Over the next few weeks we're going to be doing some upgrades to the software platform that runs TPMCafe as well as rolling out some new features that users have been asking for.

Tonight, we're looking for a few TPMCafe regulars to help us do some final beta-testing of the new version of the software. If you'd like to lend us a hand please send an email to tpmbugs@gmail.com. We'll send instructions.

And keep an eye out for further posts about new features we're designing for the site.

Merrill Lynch reported yesterday that American households spend more on debt service than food.

That startling statistic underlines the extent to which the credit problem is influencing household cash flows. Sacrifices will be needed to bring the ratio of interest payments-to-income down from 14% to the level it usually reaches at recession lows, about 10%.

That means the American consumer is going to have to find $400 billion in cuts to their household budget in the next nine months. Despite the bad news on unemployment yesterday which generally confirmed my contention that we have been in a recession since January, the stock market went up. This is because market makers figure all the bad news is already discounted into stock prices. But Merrill's David Rosenberg, who called this correctly many months ago notes there is a problem with this theory which is based on the assumption that the recession will be a garden variety six month long affair.

But if this consumer led recession turns out to look more like the 1973-75 down cycle (which we think it will), the stock market is priced only 34% of the way and the Consumer Discretionary sector only 39% of the way.

I don’t like to be dismal, but recessions just bring me down. They also bring down the number of jobs in the labor market, down 80,000 last month, the third month in a row that employment contracted and the largest monthly loss in five years.

The unemployment rate jumped up from 4.8% to 5.1%, the highest jobless rate since September 2005,

Since employment peaked in December, payrolls have contracted by 232,000. Private sector payrolls were down 98,000 last month, and 109,000 in February. Since hiring in the government sector is less susceptible to cyclical swings in the overall economy, private sector job patterns provide a clearer signal of the weakening labor market. Since they peaked in November, private sector jobs are down 300,000.

It is often the case that once they get around to it, the official recession is declared to have started at or near the payroll employment peak. Thus, there’s a good chance that the recession will ultimately be recognized to have begun in December or January.

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One of the rules of Washington sports reporting is that it's critical not to state the obvious concerns with the hometown teams. Any reporter that does so finds that his or her editors don't back them up, and pretty soon they are off the beat, assigned to far-off Fairfax County or the forgotten continent of the business section.

The two current examples are the Wizards and the Redskins. The big unreported story (you can only see hints) is the downside of the return of Gilbert Arenas. He's back after a long injury lay-off. And when he's in the defense disappears. Perhaps he cannot move laterally. Perhaps he should rest the knee until the next year. Or perhaps, as a former Wizards coach told me one time, he is death to any team because for him there is never a thought about the team because the whole world revolves around his ego.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist.

He never called himself that in public. Cold War red-baiting was still powerful and haunted him even before his rhetoric turned to class. But his organizing was increasingly in that vein and privately he spoke of his support for democratic socialism. He was organizing a Poor People's Campaign and talking about the necessity to build an interracial movement for economic justice.

In this and in many other ways, King was a radical.  But, from watching most of the news coverage of the 40th anniversary of King's assassination today, you wouldn't know it.  The absence in our collective memory of of King's leftism is just one of the aspects of what Cornell West calls the Santa Clausification of MLK:

He just becomes a nice little old man with a smile with toys in his bag, not a threat to anybody, as if his fundamental commitment to unconditional love and unarmed truth does not bring to bear certain kinds of pressure to a status quo. So the status quo feels so comfortable as though it's a convenient thing to do rather than acknowledge him as to what he was, what the FBI said, "The most dangerous man in America." Why? Because of his fundamental commitment to love and to justice and trying to keep track of the humanity of each and every one of us. [...]

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Some respondents this week have questioned the relevance of history for confronting racial inequality today. Jim Sleeper demonstrates, however, just how important our understanding of history is. In the story he has told repeatedly over the years, the New Deal coalition was destroyed and Reaganism was ushered in by those who sought to dismantle institutionalized racism. The blame is thus laid at the feet of antiracist progressives instead of the conservative movement-builders who exploited racial anxieties for Republican victories. The implication Sleeper draws from this story is that the only way forward for progressives is avoid any discussion (let alone action) about race or racism. Pointing out racial stratification will only anger whites and violate the hallowed Tocquevillean norms of American individualism and civic republicanism.

This backlash narrative to which Sleeper subscribes was initially not an historical account, but rather an active political strategy by conservative Republicans to win over white voters both in the south and in the north and west as well. Party organizers couched their appeals to white working and middle class voters in racialized language, fanning fears and exciting resentments by hinting at the horrors to come if their neighborhoods, unions, schools and the like were opened up to black folks.

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There is a broad and not yet fully articulated difference in assumption between Sleeper on the one hand, and Lowndes, Loury, and myself on the other hand. Surely, we disagree about the centrality of racism in American history up through our present moment, but there are also different assumptions about change. Sleeper worries that confronting the past creates resentment; people must "put the past behind them" if they are to forge a progressive coalition. In a variety of ways, Loury, Lowndes, and I have argued, in contrast, that no future -on different terms than the past seems to dictate- is possible unless we loosen the grip of the past, by naming and confronting it. Fundamental -as opposed to incremental- change requires confrontation and conflict about the meaning of the past.

My worry about Obama concerns not only race, then, but his view of history, and his assumption that we can "move beyond" rancor and partisanship if we "leave behind" the sixties era to which he attributes them. In my view, he is leaving behind, indeed patholoogizing, a moment when the imperial project of the American state, and its racial underpinnings, were exposed and contested by broad constituencies in American life. Of course, since 1968 the new right and the Republican party have organized to demonize that moment, which connected social injustice to imperial war. This effort to overcome "the Vietnam syndrome" as well as social justice concerns has been extraordinarily effective.

In what terms, then, are we to address the imperial character and domestic policies of the American state now?

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It is fascinating, although not at all surprising, that the candidates for president almost never discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s not like it is some minor foreign policy issue. Ask Americans to name two or three of the most pressing foreign policy issues and they are bound to mention the Arab-Israeli conflict. How could they not? After Iraq, there is no other that is so extensively covered by the media nor is there another one of interest to as many voters.

Nonetheless, the candidates’ silence on the issue is rather profound. Other than mouthing the usual pieties about standing with Israel, candidates approach the issue with the proverbial ten foot pole.

The reasons for this reticence are obvious. Although most voters, and certainly most voters who care about Israel, favor active diplomacy to end the conflict, the loudest voices on this issue tend to be fervent supporters of the status quo. They are single-issue voters and single-issue donors and, accordingly, they have disproportionate influence despite their decided minority status. (That is the way it works in the current system. Those who vote and make contributions based on a full range of issues do not have anywhere near the clout of those who tell a candidate that their support is tied to the candidate’s stand on one issue and one issue only).

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James Surowiecki, in this week’s New Yorker, recalls the 2005 bankruptcy bill and how it privileged credit-card companies over both consumers and the economy. Credit-card companies were hugely profitable in the decade before 2004, but they wanted more, and Congress—with the help of some Democrats—was happy to oblige. For the economy as a whole, though, it created dead-weight economic loss and deterred entrepreneurial innovation. “In responding to an imaginary threat,” he writes, “we ended up making the economy less dynamic and less flexible. Now that hard times are here, we may find ourselves with a genuine bankruptcy crisis. But this will be one that Congress created.” His observation—that Congress has privileged the private wealth of corporations over not only consumers’ interests but also over sound economic policy—could not be more timely. Will the current crisis provoke huge reforms, as it did after the Depression, or nothing substantial, as it did after the Savings and Loan crisis?

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It’s time again to delve into the weeds at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This time, we’re looking for a relatively obscure decision likely to come in the next few weeks that will thwart the choices have for cellphones and other wireless devices.

The decision in this instance will come in a couple of weeks, although FCC Chairman Kevin Martin telegraphed the move earlier this week in a speech at a convention of the cellular industry. He announced that he wants to dismiss the petition filed last year by Skype that would bring the wireless world into the freedom of the wireline world by allowing any device to be connected to the wireless network. Chances are Commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate, the other two Republicans on the Commission, will vote with Martin.

It's a shame, and another opportunity to help consumers is wasted.

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Last week I wrote that a certain kind of Savage Capitalist was responsible for a good deal of market manipulation. Just how powerful that force was, leaked out at yesterday's Senate hearings on the Bear Stearns bailout.

Pummeled by market rumors of insolvency, the investment house lost more than $10 billion —or more than 80 percent — of its available cash in a single day. Only a few days earlier, the chairman of the S.E.C., Christopher Cox, had sought to calm investors, telling reporters that “we have a good deal of comfort about the capital cushions” at Bear and other large investment houses.

Maybe Chris Cox should take his head out of the sand and investigate who gained from the fall of Bear Stearns? Who was spreading the rumours of insolvency because they were shorting the stock? Who created the self-fulfilling prophecy?

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It's a dreary Friday in Washington, even drearier because I no longer have Paul Krugman's column to brighten my weekend. I guess brighten is the wrong word. Krugman never made me especially happy. But he did stimulate me and helped me understand the terrible fix America has been in for the last eight years. For a non-economics type like me, Paul Krugman explained it all.

No more.

Today I read his column about John McCain and the health care issue and I started to get the old feeling back. Maybe he would just write about McCain and how ridiculous his "plan" is. Maybe he wouldn't trash Barack Obama.

Maybe I'll be able to finish his column.

No such luck.

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I am pleased that so many readers found my previous post to be stimulating, and that it has attracted so much discussion at the site. By way of a response to some of these comments, and with apologies for the length of this post, I wish to try to clarify and defend a few of the key propositions in my original piece:

1. Comparing Obama and LBJ:

A shocking degree of historical amnesia/ignorance has been revealed in the gushing press commentary on Obama's 'race' speech. People are confusing a cult of personality with a political movement capable of making institutional reforms. I compared, unfavorably, Obama's recent speech with LBJ's commencement address at Howard University in 1965 because, unlike Obama, LBJ staked-out a political position which has had consequences. This position was that the people of the United States were obligated to undertake a massive expansion of social investment for the disadvantaged in American society, and that this obligation rested at least in part on the historical necessity that we act so as to reduce racial inequality in our country. This kind of rhetoric, coupled with a focused legislative agenda and the political acumen/muscle to get in enacted, is the stuff of historical transformation. It represents the kind of thing that can be accomplished when the apparatus of a political party is harnessed with an ideological vision that has teeth, and that is willing to take a stand on the great questions about the role of government and about the moral imperatives of our imperfect history.

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As we all know there is an ongoing debate in politics between those who favor market solutions and those who believe that the government must intervene to protect the rich.

Okay, the first group may not exactly be market fundamentalists, but the government intervention help-the-rich faction is definitely calling the shots these days, especially when it comes to housing policy.

The economy is in recession and job loss is soaring. The banking system is on life support, with the Fed handing tens of billions of dollars to the country’s biggest banks at below market interest rates. Millions of homeowners are facing foreclosure, and more than ten million are now underwater in their mortgages, owing more than the value of their house.

In such dire circumstances, Congress did the only thing it could; it gave more tax breaks to banks and homebuilders.

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Following the Yoo-Bybee-Addington-Rizzo crew's shameful return to the spotlight, reader Disavowed calls on the Democratic candidates to Stake Out the High Ground. Also, take a look at Reece's attempt to cut through the euphemistic fog of the newly released Yoo memo.

Hilary has up a very thoughtful response to Carmen Van Kerckhove's post on the perception of self-interest and the anti-racism movement.

Project Vote lays out a "recent history" of The War on Voting Rights.

More after the jump. . .

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Many people remember the courageous civil rights activists who in the early 1960s risked their lives to challenge Jim Crow laws by riding racially integrated buses into the South. But few people know that southern universities expelled dozens of these young people for participating in what are now remembered as the "Freedom Rides."

To atone for these politically motivated expulsions, which denied activists their college degrees, at least six southern universities have granted former activists honorary degrees. Having denied these young people the opportunity of an education, it was the least they could do.

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As I follow the discussion we're having here at TPMCafe, I keep thinking about The Mother Teresa Effect, a concept based on her quote: "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."

Jae Ran Kim explains:

In 2004, Carnegie Mellon University conducted an experiment to see if this quote held true in real life. They gave participants five $1 bills to participate in a fictional survey, then presented half of the participants with a fact sheet about starving children in Africa along with an envelope for a donation. The other half of the participants received the same envelope, but instead of a fact sheet, they were given a photo of a young girl named Rokia and a paragraph about how her life would benefit from the participant's donation.

As you might expect, those with the picture of Rokia gave more than twice as much as those with just the fact sheet.

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Six weeks ago, I wrote that Basra would become a real problem for the Iraqi government. In this morning's New York Times, the seat of the pants operating style of Prime Minister Maliki was revealed to be at the heart of the disaster last week in Iraq's southern city.

Interviews with a wide range of American and military officials also suggest that Mr. Maliki overestimated his military’s abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance. The Iraqi prime minister also displayed an impulsive leadership style that did not give his forces or that of his most powerful allies, the American and British military, time to prepare.

“He went in with a stick and he poked a hornet’s nest, and the resistance he got was a little bit more than he bargained for,” said one official in the multinational force in Baghdad who requested anonymity.

So why did Maliki rush this operation without informing either his American protectors or the rest of his government?

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I think it is worth reflecting more on the significance of Obama’s Philadelphia speech. Unlike Skrentny, I think his dramatic departure from conventional political rhetoric about race matters quite a bit. In any case I don’t know what Obama would do – or would be able to do – as president for African Americans. In general, presidents don’t control the terrain on which they act. Absent pressure from below, Obama’s range of options on the matter of racial equality would likely be constrained.

Nevertheless, the fact that the speech has been so enthusiastically received across a broad spectrum (including a number of prominent conservatives) may indicate that there may be something new afoot. There has been no real groundswell of antiracist action of late, that’s for sure. But maybe there is finally some exhaustion in the long-held strategy of racial demonization that brought the GOP to power (and the DLC along with it) in recent decades. Many leading Republicans, including Bush, former RNC head Ken Mehlman, Michael Gershon, and others now try hard to distance themselves from the taint of racism. This fact, while significant, should not immediately provide solace, however. As Victoria Hattam and I have written elsewhere, Republicans who want to reconfigure their relationship with civil rights will do so for purposes most on the left would not support. The most prominent example here is probably Condoleezza Rice using her childhood in Jim Crow “Bombingham” to justify the war in Iraq.

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Gee whillikers! All I do is post a little thing suggesting that the Clinton campaign has lately been trying to appeal to voters who are likely to believe that Hussein Obama X wasn’t really a real law professor and that he doesn’t want them to vote in upcoming primaries, and Clinton supporters get all offended. Why, some good people have even tried to suggest that I’m an elitist snob who’s dismissive of women over 30 and who doesn’t understand Hillary’s working-class appeal!

Well, it’s true that I find the process by which Hillary Clinton became a certified, tested-and-vetted Working-Class Hero® one of the strangest things I have witnessed in my lifetime, but let me try to make things right. Because I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh readers, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

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Since the beginning of the sub-prime crisis, anti-predatory lending advocates have pointed to how the egregious behavior of lenders and mortgage brokers have contributed to the crisis; their arguments recently found yet another anchor of evidence in the recently surfaced memo from JP Morgan Chase entitled “Zippy Cheats & Tricks.”

The nation's second-largest bank, Chase originates mortgage loans in addition to operating as an underwriter and funder of loans brought to them by a network of mortgage brokers. The memo instructs brokers on how to get their loans approved by Zippy, the bank’s automated loan underwriting system, explicitly suggesting that brokers inflate borrowers’ income or otherwise falsify loan applications.

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One of the many merits of this forum on race and politics in the wake of Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech is that it includes scholars on the left who are uncomfortable with Obama because, as Joseph Lowndes warns, he’s not helping Americans to understand that “the deeply lodged problems of racial and economic inequality are inexorably tied together, and must therefore be broached together.”

These critics don’t believe that a candidate or movement can reform or substantially reconfigure American corporate capitalism without confronting, head on, this country’s engrained racism -- and the harsh truth, as they see it, that capitalism has always relied on racism and sexism to distract us from its many broken economic and moral promises.

My questions are, Where will the movement they're calling for come from? After all their and their predecessors’ labors and struggles, why hasn't it ever truly come except in their dreams and their books? Why has capitalism reigned through boom and bust, right alongside feminism and the rise of a substantial and growing black middle class? Might it have found new inequities and diversions that the capitalism=racism paradigm can't explain?

The way to real answers runs through an acceptance of certain truths about America that too many academic critics insist on dismissing as lies, thereby dismissing themselves from political relevance even when they're not wholly wrong and have valuable lessons to teach.

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Yesterday, Tuesday, the New York Times ran a long front page article about the Hamas use of incitement against Jews and Israel. The first thing to say about the piece is that it is almost certainly accurate and not something that can be easily dismissed. There are problems with some of the sources but beyond this article there is the need to recognize the full range of causes of mutual anger, hatred, and suspicion. There are no excuses for the incitement that Steve Erlanger highlights, there are though ways to be more serious about combating it.

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While we debate the impact that Obama's race has on his campaign, we should also ask ourselves: would his election make a difference for African Americans?

Consider this: the Department of Justice reports that African American incarceration rates are eight times higher than whites, and they are about three times than that for Latinos (see chart; note: pdf). This racial difference is hardly unique. The African American unemployment rate is now twice that for whites (with Latino unemployment in between black and white). But this is very old news--that's the same difference it was in 1964 when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. And in their classic book, American Apartheid, Doug Massey and Nancy Denton reported the astonishing statistic that the wealthiest blacks had higher residential segregation rates than even the poorest Latinos.

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So Harold Ickes, wooing superdelegates for Clinton, has admitted to our TPM colleague that he tries to gain superdelegate votes for his candidate by explaining that Republicans will use unfair and factually groundless linkages between Obama and Reverend Wright to defeat Obama in the fall. Therefore, he says to the superdelegates, they should pick Clinton not Obama.

All's fair in love, war, and campaigns, which are of course about love and war. But I know Harold Ickes. I've supported Harold's causes. The Harold Ickes I know helped Jesse Jackson, tirelessly fought for civil rights again and again, constructs the proverbial big tent and gathers all Democrats under it ever four years, is a monumentally tolerant person. He is a tough and brilliant fighter; anyone would want him on their side.

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I would like to address the interesting differences between the posts submitted by Loury, Lowndes, and Sleeper.

If we can endure Sleeper’s dismissive denigration of any view he disagrees with, his way of positioning himself between those he calls “extremes,” and his demonizing of anti-racist politics, we do arrive at an important claim in the final sentence of his post: “For Obama, de-politicizing race is not only a necessity but a big tactical step forward toward racial justice.” As Sleeper has argued for years, liberalism became a racializing (identity) politics that produced division and resentment rather than consensus around issues of class inequality. Social justice thus requires taking race (and identity politics more broadly) out of progressive politics, which can advance only by speaking a language of universality, not difference. Lowndes and Loury offer compelling reasons to reject Sleeper’s narrative of post-new deal and post-sixties history, and so, his assertions about the conditions enabling progressive politics.

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In American politics, there's a basic - and sad - rule of thumb: When a white person talks about a taboo subject, they are often considered courageous or a "truth-teller." When a black person talks about the same subject, they are attacked as "controversial" or worse. Draft-avoider Pat Buchanan, for instance, beats his chest as super-patriot and supposedly principled spokesperson for that horribly oppressed group: whitey, as he calls it. For this, Buchanan is rewarded with a regular slot as a Serious Political Analyst on cable news. Meanwhile, Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor and former Marine, is berated as anti-American for acknowleding the concept of blowback that our own government acknowledges.

This double-standard dynamic is why Barack Obama's speech on race was so courageous: He addressed a taboo subject - America's racial divide - knowing that black political leaders like him have typically faced harsh Establishment vitriol for doing so.

This divide is American politics' own version of Voldemort from the Harry Potter books - the thing whose name must not be spoken - and especially not by a black man, according to our political culture. That's especially true in the 2008 presidential campaign as the Clinton campaign continues to do everything it can to transform the election into a proxy war over race.

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Glad to see Jim Sleeper joining the conversation on Obama and the future of this great conversation on race. I have to say though, that it put me in the mind of another conflict in the 1990s—the rupture of the black-Jewish coalition. The intellectualizing around the fracturing of this venerable coalition always struck me as weird, mostly because it seemed some distant from my, admittedly bias, on the ground reality. I don't mean to trivialize Crown Heights or Farrakhan, but I think the hot debates went right over the heads of lot of blacks and Jews. It took me coming to New York to understand that "The Split" was a quasi-local story—a narrative born of a few patchwork incidents and then foisted on millions of people, who basically had no idea.

In those days I was a lazy student, half-assing my way through Baltimore city public schools and then, miraculously, into college. Still, even then, I had some interest in these matters, and was always taken aback by how much energy was expended on some of the issues Jim addresses—affirmative action, racially demarcated voter districts, the merits of "diversity." Had you asked me, or I'd say any black kid in West Baltimore, about race we would have talked about crack, prisons, the murder rate, poverty and teen pregnancy. I didn't even know what "identity politics" meant until circa 2002. Of course now I can sling the term around like a pro.

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Successful business leaders are nothing if not pragmatic when it comes to picking a winner in a Presidential race. Its clear the business bet is on the Democrats.

Of seven major industries that have been the most reliable Republican resources, Sen. McCain has beaten Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama in only one, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization. Even that one, transportation, is a close call. Among the seven combined, the expected Republican nominee raised $13.1 million through February, compared with $22.5 million for Sen. Obama and $27.1 million for Sen. Clinton.

And in perhaps the most pragmatic business family of all, the Murdoch's, there is a not so subtle shift away from Clinton and towards Obama, Elisabeth Murdoch is throwing a fundraiser for Obama tomorrow. Rupert had the New York Post endorse Obama

"He has a very well-informed sense of the influence of politics on his business interests,” said Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the first Clinton administration, who during negotiations had an up-close view of how the media mogul seeks to influence government.

We have entered an Interregnum, and all normal ideas of political alignment are moot.

Hello again, everyone. I’ve been much too busy with the day job lately, and I’ll have to put off until next week the post I want to write on Obama’s remarkable policy statement on disability (that's a pdf, btw). For now, I just want to note this little curio from today’s papers. It’s a McClatchy Newspapers item filed by one Margaret Talev, and it graces the front page of my own hometown paper, the Centre Daily Times. In it, Ms. Talev visits Hazelton, PA, which, despite being the ancestral home of Obama Girl (I did not know that!), is largely representative of Hillary Clinton’s eastern-PA stronghold. Come with us now to Jimmy’s Quick Lunch, where folks are talking to Ms. Talev about what's on their minds:

Of Obama, Duser said: "I'm not crazy about voting for a colored guy, but that's not why I don't support Obama. I'm not prejudiced. I just like Hillary."

A couple tables over, Jean Fetterman, a foster grandparent, said of Clinton: "Oh, I love her. She's a very intelligent person, and she has her husband who went through this."

She scoffs at the idea of voting for Obama: "I don't want to be a Muslim!" She looks dubious when told Obama is Christian. "Then why did he go see what's-his-name over in Iraq, that Lama?"

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It appears that John McCain really is running for George W. Bush’s third term. In a nice column in Slate, Daniel Gross outlines how, for McCain, “[t]he problem with the last eight years isn't that the Bush administration had the wrong policies or was incompetent. No, the problem is that it lacked intensity.” (A similar piece from Salon is here.) This is true, Gross shows, on issues from Iraq to taxes, and he is, if anything, to the deregulatory right of the Bush administration on the housing crisis. (See this story explaining the administration’s proposal and criticisms of its woeful inadequacy here and here.) Nevertheless, as several recent articles are suggesting, McCain’s campaign—running on Iraq and on anti-consumer pseudo-economics—is increasingly anachronistic, even in Republican circles. Many Republicans are now acting like New Democrats, which could mean that the era of anti-government is over.

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First off, some responses to this week's series of special guest posts on the politics of race in America:

Reader destor23 argues that Americans should be focused on civil rights, rather than race per se. G. Ken Patton critiques the skewed handling of the Rev. Wright question. And, in a very insightful post, reader bulawlefty discusses "Obama's Vision of a Different Progressive Discourse."

Robert Feinman has an interesting post up on the strange state of class relations in America.

More after the jump. . .

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With the housing bubble in full meltdown, our political leaders are busily ignoring all the things they have said about the market over the last quarter century and looking to throw all the money that they can find to sustain the bubble. This would be comical, if it weren’t so painful.

Remember all the steel workers and autoworkers who lost their jobs due to trade agreements that were supposed to advance economic efficiency over the last quarter century? How about the workers in the airline, trucking, and telecommunications industry who lost jobs due to deregulation, which was also supposed to increase economic efficiency?

Well, it’s a new day. Nothing these people (or their economists) said matters anymore. It housing bubble support time!

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In December, just before the presidential primary season, the conservative black writer Shelby Steele published A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. The book proved instructive in ways he didn’t intend: It showed the dangers of trying to shoehorn recent racial developments into old racial paradigms that may have illuminated circumstances of 15 years ago but now obscure the opportunities and challenges before us.

Academics and some belletrists are especially prone to try shoe-horning, perhaps even moreso if they’re on the left and have made their careers creating, promoting and defending certain paradigms, in conference after conference, as the world rushes by. Yesterday’s liberation becomes tomorrow’s dead hand. Look at what's become of romantic “third worldism” that celebrated “people’s liberation movements:” It found itself tongue-tied by 9/11 and has gone to Gaza to die.

And look at what’s become of some leftist wisdom about race in America; it's as dated as Steele’s insights about the left. I wrote a couple of books about all this long enough ago for them, too, to bear reassessing. I've done that recently on a new website, but the interesting and fruitful discussion right here of Obama's recent speech prompts me to add a few things now.

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One of things I really admired about Obama's speech was his attempt to demonstrate that racism is an issue all of us need to care about - including white folks. The jury is still out as to how successful he was, but it got me thinking about two questions: What role should white people play in ending racism? And how do we mobilize them to join the cause?

The blogosphere is full of lists that tell people what not to do when discussing race. See Sixteen Maneuvers to Avoid Really Dealing with Racism and How to Suppress Discussions of Racism, for example.

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Yesterday, I had coffee with a former three-star general who has outed himself as a political conservative in his post-military life. Joining us was a former conservative member of Congress, a conservative CEO, a top tier conservative organizer, and a conservative pundit. I discussed the Iraq War, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan/Pakistan, nukes, and Cuba with them.

The anger among the serious strategic-thinking conservatives about the state of the country, its foreign policy position, the value of the dollar, and the beleaguered military is serious -- and John McCain seems to have no idea how much frustration is boiling among conservative patriots with his saber-rattling about hundred year deployments and more wars in the "Koran-zone."

But one of the really interesting lines from the general and heartily agreed to by the conservative organizer and also the pundit was:

No one serious can support our policy towards Cuba. Fifty years of failure. We need to engage those people. Commerce and travel, exchange between their people and our people. . .well, you know what I mean. Cuba is an easy fix. Castro's brother, Raul, is lifting all sorts of restrictions on his public, and we're doing squat. If we want to steal Hugo Chavez's thunder in Latin America, then open up to Cubans and see where the currents take us. Can't get worse than the "zero" we have achieved thus far.

If serious conservatives can say this, why can't the serious Dems running for the White House?

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Eric Lichtblau's new book due out this week, Bush's Law, contains a passage implying that I switched my view on the NSA surveillance program – supporting it when it was a secret and opposing it after it was leaked.

Let me set the record straight.

When I became Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, I was included for the first time in highly classified briefings on the operational details of an NSA effort to track al Qaeda communications using unique access points inside the US telecommunications infrastructure. The so-called “Gang of Eight” (selected on the basis of our committee or leadership positions) was told that if the terrorists found out about our capability, they would stop using those communications channels and valuable intelligence would dry up (which had happened before).

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For more than three decades, the staggering evidence of racial stratification in America has been met with stubborn indifference, denial or irritation. Black leaders who have raised issues of inequality in the post-civil rights era have been consistently dismissed as hucksters or paranoics, regardless of the content of their claims. Obama initially was able to avoid these kind of caricatures by downplaying divisions of any kind, and claiming to have left the conflicts of the 1960s behind. But a racially-obsessed nation combined with the statements of Obama’s afrocentric pastor have pushed him to confront a split in his own political life between the reconciling identity he represents to the country and the black nationalist political culture on Chicago’s Southside. Instead of casting off either side, he attempts to resolve the split by metaphorically merging the body politic with his own. In doing so he does not subsume black claims for justice, but rather makes them integral to a renewed national purpose.

By mapping his genetic heritage onto the national heritage in the Philadelphia speech, he can use this racial pluralism writ small to re-interpret and thus alter the negative view of the Reverend Wright.

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The biblical metaphor from the Garden of Eden, of the fig leaf being used to cover up embarrassment born of knowledge has the implication that "the cover is only a token gesture and the truth is obvious to all who choose to see it." This morning Treasury Secretary Paulson rolled out his fig leaf for the Credit Crisis.

Mr. Paulson also deflected blame for the current tumult away from his administration. “I do not believe it is fair or accurate to blame our regulatory structure for the current turmoil,” he said. Under the plan, the Fed would receive some authority over Wall Street firms, but only when an investment bank’s practices threatened the financial system as a whole.

I have long cited Bill Gross' depiction of the Shadow Banking System as the main culprit in our current meltdown. The ability of a bank like Bear Stearns to use off-balance sheet entities and 30-1 leverage to blow their relatively small capital mole hill into a mountain (albeit one made of air) is where our problem lies. But it does not appear that Paulson's remedy would force the next Bear to keep a more conservative reserve policy.

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I agree with much of what Glenn and Ta-Nehisi have said about Obama's speech, including the notion that it is too early to say if it will lead to progress, and that it seemed to be mostly about, or to have the most importance to, black/white relations. But I found myself perhaps more impressed than they with Obama’s speech--impressed by its political boldness and its political brilliance.

These are my main points: Obama’s speech was remarkable and powerful for what he said, how he said it, and because of who he is. At the same time, it showed that even a politician as gifted as Obama cannot transcend rule number one of American politics: there shall be no policies targeted to benefit blacks.

Key to the power of the speech, of course, is who Obama is.

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I think, without a doubt, Obama's speech definitely advanced the dialogue. I thought it was the most complex, layered speech on race I've ever heard from a politician. Furthermore, it was one of the brainiest meditations on any subject I've ever heard from a presidential candidate so close to the White House. But I think Glenn makes a great point. The talking heads are running around claiming this is the greatest speech on race since "I Have a Dream." But we should be wary because history and race are two of the MSM's biggest blind-spots. The hamfisted, slack manner in which they've handled Obama's racial identity (last year he wasn't black enough, now he's too black) is evidence that these are the last people to we should turn to for answers on something as nuanced as this. In fact, I think that's the sort of question that can not, and should not, be answered today. Let's see what happens. Then we can judge the historical import of "The Speech."

That aside, as we look forward we have a huge problem when it comes to closing the racial gap. But first some qualification: To talk about this broadly in terms of race, I think misses the point.

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