this new package. The market started the day up and kept rising, gaining about 300 points by 1:00 pm, reaching a peak of 10,766. The House voted at that time and passed the measure quite easily.

Since we were told that the House failing to pass a bailout plan on Monday was the cause of the steep decline that day, you would expect that passing it now would be an occasion for joy. What actually happened was that right after the vote, the market immediately went into a steep decline, losing 450 points to end the day with a net loss.

To me this makes no sense at all. Maybe, to use the phrase coined by MIT professor of business Dan Ariely and which is the title of his book, the market is 'predictably irrational', meaning that there is some method in its seeming madness and I am not expert enough to see it.

As long as the stock market was tethered to the underlying real economy, that may have been true. But I think that the present out-of-control virtual economy, generated by financial institutions that have been allowed to speculate wildly using debt-based securities that were free from regulations and oversight, has resulted in the stock market being connected to the real economy by the slenderest of threads, making rational decision-making impossible.

Maybe it is truly rational and there are people who actually understand it. I know I don't.

POST SCRIPT: Paulson's history

This article points out the little publicized fact that Treasury Secretary Paulson, while head of Goldman Sachs, advocated the very policies that led to the current crisis. And now he has been given a huge check from the taxpayers to 'solve' the very problem he helped create. Nice work if you can get away with it.

Paulson, according to a celebratory 2006 BusinessWeek article entitled "Mr. Risk Goes to Washington," was "one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in their pursuit of profits." Under Paulson's watch, that meant "taking on more debt: $100 billion in long-term debt in 2005, compared with about $20 billion in 1999. It means placing big bets on all sorts of exotic derivatives and other securities."

According to the International Herald Tribune, Paulson "was one of the first Wall Street leaders to recognize how drastically investment banks could enhance their profitability by betting with their own capital instead of acting as mere intermediaries." Paulson "stubbornly assert[ed] Goldman's right to invest in, advise on and finance deals, regardless of potential conflicts."

In testimony in 2000 before the Securities and Exchanges Commission, Paulson as head of Goldman Sachs, argued that Wall Street should be allowed to regulate itself.

Meanwhile, Rep. Brad Sherman of California describes the horror scenarios painted for lawmakers in private sessions before the Monday vote to try and scare them into voting for the bill.

October 02, 2008

Sarah Palin, a river of babble-on*

Tonight the nation finally gets to see Sarah Palin live and unplugged, presumably speaking unscripted.

The last three weeks have been mixed for her. On the one hand, she has drawn large and adoring crowds to rallies and meetings, being a bigger attraction than John McCain or Joe Biden. But despite this, her campaign has gone to extraordinary lengths to shield her from reporters. The two interviews she gave to Charles Gibson of ABC News and Katie Couric of CBS News were excruciatingly painful to watch, as you can judge for yourself from these excerpts from the latter.

Did that make any sense at all? Was there even a sentence in that mish-mash of words?

Ok, maybe that was a bad patch. Anyone can have an occasional brain-freeze. Let's look at an extended clip.

Apart from some flashes of coherence, she again seems to free-associate, gets lost in run-on sentences, degenerates into childish language ("good guys" and "bad guys"?), and throws in a few non-sequiturs for good measure And what was all that about "It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to, to our state."

Is she suggesting that Russian planes routinely violate US airspace over Alaska? Does the Pentagon know this? And are we dependent on the good people of Alaska to keep an eye on Russia and be the early-warning system? Jesus's General thinks that Putin may be keeping a similar eye on Palin.

Here is another extended segment from the Couric interview. It is not reassuring.

What is disturbing is that the kinds of questions Couric asked were ones that could have been predicted, so she should have had reasonable answers ready. There were no questions on obscure matters or that required knowledge of esoteric details. When unable to come up with even an incoherent response, Palin resorts to an exaggerated aw-shucks, I'm-just-a-country-girl shtick that is cringe-inducing.

The inability to be specific and to wander off into mindless generalities is very much on display here, where she is asked to name another Supreme Court decision she disagrees with other than Roe v. Wade.

After not being able to name a single case, she wanders into a thicket of words about the rights of states to decide issues and how she and McCain will change that. Really.

And again here, when she is asked what she reads to get her information.

After saying at one point, incredibly, that she reads 'all of them', she again avoided the question by switching it to an aggrieved implication that people who ask such things must be thinking that Alaskans are ignorant hicks.

She is clearly filibustering, emitting a cloud of words to hide her ignorance.

Palin seems to have been told by her advisors to hit certain talking points and she seems determined to do so whatever the question, come hell or high water. As a result her answers start to wander all over the map as she searches for ways to include each point and she ends up not knowing how to complete the sentence she started. She reminds me of some physics students who, when asked a question to which they do not know the answer, try to bluff their way out by using words like 'energy' and 'entropy', hoping that this will mask their lack of understanding and give their ramblings a veneer of reasonableness. The result is not pretty.

She is undoubtedly articulate and must have some political smarts to be able to reach the level of governor of a state. It is quite possible that she is both smart and ignorant. A lot of politicians are. But what is clear is that she does not know how to use 'political speak' to hide her ignorance the way most seasoned politicians do. She does not how and when to stop talking when she has nothing to say.

It is not that she does not know specific pieces of knowledge that is troubling. It is that she, like George Bush, does not seem interested or curious enough to have even thought about these things. She, like Bush, seems to work off some ideological template that spits out decisions and actions with little deliberation or thoughtfulness.

The reviews of her interview performances have been devastating (see here and here.) The campaign seems so nervous about letting her loose that they would not even let her talk to the press to praise her partner after the Obama-McCain debate (a routine duty for running mates), and instead had her watch the debate in a Philadelphia bar.

But she got into trouble the next day when in, response to a question from a bystander, she seemed to be supporting the position Obama had taken on Pakistan and which McCain had taken pains to criticize just the day before in the debate. Was she not even paying attention to the debate? McCain then had to embarrassingly disavow her comments.

By now everyone must have seen the devastating parody of the Couric interview on Saturday Night Live, made worse by the fact that on many occasions they used her actual words. Though Tina Fey got most of the laughs as Palin, Amy Poehler should get a lot of credit for her dead-on impression of Couric, faced with stream-of-consciousness incoherence, desperately trying to look as if it made some sense.

One of the best things about the first Obama-McCain debate was the more free-wheeling format that encouraged back and forth exchanges, though the candidates took some time to get used to it. It was much more like a true debate although McCain failed to exploit its potential by speaking directly to Obama, for which he has been rightly criticized.

It appears that the McCain camp wants to have a much more structured form for the VP debate, reverting to the 'joint press conference' format, with very little time for back-and-forth, presumably so that Palin will not have to improvise as much and can stick to scripted answers.

In these debates, part of the tactics is lowering the expectations of your own candidate as much as possible since 'victory' is measured (at least by the pundits) by how well you exceed them. The McCain camp has succeeded so well that if Palin just manages to speak in complete sentences, she will have done well, irrespective of what she actually says.

I think she will do a lot more. It is likely that she will come out with both guns blazing, armed with prepared quips and one-liners, trying to resurrect the convention image of the tough, spunky, fast-talking, barb-throwing, woman-of-the-people that so endears her to the party faithful. Whatever the question, she will fill the allotted 90 seconds or whatever by stringing together some tested applause lines.

As a result, she may well succeed in impressing some people.

It should be an interesting evening, though likely to lack much substance.

(* Idea for pun courtesy of that champion of snark Tbogg.)

POST SCRIPT: Bad Disney movie trailer

In an interview, actor Matt Damon said that the selection of Sarah Palin by John McCain was like the plot of a bad Disney movie. Now you can actually see the trailer of that movie.

Damon was also disturbed by reports that Palin thinks humans co-existed with dinosaurs and hopes she will be questioned about it, saying "I need to know if she really think that dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. I want to know that, I really do. Because she's gonna have the nuclear codes."

October 01, 2008

Gambling John McCain

John McCain is known as a lifelong gambler relishing visits to casinos. I have written before that I thought John McCain is also hot-headed and reckless. All these are not signs of the temperament required for a head of state. But his performance last week was extraordinary, even by his own standards.

His week started poorly when the headlines were blaring about a financial crisis and he had to backtrack from his earlier statement that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. He may actually be correct (I am not one who equates the health of Wall Street financial institutions and the stock market with the general economy, although the two are undoubtedly linked) but it was a poor choice of words and timing and he had to immediately retract and explain away, not a good thing to have to do for someone already being portrayed as being out of touch and ignorant on the economy.

Then on Tuesday there was the release of damaging news that his campaign chief Rick Davis's company had received millions of dollars from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide access to McCain. Davis's company was receiving a hefty retainer as late as August 2008 even though both Davis and McCain had said that Davis had no links to the two companies for over two years. So either Davis was lying to McCain or both were lying to the nation. The previously highly visible and voluble Davis who used to be interviewed all the time suddenly disappeared from sight, not talking to reporters

Then came Wednesday. First there was the release of the Washington Post-ABC News poll showing Obama surging ahead with a whopping 52-43 point lead, suggesting that McCain's campaign was tanking and the Palin bounce was gone. Then there was the taping during the day of the interview that Sarah Palin had with CBS News's Katie Couric. Apparently the Palin entourage who watched the interview realized that it was an unmitigated disaster (more on this tomorrow) and that it would dominate the news that evening.

McCain may have felt the need to make a dramatic move to obliterate all this bad news and put the focus back on himself, playing the role he loves of someone who does not play by the normal conventions. So he declared that he was 'suspending his campaign', flying back to Washington to solve the financial situation, and would even skip the much anticipated debate on Friday until and unless there was agreement on the bailout plan. This headline-grabbing move was reminiscent of his dramatic selection of Sarah Palin when it was becoming clear that Obama would have a rousing finale to the Democratic convention.

In tactical terms, both moves worked. They definitely overshadowed the other news, though the Palin-Couric interview still created waves. But just as the Palin selection rapidly declined in effect over the subsequent few weeks, the campaign 'suspension' move had an even shorter life, blowing up in just a few days.

For one thing it was pointed out that McCain's 'suspension' had little meaningful content. He was still giving numerous interviews, his ads were running all over the country, and his surrogates were out in full force putting out his message.

Second, it proved embarrassing when it was revealed that McCain had not even read the Paulson plan, even though it was only three pages long.

Third, it came out that after all his dramatic statements about wanting to solve the problem, McCain was silent at the White House meeting on the plan. It was Obama who was active in the discussions, asking a lot of questions, some of them directly to McCain and not getting any response. McCain seemed disengaged.

Fourth, many lawmakers in Washington were not pleased with injecting presidential politics into the negotiations and openly said that the candidates' presence was not helpful, since neither of them were members of the committees that were responsible for the matters involved in the negotiations.

Finally, the impression arose that the House Republicans had scuttled a tentative agreement at McCain's request after he arrived in DC, so he was now portrayed as part of the problem, not the solution.

McCain was back in the spotlight but not in a good way. Speculations ran rampant as to the reasons for his erratic behavior. Did McCain scuttle the tentative agreement? If so, why? Some suggested that he wanted to ride to the rescue and solve the crisis single-handedly and was disappointed that an agreement seemed to have been reached before he arrived, so he sabotaged it even though he did not have a ready alternative.

Another suggested reason was that what he and his campaign actually wanted was to postpone or even cancel the Biden-Palin debate because of fears that she would be revealed live on national TV to be out of her depth. His campaign's suggestion that his September 26 debate with Obama be postponed to October 2nd (the original date of the vice-presidential debate) and that the VP debate be vaguely rescheduled for a later date seemed to suggest that they were either trying to run out the clock completely or at least stall for more time to help her prepare.

Whatever the reasons, the tactic did not work. Instead attention became focused on his penchant for stunts and what it said about him and his campaign. Slate even ran a list of his next ten possible stunts to grab attention. (#1: Returns to Vietnam and jails himself.)

Faced with mounting criticism and even ridicule, McCain was forced to go to Mississippi for the debate with his tail between his legs, even though there was no bailout deal. During the debate he even weakly conceded that he would vote for the deal that would be worked out in Washington, even though he did not know at that time what eventual plan would be proposed. It is likely that this will be regarded as his worst week in his campaign, one misstep following another.

Oddly enough, I think McCain could have come out of this as a very big winner. There is huge public opposition to the bailout. It was a foregone conclusion that Obama, a good friend of Wall Street, would support the bailout plan in its essential outlines. If McCain had come out strongly opposing the bailout and openly led the efforts to scuttle it, he may have been able to accurately portray Obama, the Bush administration, and the Congressional leadership of both parties as serving only Wall Street interests, and ride a huge surge of public support as the only true champion of ordinary people, all the way to November.

But the gambler lost his nerve and folded. Wall Street enmeshes the political leadership of both parties in a tight embrace. To defy them now would be to defy all the people who have supported him all these years: his financial contributors, his own party's leadership, George Bush, all his close advisors and confidantes, and those with whom he socializes. He would have been turning his back on his own class and he just could not bring himself to do it.

Although McCain rails against Washington elites and praises his own alleged maverickiness, when an occasion came along that provided an ideal vehicle to show his independence in a concrete way and not just as rhetoric, he capitulated. Such is the power of ruling class allegiance.

In the end, he did what he and Palin repeatedly keep saying you must never do. He blinked.

POST SCRIPT: McCain's stunts

Jon Stewart gives his take on McCain's erratic behavior.

September 18, 2008

The Palin choice-12: The strange appeal of Sarah Palin

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

I want to end this longer-than-anticipated series of posts by returning to the original question of "Why?" but shifting it from why was she chosen to why so many people are enamored of her, given her obvious shortcomings.

There is no question that the selection of Sarah Palin has given a big boost to the McCain campaign. It has definitely enthused the party faithful. Whether this lasts and translates into changing actual voter preferences among the so-called independent or 'swing' voters is something that has to be awaited. There are already signs that her star is beginning to fade.

Conservative (and former Republican) John Cole explains his concern with what the Palin choice says about the direction in which the Republican Party is heading.

The depressing thing is that this has been the GOP platform for years now. Expertise is overrated. Gut instincts, being "tough," and being "decisive," and not "blinking" are all far more important than actually knowing things.
. . .
Look at the thorough disdain for science the GOP has displayed for the past few years. Amorphous morals trump reason and science, and then those morals are conveniently discarded or altered when it becomes inconvenient for the GOP (see: family values, David Vitter).

The funny thing about all this is that the new savior of the GOP, Sarah Palin, is the one who is finally waking everyone up to what the Republican party really is all about. They are not serious about foreign policy . . . They are not serious (or honest) about scientific policy. They are not serious about economic policy (other than cutting taxes). They are not serious about an energy policy (just drill, baby, drill).

They just are not serious about, well, anything.

And Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.

This disdain for knowledge and expertise is a troubling phenomenon. While the leaders of the country need not be scholars or policy wonks or experts in economic or military matters, that is a far cry from the absurd notion that common sense and gut instincts are sufficient for making major decisions. As another conservative Dan Drezner says: "Question to other GOP policy wonks: is it possible to support a candidate that campaigns on the notion that expertise is simply irrelevant?"

Even David Brooks, a reliable purveyor of conservative conventional wisdom, is having qualms about this tendency to view knowledge and expertise as somehow suspect and to praise ignorance as being a sign of being a 'real' person. .

This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom.

There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

People who call themselves conservatives in America have long ago abandoned those standards. So what exactly is Palin's appeal to the present-day conservative faithful? It cannot be merely her views on the hot-button culture war issues. While she can glibly recite the standard right wing talking points on taxes and abortion and guns, so could any of the other people who competed against McCain in the primaries or whose names were floated as vice presidential possibilities. Clearly it is something about her as a person that seems to excite the imagination of the party faithful.

Cole points out a telling portion of her interview with Charles Gibson that I too found troubling, when he questioned her about the moment when she was asked to be the vice presidential nomineee.

Charles Gibson, the interviewer, asked her if she didn't hesitate and question whether she was experienced enough.

"I didn't hesitate, no," she said.

He asked if that didn't that take some hubris.

"I answered him yes," Ms. Palin said, "because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate."

This is, of course, absolute drivel. Surely any reasonable person would want to think it over before taking on such a major responsibility as the vice presidency, especially since there is no indication that she was required to make an immediate decision. At the very least her responsibility to the people who elected her governor should have given her pause. Why is she spouting nonsense about 'not blinking' and being 'committed to the mission' when the question posed to her did not require either of those things?

Like Cole, I was disturbed by this pride in the lack of thoughtful decision-making in a situation that did not require urgency. Palin takes pride in making instantaneous decisions, without weighing the pros and cons. It seems like steely-eyed, clenched-jaw determination and an unquestioning and overweening confidence in the rightness of ones instincts are what passes for leadership these days. She is proud of being 'wired' in this way so she never has to 'blink' when faced with a decision because her gut tells her exactly what to do. She presumably reacts the same way when asked whether she wants tea or coffee.

Cole then put his finger on the reason that Palin appeals to the faithful: "She is supremely self-confident to the point of not recognizing how ill-equipped she is to lead the country . . . [She is] George Bush in a dress." (my italics)

Cole remains cynical about the ability of his fellow conservatives to see through the phoniness. He thinks that they have been cheerleaders for George Bush for so long that they are unable to break from the addiction.

The Palin interview should be a gut-check for Republicans and conservatives who think the last eight years has been a perversion of conservative principles. I am betting most of them will not even put down their pom-poms, though.

POST SCRIPT: New Rules

Bil Maher is back with his New Rules where he comments on some of the issues raised in this series of posts.

September 17, 2008

The Palin choice-11: McCain and Obama on taxes

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

I have looked previously at where Sarah Palin stands on the issues. In this post I will examine McCain's positions. This is not easy to do since McCain has shown himself remarkably willing to change positions for the sake of expediency. Yesterday's Post Script of the Daily Show bio of McCain shows this.

McCain keeps saying that he is a 'maverick' but what that seems to mean to him is that he takes policy positions that serve the purpose of polishing his own image. If that requires him to criticize his own party when his own needs demand it, he does not hesitate to do so, but he rarely follows that up with any actions that actually goes against his party. Steve Benen has been keeping a running list of McCain's flip-flops. It is getting pretty long.

It is important to emphasize that changing one's position on an issue is not by itself bad. If the facts or circumstances change or one is presented with compelling new arguments or evidence, then one should review and revise one's stand. It is the reasons for the change that are important. With McCain, he often does not even bother to give any reason.

Although the campaign has become, as usual, focused on trivialities (lipsticks, pigs, and fish) and culture wars, the really important issues are those of war and peace and the distribution of income, wealth, and services in the country. The one-party/two-factions system that exists in the US requires both candidates to serve the interests of Wall Street and the wealthy. Both Obama and McCain have obliged. It is only at the margins that they differ.

Candidates who strongly favor the very rich (like McCain) prefer to talk in terms of 'averages' (in income or tax cuts), because that can mask huge differences between groups. You can give huge tax cuts to a few rich people and very small cuts to a large number of poor people and still claim that people are receiving a good 'average' tax cut. But what needs to be examined is how it breaks down in narrow income slices.

The Washington Post recently had the kind of political analysis that is worth reading. It analyzed how Obama's and McCain's tax plans would affect people in specific income groups. Such detailed breakdowns are far more useful than broad generalizations.

We see that McCain's policies are heavily skewed to benefit the very wealthy. McCain emphasizes how his policies would give everyone a tax cut and the average benefits would be larger than Obama's plan. That is true, but the graphic clearly shows that lower income groups get tiny tax cuts while the very rich get enormous benefits. Obama gives bigger tax cuts to the lower income groups (those earning below about $100,000), smaller tax cuts to those earning between $100,000 and $250,000, while the very rich have to pay more taxes.

BusinessWeek says:

The [Tax Policy Center] took a look at the various tax proposals put forth by the two candidates and estimated that Obama's plan would lead to a boost in aftertax income for all but the highest earners, while taking a smaller bite out of government tax revenues than would McCain's plans.
. . .
Under McCain's proposals, by contrast—including an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all taxpayers, a corporate tax cut, and a larger reduction in estate taxes than Obama would support—far more of the benefits would go to the top. If his plans went into effect in 2009, married couples in the bottom fifth of the population would see aftertax income go up just 0.2%, while those in the next quintile would see a 0.7% hike. But those in the top quintile would see a bump up in aftertax income of 2.7%.

There is no question that the Bush administration has favored fiscal and monetary policies that have favored the already well-to-do, while gutting the protections that poorer people depend upon. The Wall Street Journal points out that among wage earners, only professionals like doctors and lawyers made more in 2007 than in 2000. McCain's tax policies will enable the very rich to keep even more of their income, accelerating the inequalities that has been going on for some time.

Although Obama's tax plans are a less generous to the very wealthy than McCain's, for me, the biggest factor in favor of Obama is that he is unlikely to recklessly start another war or create international tensions, while McCain is, if possible, even more reckless than Bush.

POST SCRIPT: US-Pakistan clashes?

Lost in the coverage about the presidential campaign and the chaos in the financial markets has been this troubling story about tension between US and Pakistani forces on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan following an incursion into Pakistan by US forces on September 3 that led to the deaths of some villagers.

The BBC reports that a second attempted incursion was stopped because of Pakistan paramilitary troops firing on US forces:

Pakistan's army spokesman has made clear that its forces have been ordered to open fire if US troops launch another raid across the Afghan border.
. . .
Locals said seven US helicopter gunships and two troop-carrying Chinook helicopters landed in the Afghan province of Paktika near the Zohba mountain range.

US troops from the Chinooks then tried to cross the border. As they did so, Pakistani paramilitary soldiers at a checkpoint opened fire into the air and the US troops decided not to continue forward, local Pakistani officials say.

September 16, 2008

The Palin choice-10: The real McCain

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

One of McCain's successes is the way he has managed to cultivate and flatter the press so that they have been very gentle to him and taken his self-portraits of being an honorable, independent-minded maverick at face value, instead of portraying him more accurately as a self-aggrandizing panderer who shamelessly exploits his Vietnam experiences to hide his right-wing agenda and his reckless personality.

The real McCain is a much darker figure. To start to get a better idea of who he really is, watch this 'McCain in three minutes' video, produced by ABC News's Good Morning America.

The darker side of McCain has always been apparent although the media chose to turn a blind eye to it. The Keating Five savings-and-loan influence peddling scandal (which was not in the above video) is one such example of McCain's corrupt politics, quite at odds with his claim to be an opponent of lobbyists and corruption. The Phoenix New Times also details the shady history of the origins of his wife's family's fortune and his participation and benefiting from it.

Meanwhile, a London newspaper lays out the story of how McCain callously abandoned his first wife after she had been disfigured in a car accident, to marry the current one.

McCain has always had an explosive temper that suggests that he is unbalanced. Jeffrey St Clair describes one incident:

In 1992, Robin Silver and Bob Witzeman went to meet with McCain at his office in Phoenix to discuss Mt. Graham. Silver and Witzeman are both physicians. Witzeman is now retired and Silver works in the emergency room at Phoenix hospital. The doctors say that at the mention of the words Mount Graham McCain erupted into a violent fit. "He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room", Silver tells us. "He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us. It was as violent as almost any domestic abuse altercation."

Witzeman left the meeting stunned: "I'm a lifelong environmentalist, but what really scares me about McCain is not his environmental policies, which are horrid, but his violent, irrational temper. I think McCain is so unbalanced that if Vladimir Putin told him something he didn't like he'd lose it, start beating his chest about having his finger on the nuclear trigger. Who knows where it would stop. To my mind, McCain's the most likely senator to start a nuclear war."

This trait earned him the nickname 'McNasty' in high school and his casual hurling of obscene and ugly language at his wife and others are well known to those who work with him but largely hidden from the public. McCain also publicly made a vicious joke about Chelsea Clinton when she was still a teenager, a joke that was so mean that many major publications refused to publish it.

All these things reveal him to be a person of highly dubious character. Those supposedly religious people and Biblical literalists who like to claim that a candidate's personal character is the most important thing and who think that plastering the Ten Commandments everywhere and praying in schools is the answer to everything seem to have no problem with these revelations, revealing that their religion is one of convenience.

When confronted with any criticism, McCain and his campaign have pathetically resorted to using his prisoner of war experience to excuse anything, a kind of 'get out of gaffe free' card. Steve Benen lists all the times they have invoked his prison experience as a a shield. What is worse is that they simultaneously claim that McCain is reluctant to talk about it, although campaign and the Republican convention highlights that story at every opportunity.

Rudy Giuliani's shameless invocation of the events of 9/11 for his personal advancement was mocked by Joe Biden who said that his every sentence consisted of a noun, a verb, and 9/11. Replace '9/11' with 'POW' and we have a good description of John McCain's answers to awkward questions and criticisms. This trait has become so blatant that even Maureen Dowd (someone who never fails to portray Republicans as macho and decry Democrats as wimpy) became distracted from her usual pathetic obsessions with the Clintons to comment on it.

So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.

McCain's prisoner of war experience is now becoming the butt of jokes and a target of cartoonists

John McCain also seems to be showing himself to be increasingly cranky as can be seen from the Time magazine interview. It seems like he is on a short fuse and I wonder how long it will be before his legendary temper and uncontrollable rage explodes in full view of the media.

The story of McCain's lack of awareness of the number of houses he and his wife own (we still don't know the exact answer. Four? Seven? Twelve?), his lack of knowledge of the make of car he drives (a Cadillac CTS), his $500 Italian shoes, and his fancy lifestyle has exposed the absurdity of his campaign trying to insinuate that Barack and Michelle Obama and his wife are 'elitists'.

If all that was not bad enough, John McCain is running a campaign that is so full of distortions and lies that Josh Marshall concludes that McCain is running the sleaziest campaign in modern history and is clearly unfit for the office he is seeking.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on McCain

Here is a biopic of McCain that accurately captures his opportunism.

September 15, 2008

The Palin choice-9: McCain's recklessness

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

When I first heard that John McCain had selected Sarah Palin, my initial hypothesis was that this was a desperation move, a sign that the campaign's internal analyses were suggesting that the seemingly close national polls were misleading and they were going to lose unless they did something to break out of the rut. It seems like that initial impression was right.

The Palin choice is being portrayed by media analysts as a sign that the McCain campaign felt they needed to solidify the campaign's right wing, evangelical base. Perhaps that is true. It is undoubtedly the case that that group seems very excited by the choice.

But the reports about last minute decisions suggest that there is very little coherence to their campaign strategy. After all, all the indications are that right up till the end, McCain had really wanted Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge but had been warned away from them, saying that this same base would revolt.

But Lieberman and Ridge are not very similar to Palin on social issues. So to lurch abruptly from them to Palin suggests that such policies don't matter at all to McCain, not if he risks losing because of them. It looks like McCain would risk putting the country in untested hands simply to salvage his chances of winning, which makes a mockery of his boast that he "puts country first".

As Kyle Moore says:

At the first sign of trouble, McCain abandoned his game plan and went instead with a high risk maneuver that thus far seems to have some pay off, but is coming with a high cost.

What does that say about how he’ll behave in the realm of foreign policy? Will he abandon any semblance of a safe and tested plan in favor of a high risk move that will put us and our families in danger? What about terrorism? In a McCain administration, I think that this indicates that instead of pursuing a smart and tough anti-terrorism policy, he would engage in a reckless and reactionary response that would only make us less safe and likely put us in another war.

We can discuss the lack of qualifications for Sarah Palin, and there are plenty, but the biggest problem is that it indicates that John McCain’s temperament and judgment is far below the standards necessary to serve in the Oval Office.

Steve Benen adds:

So, what are we left with here? John McCain met Sarah Palin in person once, for 15 minutes. Months later, he then talked to her on the phone for five minutes. Four days later, without a thorough background check, he invited her to be vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

Sensible people of sound mind and character simply don't do things like this. Leaders don't do things like this. Those fundamentally unsuited for the presidency do things like this.

Even David Frum, a conservative and former speechwriter for George W. Bush says over at National Review Online:

The longer I think about it, the less well this selection sits with me. And I increasingly doubt that it will prove good politics. The Palin choice looks cynical. The wires are showing.
. . .
I'd guess that John McCain does not have a much better sense of who she is, what she believes, and the extent of her abilities than my enthusiastic friends over at the Corner. It's a wild gamble, undertaken by our oldest ever first-time candidate for president in hopes of changing the board of this election campaign. Maybe it will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I'd be pounding home if I were the Obama campaign: that it's John McCain for all his white hair who represents the risky choice, while it is Barack Obama who offers cautious, steady, predictable governance.

Here's I fear the worst harm that may be done by this selection. The McCain campaign's slogan is "country first." It's a good slogan, and it aptly describes John McCain, one of the most self-sacrificing, gallant, and honorable men ever to seek the presidency.

But question: If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Other Republican party stalwarts like Michael Murphy and Peggy Noonan are equally worried about what this choice says about McCain, as was revealed by their comments to MSNBC's Chuck Todd when they thought their microphones were off.

(You can read transcripts of the comments here.)

If anything, this entire episode confirms reports that McCain is hot-headed and reckless, a dangerous trait for a president to have. Furthermore, it reveals that these people are very unserious, caring little for policy, and viewing elections as entirely tribal feuds, appealing to the worst of passions, and further trivializing the process.

Now that the lightweight Palin has been picked, the McCain campaign is desperately trying to change the focus of the discussion. Their campaign manager is now saying that this election will not be about issues but about people.

I read that as a signal that we are now going to see a campaign based purely on culture wars (god, family, sex, abortion, race) and the politics of tribal resentments. It worked for the Republicans in 2004 on the issues of gay marriage and the ten commandments.

This time they are trying to sell the idea that McCain and Palin represent 'real people' who will bring change. This Tom Toles cartoon points out the hypocrisy of McCain campaigning as the agent of change. But will it work?

POST SCRIPT: Video of Palin pork

The hypocrisy of Palin/McCain on the earmarks issue:

And cartoonist Mike Luckovich gives his take.

September 12, 2008

The Palin choice-8: The vetting process

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

John McCain's campaign people surely must have been aware of the dangers of suddenly springing an unknown like Sarah Palin onto the national stage. If you are determined to do so, the way to minimize the chance of unpleasant surprises is to have a very long, exhaustive, and fairly open vetting process. But the trade-off for doing so is that you then cannot keep the process secret because too many people are involved and being questioned.

For reasons that are not clear to me, it seems like McCain wanted both a relative unknown and also for the announcement to be a big surprise, and these two things simply don't go well together. He apparently wanted to "shake up the ticket". The fact that Palin's name was kept to just a handful of close advisors suggests that the vetting process was cursory and hurried. As The Politico reports:

They met for the first time last February at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Then, they spoke again — by phone — on Sunday while she was at the Alaska state fair and he was at home in Arizona. . . . The fact that McCain only spoke with Palin about the vice presidency for the first time on Sunday, and that he was seriously considering Lieberman until days ago, suggests just how hectic and improvisational his process was.

The New York Times fleshes out what went on behind the scenes:

Mr. McCain was getting advice that if he did not do something to shake up the race, his campaign would be stuck on a potentially losing trajectory.

With time running out — and as Mr. McCain discarded two safer choices, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable — he turned to Ms. Palin. He had his first face-to-face interview with her on Thursday and offered her the job moments later. Advisers to Mr. Pawlenty and another of the finalists on Mr. McCain's list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.

"They didn't seriously consider her until four or five days from the time she was picked, before she was asked, maybe the Thursday or Friday before," said a Republican close to the campaign. "This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn't get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe or Ridge.

It appears that they are doing the real vetting after they made the selection.

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin's background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice. The campaign was still calling Republican operatives as late as Sunday night asking them to go to Alaska to deal with the unexpected candidacy of Ms. Palin.

The shallow nature of the vetting process is becoming increasingly clear:

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Ms. Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

"I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called," Ms. Phillips said. "I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven't found anybody who was asked anything."

The current mayor of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller, said she had not heard of any efforts to look into Ms. Palin's background. And Randy Ruedrich, the state Republican Party chairman, said he knew nothing of any vetting that had been conducted.

State Senator Hollis French, a Democrat who is directing the ethics investigation, said that no one asked him about the allegations. "I heard not a word, not a single contact," he said.

A number of Republicans said the McCain campaign had to some degree tied its hands in its effort to keep the selection process so secret.

We don't know much yet about Palin and what we are learning is clearly not what the campaign intended as a first impression. But this decision and the process by which it was arrived tell us a lot about McCain and his campaign, and most of it is not good.

It has become a cliché to say that the first and most important decision that a president of president-to-be makes is the choice of the vice-president because he is putting the leadership of the country potentially in the hands of that person. Furthermore, the decision is his and his alone. It does not require consent of the US Senate and voters are not required to approve it during the primaries. So how that decision is made says something about how the candidate deliberates.

Perhaps the most pathetic attempts to put her in a positive light have been the statements that Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska is so close to Russia! For sheer inanity, that probably beats the other statement by McCain that "[Palin] knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." Really?

The way the Palin choice was made, irrespective of how well it turns out for McCain, indicates a certain recklessness that does not reflect well on his temperament. Cartoonist Mike Luckovich speculates on what the choice of Palin reveals about how McCain will select his cabinet.

It has become increasingly clear that the McCain camp is banking on the American public being stupid.

POST SCRIPT: How Palin was really selected (language advisory)

September 11, 2008

The Palin choice-7: Her background and positions on issues

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

What do we really know about Sarah Palin, apart from her family life? Here is a synopsis of some of her views.

The news website Alternet gives some background on Palin's political positions and history. We learn that:

• Palin doesn't believe global warming is man-made.
• Palin is the candidate of a powerful far right-wing cabal; her nomination seals their support for the little-wanted McCain.
• Palin staunchly opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.
• Palin supports failed abstinence-only sex education programs.
• Palin is under investigation for allegedly abusing her power as governor to help her sister in a messy divorce.
• Palin has big money ties to Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who has been indicted for political corruption.
• During her time as mayor, Palin drove the town of Wasilla deep into debt.

The Progressive Review has more on Palin's views.

Palin also supports, against all scientific advice, allowing the public to kill wolves by shooting them from planes.

She also believes that we should teach creationism in schools, in addition to evolution.

Since Obama's pastor became a campaign issue, it is instructive to see what her pastors' views are and that can be seen here. She was baptized in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla that is Pentecostal and whose parishioners believes in speaking in tongues and whipping themselves into incoherent frenzies.

Although she speaks as someone who looks out for taxpayers, she got the state to pay her thousand of dollars in per diems for staying in her own home. In fact, Palin seems quite comfortable stating things that are flat-out contradicted by facts.

Her record as Mayor of Wasilla and her attempt to ban books from the public library and fire the librarian when she refused to go along can be seen here.

Her husband and her own past flirtations with the Alaskan Independence Party (whose founder has said "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government" and "I won't be buried under their damn flag,") can be seen here and here.

Palin and her husband also had some failed business ventures.

Given all these negatives, Glenn Greenwald describes how Palin's supporters are trying to shut down criticism of her.

Palin herself has been shameless in her repeated lies about being a stalwart opponent of federal pork earmarks, especially the infamous 'bridge to nowhere', using the same words each time. She first supported it, then opposed it only after Congress cut off funds to build it, and yet still kept the money and used it for other projects.

In actual fact, under her governorship Alaska requested the highest per capita earmarks of any state. She is in fact just the kind of person that John McCain says he detests and thinks is ruining the country.

Steve Benen summarizes why Palin is wrong for the job and what this choice says about McCain.

What should be clear to anyone paying attention is that the McCain/Palin ticket is cynically hoping that people will overlook the facts and vote on the basis of bogus slogans and non-issues.

POST SCRIPT: Leave Sarah Palin alone!

Since Sarah Palin's policies and history cannot bear close scrutiny, the McCain campaign has gone into full victim mode, whining about how mean people are to her, and trying to pressure the media to treat her gently. A famous defender of another beleaguered woman has resurfaced to rescue her. (language advisory)

September 10, 2008

The Palin choice-6: McCain and women

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The reason that is bandied about the most for the Palin choice is that it was aimed at attracting women voters to the Republican cause, especially those Democrats who are allegedly so furious that Hillary Clinton did not get their party's nomination that they were looking for reasons to vote for McCain.

The good thing about McCain's choice of a woman as a running mate is that it reveals that he does not harbor any absurd beliefs that women are not capable of running the country. Thanks to his choice, whichever ticket wins in November will result in either a black president or a female vice-president and this, other things being equal, is a good thing.

On the other hand, the fact that Palin was a hometown beauty queen (Ms. Wasilla, pop: 7,000) and Miss Alaska runner-up (1984) does raise some disturbing questions, though about McCain and not her. There is nothing wrong in being physically attractive and looks and governing abilities are not mutually exclusive.

The problem is that McCain's first wife was a swimsuit model, whom he divorced after she was disfigured in a car accident to marry his present wife Cindy, an extremely wealthy heiress seventeen years younger than him and a Junior Rodeo Queen of Arizona in 1968. The fact that he now picks an attractive woman 28 years younger than him and whom he hardly knew to be his running mate seems to reveal an uncomfortable pattern of McCain as being a man who is more influenced by shallow considerations like looks than is perhaps desirable in someone seeking such a responsible office.

The fact that he has called Palin his 'partner and soul mate' is a little inappropriate for a man with his history. The Jed Report has picked up on some odd behavior by McCain when he first presented her as his running mate that will provide plenty of fodder for body-language aficionados. Watch.

It seems likely that the McCain's advisors became a little concerned about this and have said something to him because McCain has now started to talk about his wife more.

If, as has been widely suggested, McCain specifically wanted a woman to woo over the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton, there were other options. As Steve Benen points out:

I'd just add how striking it is that McCain had more capable women to choose from, but picked one who wasn't even a governor when he started his presidential campaign. Senators such as Hutchison, Dole, Snowe, Collins, and Murkowski were skipped over, as were more experienced governors like Lingle and Rell, as were "mavericks" like Todd-Whitman, as were cabinet secretaries like Rice, Spellings, and Chao, as were business leaders like Fiorina and Whitman.

McCain skipped over more capable women for a younger, less experienced woman he barely knows. This is supposed to impress women voters? Seriously?

This all comes back to the question: Why did he pick Palin? Although Obama and Clinton and McCain all occupy the narrow ideological spectrum demanded by the one-party/two-faction state that currently exists in the US, there is no question that Obama and Clinton are far closer to each other in their views than either is to McCain or Palin. Given the difference that exists between Clinton's and Palin's views on issues, thinking that the selection of Palin would appeal to Clinton's supporters is like thinking that Alan Keyes appeals to black voters.

Clinton supporters had already been moving to Obama. I have no idea about how women as a whole will react to what seems to me like blatant pandering by McCain. But a young woman whose views I respect told me some time ago that she was voting for Obama on the issues but really respected McCain as a person of integrity and principle. She stuck to this position despite my presenting arguments and facts that I thought clearly showed McCain to be a phony who was shamelessly using his war experiences to deflect attention from his policies and serious flaws as a candidate. But she is now absolutely livid about the selection of Palin, saying it revealed McCain to be a 'slimy and shallow manipulator'.

Although this is a sample of one and should not be given much weight, early polls seem to indicate that the selection of Palin, while firing up the conservative and religious base, is not having the intended effect. Andrew Sullivan says that the early results are not encouraging for McCain: "From this first snap-shot (and unsettled) impression, Palin has helped McCain among Republicans, left Democrats unfazed, but moved the undecideds against him quite sharply. I totally understand why." Joe Klein seems to find a similar result. But other polls suggest that white women have indeed moved towards McCain.

But events are still fluid and moving fast. We will have to wait until a few weeks have passed and the conventions fade into memories to see what the true situation is.

POST SCRIPT:A little Googling is a dangerous thing

On the day that Barack Obama clinched the number of delegates he needed to win the nomination, John McCain gave a speech that was widely ridiculed for its poor delivery. In addition, they made him stand in front of a green background that gave him a pasty look and the impression of his head being like a lump of dough bobbing around in a bowl of lime Jello. Since green (and blue) screen backgrounds are used in filming to project backdrops, there has been an explosion of video clips online that have taken his speech and changed the backdrop for humorous effect.

I was startled therefore when shortly into his acceptance speech last week, McCain was once again in front of a bright green background for about five minutes, suggesting another goof-up. But when the camera switched to a wide view, I realized that the green was the lawn in front of a mansion.

But why show a mansion as a backdrop? And whose mansion? For a wild moment, I thought that they might have decided to deliberately flaunt McCain's wealth by showing a picture of one of McCain's many homes but quickly dismissed the idea as absurd.

Josh Marshall was also puzzled by this and investigated and discovered that the mansion was that of Walter Reed Middle School in California. His hypothesis is that someone was asked to provide a backdrop of the Walter Reed Medical Center, googled just the name, came up with this image and used it without checking further. That explanation is consistent with the general sloppiness of the campaign.

Many news organizations have asked the McCain organization about the house but they refused to answer questions, reinforcing the impression that this was an embarrassing mistake. The middle school principal has also complained about her school being used for political purposes without her permission. (Josh Marshall has an update.)

September 09, 2008

The Palin choice-5: To close the age and health gap?

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Another possibility for the Palin choice is that perhaps she was selected to close the age and health gap between the McCain and Obama tickets.

There is no question that the Obama campaign just oozes energy (despite Joe Biden), while John McCain does not. McCain was born even before Obama's mother was, and it shows. Whenever Obama and McCain are shown together, McCain comes out looking the worse.

Obama projects the kind of youthful vigor that Americans like to see in public figures ever since TV started playing a big role in the 1960 election and kept their presidents constantly in the public eye. John Kennedy is the model for this (he carefully hid his serious health problems from the public) and it is no accident that George W. Bush spends a lot of time being seen hacking away at brush and riding bikes. These are deliberate image creating events, to show people that their leaders are fit and energetic.

These age and health concerns about McCain have so far been flying under the radar and mostly raised by comedians and cartoonists portraying McCain as a cranky old man. No one wants to be accused of ageism and only humorists can get away with raising this touchy subject. The Obama campaign has studiously avoided any direct mention of age, perhaps because it would be in poor taste and also might cause a backlash among the large percentage of voters who are elderly.

But lingering, low-level concerns about this issue undoubtedly exist. Polls have long shown that voters find McCain's advanced age (72) a bigger concern than Obama's ethnicity, and his multiple bouts with melanoma are well known. Reagan having Alzheimer's disease during the latter stages of his presidency have also raised concerns about electing the oldest first-term president ever.

So was Palin picked to compensate for this perceived age and energy deficit?

If so, it might have had the opposite effect. One consequence of the Palin pick is that the issue of age and health of McCain have now moved front and center, as people will undoubtedly start taking into consideration the odds that she will be asked to assume the presidency in the event of McCain becoming incapacitated. People are now consulting actuarial tables to figure out what are the chances that she will have to take over at some point. The age concerns have gone mainstream

Furthermore, being constantly seen next to the very young-looking and vibrant Palin is undoubtedly going to make McCain look really old, like he is her father or even her grandfather. For all these reasons, I had expected McCain to pick someone in their fifties or sixties, old enough to not make McCain look bad by comparison but young enough to appear dynamic. Palin went completely against that expectation.

While choosing a fresh face unknown to the nation does have some advantages, I have written before of the dangers involved in putting a novice onto the national stage. Another problem is that although Palin seems bright and able, she simply hasn't had the time to get up to speed on many issues.

Furthermore, she would not have as yet mastered the skill of seasoned politicians in being able to distinguish between those questions that call for a response that has been carefully scripted to be 'on message' and cater to targeted constituencies, and those which are outside the predictable and for which you have to learn the art of the 'non-response response', where you speak in bland generalities without really addressing the question. They also know how to filibuster, running out the clock by talking about extraneous issues without pausing and allowing the questioner time for follow-ups.

Really good politicians know how to subtly modify both classes of answers so that the answers seem fresh and not robotic. Furthermore, their families need to learn that they should be seen and not heard or when pressed, give similar non-answer answers. To engage with their questioners in a thoughtful way is to be avoided because it runs the risk of committing a 'gaffe'. Even the more seasoned Obama sometimes makes the 'mistake' of trying think a question through rather than giving a formulaic answer. It is a sad reflection on the state of politics that treating voters as intelligent is a bad thing politically.

The media love to focus on gaffes because they make news, are easy to understand and report, and don't require the hard work of analyzing policy positions. As a result, politicians make it a priority to avoid making any verbal missteps, even trivial ones. But even seasoned politicians can occasionally trip up and make the kinds of gaffes that the media will focus on, whether it is trivial or important. It is inevitable that Sarah Palin, simply because of the lack of time to prepare and however much a quick study she might be, will make some.

James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, predicts that we are going to see her and the McCain campaign plagued with having to explain away one gaffe after another. One campaign operative even made the extraordinary assertion that she may only give set speeches and never take questions. The McCain campaign, by hiding her away from questions for so long has set the bar so low that even a marginal performance will be seen as effective.

I personally do not think she will make many gaffes because most journalists are drearily predictable, sticking to a very narrow range of questions and policy perspectives, and this makes it easy to prepare responses in advance. Her first interview is with ABC's Charles Gibson, who was identified by Glenn Greenwald back in May as a reliable water-carrier for Republican talking points, which probably explains why he got the interview.

This absurd media obsession with gaffes has arisen because we seem to expect our leaders to be able to immediately spit out answers to any and every question. But even for a president, very, very, few issues require a snap judgment, and those that do are usually fairly trivial. How ridiculous the situation has become can be seen by the fact that no politician can now say in answer to a question, "That is something that I will need to think about, gain more information, and consult with experts before I reach a conclusion", even though that would reveal a deliberate and mature thinker.

But McCain seems to think that making quick decisions is a good thing and takes pride in it, as if it were a competition.

"I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can," Mr. McCain wrote, with his top adviser Mark Salter, in his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For." "Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint."

This adds further evidence to his reputation for recklessness.

The problem is that if he becomes president, he is not the one who has to live with the consequences of his hasty mistakes. We do.

POST SCRIPT: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Over the weekend, the government took a major step in bailing out these two mortgage giants, the latest development in the continuing mortgage crisis.

Economist Michael Hudson explains what happened and why

The next president is going to inherit a major headache caused by rampant, unchecked greed in the mortgage sector.

September 08, 2008

The Palin choice-4: Shameless double standards

(Although it may look on the surface as if this blog has become obsessed with Sarah Palin, it really is a chance for me to express some thoughts about politics in general, using her story as a hook. So I hope those who are sick of hearing about Palin will bear with me. For previous posts in this series, see here.)

By now, there cannot be a single person in the country who is not aware of the intimate details of the Palin family. We now know about Palin's unwed daughter's pregnancy, that this news was released by the McCain campaign to counter the rumor that this same daughter is the real mother of Palin's youngest child who was born in April with Down's syndrome, her husband's DUI conviction a long time ago, the messiness of her sister's divorce and their involvement with it, and other problems with the law. It has become a tabloid-style soap opera, putting things that should be private into the full glare of the national media spotlight, with promises of more lurid details to come.

It is important to keep in mind that none of these things reflect on Palin's ability to govern, though how she handled them in the context of her official duties is relevant and will reveal a lot about her. Of these, the 'troopergate' episode is the most troubling.

Even if the suspicion that Palin pretended to be the mother of her daughter's child is true, it is not by itself a big negative, even though it means she lied to the public. Devoted parents are willing to do extraordinary things to protect their children from harm and it will not be the first time that such subterfuges have occurred and will not be the last. If true and it was at her daughter's request, it would suggest that Palin was willing to risk her own career to protect her daughter from public disapprobation, surely an act that one can understand and empathize with.

This kind of thing was perhaps inevitable with the choice of a relative newcomer like Sarah Palin for such a high profile role, although the sheer speed and number and scale of the revelations has taken me by surprise.

You can get away with nominating a newcomer if you or anyone you trust and respect happen to have had a long and personal relationship with them and can vouch strongly for them. But there is no indication that McCain knew her well at all since he met her for just the second time the day before he formally announced his pick. There is no indication that any of his staff knows her any better, and since they apparently limited the selection process to a very small group of people, the chances of getting input from people with deep personal knowledge of Palin became remote.

What amazes me is the claim of Palin's supporters that all revelations about her is positive news and a cause for celebration because it shows 'family values' and her strong opposition to abortion. As some conservatives have pointed out, it is not a good thing for high schoolers to have children and this should not be celebrated the way that the McCain/Palin camp is doing.

As Lawrence Auster says disgustedly, conservatism for some has become a caricature, a one-note song about abortion that drowns out everything else:

All that the evangelical and Catholic conservatives care about is opposition to abortion. All that's required for them to be happy is an illegitimate or defective pregnancy, followed by birth. They have no vision of social order, no vision of an overarching good, but have reduced all goods to the good of avoiding abortion. Which means that they embrace every kind of disorder, so long as rejection of abortion is thrown into the mix.

Jon Stewart finds example after example of this kind of unprincipled somersaulting.

This is not a new phenomenon. The Republicans are demanding that McCain's Vietnam experience be treated like a religious talisman that must be venerated by all. But recall that John Kerry's purple hearts received in Vietnam were attacked in 2004 and trivialized and ridiculed by Republican convention goers wearing band-aids with purple hearts drawn on them.

Similarly, Glenn Greenwald in his usual thorough way has documented how John Kerry was portrayed by right-wing media commentators as a gigolo because he married a rich woman, the heir to a ketchup fortune. And yet, this year those same people are not calling McCain a gigolo for marrying a rich heiress to a beer fortune, whose money and family connections he has used to advance his career.

I have been impressed by the ability of some of the Republican party and its conservative Christian base to pivo