As of 9 pm Saturday night, the nation's major newspapers are weirdly reticent about Prime Minister al-Maliki's striking (make that extremely striking and indeed extraordinary) statement to Germany's Der Spiegel that a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq makes sense: "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." According to this major magazine, "In his conversation with SPIEGEL, he was once again candid about his frustration over the Bush administration's hesitancy about agreeing to a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops."

At this writing, CNN has acknowledged that Maliki said he agreed with Obama, though noting also that "a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks 'were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.'" Uh-huh. We await Der Spiegel's release of the transcript, and the particulars that Maliki's spokesman rejects.

But the news cascades, or rather the absence of news does. At 9:08 pm, the NYT has yet to acknowledge the Maliki statement in anything more than a sidebar online piece to the effect that the White House mistakenly sent out the word in an e-mail blast to reports. So, according to the NYT, this is a story of a White House gaffe, not a story about how the most legitimate political authority in Iraq sides against the Bush administration and its would-be successor, John McCain.

The WP carries Garance Franke-Ruta's blog mention of Maliki's support of Obama's position, but so far, that's all. We await the morning paper.

Update 9 AM: Await no more. Both the NYT and the WP shoehorned the Maliki report into their p. 1 pieces on Obama in Afghanistan. Garance Franke-Ruta reported it on her valuable WP blog, "The Trail." The LAT not only fronted the Maliki Spiegel interview but gave it the headline.

My take is that Maliki reads the opinion polls in the United States. Because Barack Obama is ahead, and President Bush is a lame-duck, and Obama is about to visit perhaps (who knows), Maliki feels now is the moment to stand up to the proposed occupation and insist upon an American withdrawal roughly in accord with Obama's plan.

McCain can't say the war is intended to lead to an occupation. He can't say the Iraqis shouldn't stand up and so we shouldn't stand down. He can't say anything useful. He can say that the surge worked, and he is saying that, but it's Obama, not McCain, that Maliki is agreeing with.

Back at home, McCain has no plan for the economy. He fired Gramm, who had no plan for him, and also insulted the American people. But he still has no plan; his own record on the economy is a long litany of rejection of a useful role for government. But now everyone in America sees that the Republicans stand for government intervention, although not for everyone and long after the right moment. So where does that leave McCain? Same place Maliki has left him -- everyone agrees with Obama now, whether they admit or not, on the economy and on Iraq.

By the way, everyone agrees with Obama on Iran too, since apparently we are moving to opening dialogue with that particular component of the axis of evil.

First, a big thank you to TPMCafe, and to Kerry, Dana, and Chris for participating in the discussion this week. Second, to wrap up my "mendacity tour" in these parts, I thought I'd offer a quick response to TPM user Reece, who remarks, in the course of wondering why TPMCafe invited a vile conservative and "fucking liar" like me here to chat about my book, that "Republican policies over the past 30 years haven't helped anyone."

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Well! As I noted here a few days ago, the bleak uplands of Republican policy intellection are coming alive with the sound of ground-breaking challenges to the four-cheers-for-capitalism, Bronx-cheers-for-government ideology that has kept American conservatism fogbound for 40 years. There's talk of a New Deal for white, working-class voters who backed GOP not out of any love for small government, "free markets," and war-making but out of indignation at liberal Democrats' policies on the family, welfare, crime, and race.

These voters need help with health care, education, even wages and pensions, help that strengthens their families and neighborhoods, as the liberal-Democratic welfare state too often didn't. (See my The Closest of Strangers, Chapter 2, "The Liberal Nightmare".) Supposedly, these voters want Republicans to do it right. So we are all parsing the policy proposals as Republicans prepare to lead us from Bush to Bismarck, from DeLay to Disraeli! (The 19th-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pioneered conservative welfare states.)

Okay, it's a only thought experiment, and more power to the thinkers. But it leaves something out. You might call it the elephant in the room..

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Kerry believes that the agenda sketched out in Grand New Party,

would privilege women who opt for the life course social conservatives have set for them: heterosexual marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Because I think the culture in which we live already pushes women into various roles as caretakers and compromisers, I'd rather the state not compound pressures toward gender conformity.

I think that the economy we live in pushes parents into various roles that make caring for loved ones difficult if not utterly impracticable, and that the privileging of market labor in the tax code exacerbates this effect. I'll also note that we're very keen on gender neutrality in the book.

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Here is a list of those endorsing the July 20th Christians United For Israel. That is the right-wing assembly organized by John Hagee, the minister who has said that Hitler was doing God's work, who believes that the destruction of Israel is both inevitable and necessary and who propagates a theology according to which all but 144,000 Jews must be destroyed as a prelude to Christ's coming.

I guess that means he is an anti-Semite. But, no, he's okay (unlike, say, Jimmy Carter) because in the meantime he supports the occupation, the settlements, and endless war with the Palestinians. Actually it all makes sense. The policies he favors for Israel are destructive to Israel and since his game plan requires Israel's destruction, why not?

Anyway here is a list of some of those endorsing Hagee and CUFI's Washington prayer fest for Armageddon.

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The role of subprime lenders in inflating the housing bubble, then bringing down the whole economy has received plenty of headlines. But there has been little attention paid to the role of credit card lending and BAPCPA in the current home foreclosure crisis.

A new paper, Bankruptcy Reform and Foreclosure, argues that the 2005 bankruptcy amendments are deepening the mortgage crisis. The article was written by David Bernstein, an economist at the U.S. Treasury who chose to post this analysis as private citizen listing only his home address and home e-mail address. Drawing on data from the Survey of Consumer Finance, he links credit card debt, access to bankruptcy, and mortgage foreclosures. If more families could use bankruptcy to deal with their credit card debts, more could avoid foreclosure on their homes.

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Ross argues that he is not trying to bribe a narrow segment of the population to vote for the GOP. I'm not sure why "bribing" is even relevant here; partisan politics is about coalition building, GNP is a book about strategy, and at some level all such strategy will entail responding to various slices of the electoral pie. It wouldn't be a very useful book if R&R didn't try to articulate what motivates various voters and suggest that the GOP comply.

At any rate, this was never my argument. I heartily agree that the policies meant to incentivize women will be "broadly targeted in execution" rather than directed toward the few. In promoting traditional family formation and stigmatizing deviance, R&R are trying to influence the major life decisions of most people. The tax code would privilege women who opt for the life course social conservatives have set for them: heterosexual marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Because I think the culture in which we live already pushes women into various roles as caretakers and compromisers, I'd rather the state not compound pressures toward gender conformity. But since Ross places "reactionary gender norms" in scare quotes, I guess he isn't so concerned.

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I want to return quickly to something Kerry wrote in her first post:

Children do better on average, along a variety of dimensions and across all income groups, when raised by both of their biological parents. Poor children are more likely to be born out of wedlock, and those that are born to married parents are more likely to see their parents divorce later. But as women have spent some time trying to establish, they are in fact distinct from children. The class of women is also conceptually distinct from the class of mothers; while most, but not all, women will become mothers within their lifetimes, the years spent actively caring for small children will comprise only a small percentage of her total lifespan. Even if it were possible to improve the lives of children by enforcing reactionary gender norms, it would be wrong.

Let's bracket the question of whether an expanded child tax credit and benefits for parents (of either sex) who provide child care in the home really amount to the "enforcement of reactionary gender norms," as opposed to, say, "incentivizing family structures that most parents aspire to but many can't achieve." I want to address Kerry's point about mothers who are actively engaged in mothering being a relatively small part of the female population, since it dovetails with a frequent criticism of the book - namely, that we're proposing to bribe a narrow slice of the American population, working parents, to vote more consistently for the GOP.

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Ezra Klein alerts us that Gershom Gorenberg, whose blog at Southjerusalem.com is indispensable on the Region That Will Not Go Away, posts this striking follow-up to Obama's most troubling, potentially most consequential pander to date, what certainly sounded like an over-the-top more-Promised-Land-Than-Moses declaration to AIPAC last month that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." Gorenberg:

When I criticized that statement, an Obama adviser quickly emailed to tell me the candidate really meant physically undivided: No fences. Political arrangements were a different matter. Obama, he said,

has said before that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be negotiated by the parties, but that two principles that should guide any outcome is that it will remain Israel's capital and it should never be redivided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was from 1948-67.

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) produced two reports evaluating -- criticizing, really -- the work of DOL's Wage and Hour Division. Steven Greenhouse's article in the New York Times outlines some of the key findings of the report. For instance, the reports conclude that the Wage and Hour Division was not focusing on the industries that are most likely to have violations, took 37% fewer enforcement actions in 2007 (29,584) than ten years prior (46,758), and was too willing to simply drop investigations

Greenhouse notes that one of the reports, which looked at DOL data and closely examined 15 cases, concluded that "the Wage and Hour Division had inappropriately rejected complaints based on incorrect information provided by employers, failed to make adequate efforts to locate employers and did not thoroughly investigate and resolve complaints." DOL would also call off an investigation because an employer did not call them back or claimed to be in tough financial straits. (The company in the latter example is still in business).

The article gives a very good -- albeit depressing -- summary of the reports. Please read it. And please pray that things get better under the next President.

Anyone who still holds that 9/11 validated the Lewis/Huntington clash of civilization thesis should read the book by the former Jordanian foreign minister, Marwan Muasher. True, The Arab Center is not a call for regime change, nor a simplistic celebration of Westminster democracy and a commitment to the full plethora of human rights. Instead, it is centered around the key thesis on which all moderation must be built: the rejection of violence, terrorism, and bombs, as a way to solve differences in human affairs.

The author is far from some outlier. He served as Jordan's Ambassador to the U.S.A., to Israel, and even as Jordan's deputy prime minister--in charge of reforms. Muasher sees the Arab world as composed of three groupings. Those who resort to force and reject compromise and negotiations, the Al Qaeda types, who he says must be fought. Those that are in transition from such armed struggles to political parties, such as segments of the Muslim Brotherhood, who one should encourage to complete the transition. And, large segments of the Arab world, who are moderate to begin with, dedicated to pursuing their objectives with peaceful means.

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Okay, markets are really useful in many places; but the ideological propaganda that weakening regulation on powerful economic actors will help consumers has been proven wrong time and again-- the recent subprime mortgage meltdown only being one example. Another is electricity deregulation that swept many states in the 1990s and early part of this decade. The result-- well let's let the socialist Wall Street Journal report ($$$) talking about another fine product of George W. Bush back when he was governor of Texas:

Texas had some of the cheapest power rates in the country when it zapped most of the state's electric regulations six years ago, convinced that rollicking competition would drive prices even lower.

This summer, electricity there is some of the nation's priciest..."We could end up doubling last year's power prices," says Dan Jones, who monitors the market for the Texas Public Utility Commission..

When then-Gov. George W. Bush signed the state's deregulation bill in 1999, he assured that "competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing monthly rates and offering consumers more choices."

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Ross has been parrying with our interlocutors very admirably, so I'll (try to) be brief.

Kerry suggests that the program advanced in Grand New Party is nationalist, and she is right. But my sense is that analytical nationalism is a pretty pervasive failing, from the perspective of the cosmopolitan libertarian, of pretty much the entire partisan landscape. That's not to say that this is thus excusable by Kerry's lights, and yet GNP is an intervention that at least gestures in the direction of engaging the political scene as it is, not necessarily as I'd like it to be.

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This morning I sat in my hotel in Tel Aviv and watched a country mourn its dead. For an American, it was an amazing experience. And, no many how many times I travel to Israel and how much intimate knowledge I gather regarding the mores of this country, it never fails to amaze me how one life counts when Israel marks its war dead.

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According to unions worldwide, the answer to this question is now nearly unanimous: partner, at least potentially. For decades the AFL-CIO and other international trade unions shunned the Chinese trade union, the ACFTU, because of its lack of independence from the Chinese government and Communist Party (to the extent that those two entities are distinguishable). For instance, in 2003, US and foreign unions voted China off the workers' group of the ILO--a seat which it had acquired just three years earlier.

But things have been changing. As the US-based labor think-tank, Global Labor Strategies, has documented in a recent report, US and foreign unions are now warming up to the ACFTU. SEIU President Andy Stern has seen engaging China's union as an essential piece of any strategy to combat corporations on a global scale. In 2007, after Change-to-Win split off from the AFL-CIO, a delegation of its top leaders traveled to China to meet with ACFTU officials. Then in December of last year, as GLS notes, the Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) - a global union umbrella organization comprised of 309 affiliated organizations in 156 countries of which the AFL-CIO is the largest affiliate - voted to begin a "critical dialogue" with the ACFTU.

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Ross and Reihan, I will confess at the outset that I haven't read the book, but having digested all of comments from the Book Club, you remind me of Stimson in 1852 trying to get the Whig Party to take a stance against the expansion of slavery in the new territories. Ultimately he realized it was a fool's errand and formed a spin off party, The Republican Party. Ultimately the Heritage and AEI foot soldiers will reject your advice because they stand behind the Deregulatory Ideology that is Stalinist in its unwillingness to recognize that the world has changed. They are only interested in continuing the "Regulatory Capture" regime of the last 8 (or maybe 12) years. It will only be when Big Pharma and Big Energy stop funding these think tanks and the revolving door between them and Republican policy circles stops spinning--that you will see change in the Republican Party.

You might want to follow Stimson's path and form a new party.

My fellow discussants seem to think R&R are starry-eyed dreamers blind to the realities of the party they would reform. After all, what might a Republican administration completely freed from the straitjacket of fiscal restraint look like? Perhaps it would spend tens of billions on new education programs, or hundreds of billions on a Medicare drug benefit. Maybe it would, I don't know, introduce the highest rate of federal government growth since LBJ and increase spending at three times the rate of its Democratic-controlled predecessor.

Yes, much of Bush's profligacy has been in the service of cronyism and corporatism, while Reihan and Ross want to spend on some programs that might benefit someone other than pharmaceutical lobbyists. But as Ross points out, come November this party is going to be licking its well deserved wounds and in search of new direction. Some are going to argue that the Bush administration invited defeat by abandoning any pretense of fiscal responsibility in its foreign adventures and its christening of shiny new federal bureaucracies. R&R need only suggest that the party continue to laugh at libertarians, that a return to an imagined small-government coalition is neither feasible nor desirable, and embrace continuity with the GOP's recent past in a less corrupt form.

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According to the Department of Labor:

Real average weekly earnings fell by 0.9 percent from May to June...from June 2007 to June 2008...[a]fter deflation by the CPI-W, average weekly earnings decreased by 2.4 percent.

Most workers are seeing a drop in real wages, but in that they are just joining the fate of lower-income workers who have long seen their wages dropping in the face of inflation.  For those making minimum wage, this month officially marked another increase in the federal minimum wage, up to $6.55 per hour.   Yet, adjusted for inflation, that amount is below what the minimum wage was in 1999.   And with inflation increasing, even when the minimum wage goes to $.7.25 next year, it will be lower in value adjusted for inflation than when the minimum wage was raised to $5.15 per hour in 1997. 

At least states are leading the way in trying to help minimum wage workers keep up with inflation:

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Chris Hayes' argument - that the GOP simply can't adopt anything like the agenda we're suggesting, because the party (and the conservative movement) is "funded by and run for the benefit of the very rich," and that isn't likely to change - echoes a debate I've been having with TNR's Noam Scheiber, which you can catch up on here and here and here. To what I've already said on the subject, I would add that Chris is right: The second half of Grand New Party tries to blend policy ideas with political advice for Republicans, but it's an uneasy marriage that doesn't always work, and one thing we don't tackle directly are the structural barriers within the GOP to implementing our various ideas. Of course Chris is right that "political coalitions are constrained by the agendas of their most powerful members," and any serious effort to reshape the Republican Party needs to reckon with that reality more completely than our book does.

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Thanks to Dana and to Kerry for their thoughtful criticisms. I think Kerry's right - we are a bit breezy in the book about the costs that would be associated with the sort of pro-family tax-and-subsidy system we have in mind, so let me take the bull by the horns and say that she's correct, up to a point: The kind of conservative agenda we have in mind would almost certainly raise the costs of being a single woman (or a single man) in America, by default if not by design. If you cut taxes on families, two-parent or otherwise, you'll end up raising taxes on the unmarried over the long run, and any sort of assistance for parents who take time off to raise their kids (one policy proposal we float in the book) would end up being paid for by people who aren't raising kids. This isn't necessarily true of all the proposals we put forward, I should note: We frame issues like health care and infrastructure policy as "pro-family" because we think families tend to be disproportionately affected by the problems in the current system, but shorter commuting times, say, or portable health insurance would be achievements that singletons and seniors as well as mothers and fathers could take advantage of. But it's true of enough of our suggestions to make Kerry's critique an appropriate one to level.

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First, like my fellow discussants, I, too think GNP is excellent, provocative and (hopefully) destined to be widely discussed and never implemented. That said, while I find much to disagree with in Ross and Reihan's book, I feel strongly that the country and world would be a better place if they were running the GOP. But of course, they're not running the Republican Party. And they never will. And that brings me to my main point.

In his opening post, Ross discusses two stories about post-war American political history that he and Reihan believe are misguided. The first, prominent on the left, (and one to which I in large part subscribe) is the story that Tom Frank tells in What's The Matter with Kansas. This is a story about how America's ruling corporate interests have cynically manipulated cultural populism to sucker working class voters into voting against their own economic interests.

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With stocks plummeting across the world, the White House has decided its time to send George Bush out to give us a pep talk. I doubt he will tell us to stop whining, but the guy who was a cheerleader at Andover must be pretty pissed off that he has to end his Presidency in the same stupid business.

It doesn't really matter what he says, because the U.S. economic freefall is not something he can do anything about. Take the dollar. British governments bonds are yielding 5% (Euro Bonds 4.5%) while U.S. Treasuries yield 2%. This simple fact is why the dollar is in freefall and oil costs us more everyday. In his congressional testimony this morning, Fed Chairman Bernanke talked about the banks need to rebuild capital, but as Bloomberg pointed out yesterday, even the biggest banks are in far more trouble than their balance sheets would indicate.

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From today's WP:

Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign's top foreign policy aide, noted that Biden championed the idea of dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions: Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish. "If we had followed Senator Biden's ill-informed advice to split Iraq into three pieces, we would have seen wide-scale civil war," he said.

Well! In that case, looks like we--and the Iraqis--certainly dodged a bullet.

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream grows from their 2005 essay in the Weekly Standard - at that time, a ground-breaking challenge to conservative Republicans' Four-cheers-for capitalism, Bronx-cheers-for-government approach to politics.

Douthat and Salam wrote that "Sam's Club" voters - white working-class Americans who are far from poor but stressed by rising economic and social instability -- swung to Republicans not out of any Goldwaterite love for small government, free markets, and "extremism in defense of liberty," but out of a more grounded indignation at liberal Democrats' narratives and policies on family, welfare, crime, and race. That indignation was not irrational and was often well-justified, Douthat and Salam insisted - accurately, in my view.

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My friends Reihan and Ross have written an extremely savvy book about how to reinvigorate the GOP with a new narrative and a new coalition. Because I like the Republican party flaccid and moribund (all parties, actually), I hope their book is celebrated, widely reviewed, and ultimately ignored. And because I find most of their social policy troubling, I hope that even those dipping into the book for some new ideas take time to question the assumptions within it.

I don't think I am overstating the R&R position when I say that my friends would like to return us to a more traditional and less pluralistic concept of family life. Through social and tax policy, they would privilege heterosexual two-parent families, fund marriage promotion programs, encourage the stigmatization of single parenthood, subsidize motherhood among married women, increase taxes on the childless, and so on. In short, they would structure incentives to encourage women to use their bodies in the one way most appealing to social conservatives.

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Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's new book, Grand New Party, is a thoughtful and challenging call to arms for the Republican Party to alleviate the struggles facing working class Americans. As a liberal feminist, I found myself nodding in agreement with Ross and Reihan surprisingly often, whether they were arguing for making workers less reliant on cost-cutting insurers for basic health care, or for changing employment norms to encourage flextime and telecommuting. Such pro-labor and pro-parenting policies have long been integral to progressive politics. That raises the question of why exactly Ross and Reihan believe the GOP is the party best suited to representing the interests of "Sam's Club" voters, as they term working and lower-middle class whites.

But what I'd like to focus on here is a trend central to Ross and Reihan's diagnosis of what ails working class America, but that I think they unfairly malign: changing gender roles over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, and, in particular, the rise of single parent households.

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Grand New Party, which I'm honored to be discussing at TPMCafe this week, is a book that spends a great deal of time arguing against two powerful narratives of recent American political history - one left-wing, and one right-wing. The left-wing narrative is most famously associated with Thomas Frank's bestselling What's The Matter With Kansas?, but it's been woven into liberal arguments about conservative succcess going back decades: In a nutshell, it holds that the migration of working-class voters - defined for our purposes as Americans without college degrees - from the Roosevelt majority into the Reagan-Gingrich-Bush coalition has been driven by the GOP's ability to essentially trick these voters into casting their ballots based on symbolic culture-war issues, rather than on their economic concerns, and that the Republican Party has used this bait-and-switch to enrich the already-rich and deliver the American working class to economic ruin. The right-wing narrative, meanwhile, holds that the rise of the modern Republican majority represented a triumph of Barry Goldwater's purist small-government message, which failed in 1964 because the country wasn't ready for it, succeeded in 1980 when the country was ready for it, and could provide the basis for an enduring GOP today if Republicans are bold enough to stand, and run, on rock-ribbed Reaganite principle.

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Today at Cafe's Book Club Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are joining us for a week long discussion on their new book: Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The title speaks for itself. We've got a great group of young blogger-reporters (Chris Hayes of The Nation, Kerry Howley of Reason Magazine and Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect) to discuss the future of American politics, and the politics of discourse. Buckle your seat belts.

First posts up this afternoon.

One constantly overlooked fact about Jesse is that he--quite literally--made Barack Obama possible. People often say this in a really hazy, metaphorical way, pointing out that Jesse "paved the way" or "knocked down doors" for Barack. But those sort of weak homilies actually understate how much Jesse did for Barack.

After losing in 84 and 88, Jackson's people, Harold Ickes being principle, fought for proportional representation in all states:

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Iran's recent missile tests represented an attempt to make them look tougher (and more capable militarily) than they actually are. The first clue that something was amiss came when experts noticed that one of the Iranian news agency's official photographs had been doctored to suggest that four missiles had been launched on the first round rather than three. Al Kamen of the Washington Post joked that the test verified Iran's mastery of Photoshop. The Iranian PR tactic is akin to the alleged practice of erecting fake "Potemkin villages" to give the Russian Empress Catherine II the impression that all was well in the provinces. More to the point, the whole missile episode is reminiscent of the old Soviet tactic of marching the same missiles in the annual May Day parade more than once to give a sense of a mighty military arsenal that wasn't matched in reality. Only late in the game, near the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, did Western governments acknowledge that they had drastically overestimated Soviet military power, at a cost of hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. So it may be with Iran, unless cooler heads prevail.

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Barack Obama has an important op-ed today in the New York Times titled "My Plan for Iraq."

It's a useful portal into the current thinking in ObamaLand on America's Iraq policy and continues to emphasize both his opposition in 2002 to the Iraq War and his intention to "end the conflict."

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That's the word from the press reports. Apparently the government is going to hand Fannie and Freddie bucket loads of taxpayer dollars, no questions asked. The NYT reports that they will be given access to $300 billion of government loans at below market interest.

That's nice. Shareholders who would have lost all their money if matters were left to the market, may instead walk away with billions of dollars. Similarly, the top executives of these companies, who earn salaries in the millions and tens of millions of dollars, will keep collecting their paychecks.

We should all be thankful that the government intervened. After all really rich people and investment fund managers can't be expected to be able to handle their investments on their own. They need the helping hand of the government when they really screw up.

Similarly, we don't want the fate of highly paid executives to be left to market. If this happened, some might lose their vacation homes and private jets.

Some people say that we had to hand tens of billions of dollars to the country's richest people to prevent a financial collapse. This is simply not true.

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For my next post, I want to cover two challenges to populism, and why current conditions make careful populism necessary nonetheless. Even though I don't like the word very much, I use the term "elites" here; it has use.

1) "Gladiator's" challenge to populism: The traditional challenge with using popular support as the true north for a political movement is the elitist critique that "the mob might be wrong." (Mob here used differently than Sirota uses in the description of the Montana House majority). As the Roman Senator Gracchus in Gladiator offers, "I don't pretend to be a man of the people. But I do try to be a man for the people." The mob was heck bent on games-to-the-death and laziness (and probably Xbox and USWeekly if those had existed), and certain "elites" were concerned that Rome was losing both its virtue and its competitive edge. Woodrow Wilson was like Gracchus (so was Teddy Roosevelt, but he inspired like Russell Crow's Maximus; I think his first inaugural included the line"on my signal, unleash hell"). Gracchus offers a defense of elitism in the contecxt of a misled mob.

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