Watching the spectacular opening ceremonies, I kept thinking of 1938 1936 (as you know, I was there), wondering if I was wrong. Many people in China are much better off by virtue of the spectacular economic growth. Naturally there are downsides, but the fact of an aggregate net gain seems hard to dispute.

The problem with overall net gains is that individuals can get chewed up in the process. Peoples and cultures in Western China are being destroyed. Probably with less lethality than that visited upon the indigenous people of the Americas by European colonists. So who are we to complain, you might ask, and you would be right. Nobody with a voice has standing. Nobody with standing has a voice.

In one sense the demonstration was a grand Orwellian perversity. Friendship was being proclaimed by representatives of nations that are forever conniving to eat each other's lunch, forget the assorted wars and campaigns of ethnic cleansing being administered by assorted parties as we speak.

The greatest country in the world. Can you guess which one it is?

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Last night, a 60%-black Memphis congressional district re-elected its one-term white liberal incumbent, Steve Cohen, despite TV ads by his black challenger Nikki Tinker that associated him falsely with the Klan and asked why Cohen would "pray in our churches" while voting against mandatory prayer in public schools.

Cohen had won in 2006 with only 31% of the vote, probably because several black challengers split the remainder. But last night, given two years to prove himself an effective representative, he won 79 - 19%.

Does anyone realize how important, and beautiful, this is? Emily's List didn't, as M.J. showed here, until it finally shook off its identity politics and saw that not every female candidate is better than every male. Barack Obama was cagey and quiet on this one, and thereby hangs a tale.

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As early as February of 2004, Josh Marshall and TPM were investigating the curious forgery operation around the Niger Uranium documents. Along with other investigators, many clues pointed toward a group of Neo-cons working with doug Feith out of the office of Special Plans. Most particularly, Michael Ledeen, was named in an Italian Parliamentary report.

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Now in the wake of Ron Suskind's new book on another forgery, a Conservative Blogger, Philip Giraldi says that the forgery of the letter stating the connection between Mohamed Atta and Saddam Hussein was also created by Cheney's operation.

My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith's office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith's office specialized in such activity.

This afternoon, Edwards admitted to ABC News that he'd been carrying on an affair with Rielle Hunter. Sad, strange news. Not quite sure what to make of it. Your thoughts?

First of all, I want to thank Lila Shapiro at TPM as well as Matt Dallek, Todd Gitlin and Andrei Cherny for their posts this week. It's been a great discussion.

I wanted to sum up with one of my big takeaways from working on Live from the Campaign Trail - the extraordinarily powerful role of political stereotype in our campaign discourse. "Liberal tax-and spenders," "GOP isolationists," "blame America-firsters" and "extremists;" these are just a few of the overarching political caricatures that have come to define American politics in the 20th century. We've become so inured to these short-hand characterizations that many of our political debates on the campaign trail are spent either inoculating politicians from them - or perpetuating them. To be sure, flippant political characterizations are nothing new in American politics. In the forty years after the Civil War, there was hardly a Republican politician who missed an opportunity to wave the so-called "bloody shirt," of Democratic rebellion. In the 30s, 40s and 50s Democratic politicians pretty much ran against the ghost of Herbert Hoover and the perception of Republican heartlessness and isolationism that Franklin Roosevelt helped perpetuate.

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Is it possible to discuss Iran and Israel without invoking the specter of another Holocaust? It seems like it isn't. Israeli officials, John McCain, and journalists all invoke the possibility of a second Holocaust with reckless abandon.

Reckless it is, too. Once the possibility of another Holocaust is posited, there can be no alternative but to take action, no matter how extreme, to prevent it. Israeli historian Benny Morris is so hysterical about the Iranian threat that he would use nuclear weapons to prevent it.

That's right. On July 18, in perhaps the most ridiculous op-ed I've ever seen in the New York Times, Morris called for a conventional military strike to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb and inflicting a holocaust on Israel. He predicted the strike would fail, and concluded that the only alternative left would be a nuclear attack against Iran.

In other words, he called for a holocaust to prevent a holocaust.

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With the successful conviction of Osama Bin Ladin's driver, President Bush triumphantly announced plans for further anti-terrorist prosecutions. "We will not stop until we have all of Bin Ladin's confederates: his gardener, his manicurist, his masseur, his acupuncturist, his caddy, his yoga instructor, his sous-chef, his aromatherapist, his pool boy, and his 72 ex-virgins," the president said, puffing out his chest like a parakeet.

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain said, "It is important to capture all of Bin Ladin divers, since their ability to plant underground explosives is a threat to America's harbors and naval vessels."

Thanks to Andrei for a great post. He really put his finger on an issue that I think is central to understanding Barack Obama's political ascendancy:

"This is not to say that Obama lacks substance or has not delivered enough wonky policy speeches. Neither is close to the case. However, his poetic call to renewal on caucus night made clear that he was making an argument in this presidential race, not just presenting a laundry list. Where most Democratic presidential candidates seem to be running for head of government, Barack Obama is running for head of state. That's why their speeches sound like a State of the Union; his sound like an inaugural address."

I couldn't agree more with this and only wish I had written it myself! One of the more interesting takeaways I had from researching my book was the extent to which presidential candidates rarely got into the specifics of policy issues.

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Thanks, Michael, Todd and Andrei, for your perceptive and thoughtful posts. Let me pick up on a theme running through our conversation--ie...why do we consider some campaign oratory "great"? While I think the larger context (as I said in my earlier post) is crucial to understanding any piece of political speechmaking, I also believe that great oratory must also inspire and mobilize (as Todd pointed out), provide an affirmative vision, laden with ideas, of America's future (as Michael and Andrei say) -- and that great speeches frame issues and controversies in new ways that show us who we are as a country and redefine prorgressivism at particular moments in time.

Let me offer an imperfect, but hopefully useful, analogy: When I was in college, I had a terrific art history teacher who often devoted the entire lecture to a single painting. He would use a single piece of art as a vehichle to highlight such issues as gender relations, class conflict, political power, architectural history, and issues of identity and philosophy in Renaissance-era Florence. So I learned a lot about numerous subjects about that society not simply because the brushstrokes were superior and the artists were technically skilled, but also because the paintings revealed differing aspects of the issues and divisions in 16th-century Florence.

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Membership in Reaganism requires a deeper commitment, and for that an institutional base is being built. At the cornerstone are the fundamentalist churches and their rapidly growing school system, which threatens the health and even the life of public education; about a thousand new religious elementary schools were opened this year. Alongside are the foundations and think tanks, the military and militaristic institutions, sports and celebrations, broadcasting and publishing, volunteer and charitable institutions and a new breed of ideologically oriented businesses. Amway sales agents are Reaganist cadre; so are R.O.T.C. trainees, weekend "survival game" players, religious disk jockeys and Bible salesmen, and certain professional athletes. Everyone who watched the World Series heard that the San Diego Padres' pitching staff is stuffed with John Birchers. The Olympics became a Reaganist spectacle, and the chant "U.S.A. ! U.S.A.!" was appropriated for Reagan-Bush rallies.

-- "The Age of Reaganism" by Andrew Kopkind, The Nation, November 3, 1984

Sophisticates might have sneered at his TV commercials depicting an America of Norman Rockwell prosperity and harmony, at the chants of "U.S.A.!" that carried over from the Olympics to rock Reagan rallies. But the President correctly divined that Americans were yearning to experience once more the emotions of pride and patriotism.

-- "They Also Made History" by George Church, Time, January 7, 1985

Barack Obama's ascendancy is a clear refutation of the canard that in this age of six second soundbites and thirty second attack ads the power of oratory has been diminished.

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All the recent talk of tire gauges and energy plans had me thinking this morning about one of my greatest disappointments with the current administration. True, the list of disappointments is very long - epic, even - but one in particular has come to mind this week. In the days immediately following September 11th, our country was united in a way that we had never been in my brief lifetime, and will probably never be again. Our country, at that moment - and I can only speak for myself here - felt as if it was ready to do whatever was asked of it going forward to make sure that what had happened would never again happen, and that some measure of justice would be achieved.

That moment, particularly from the perspective of someone in my generation, was a huge inflection point in our lives. It felt like - and indeed was for many - a fork in the road. And it was the moment when the President and the leadership of our country should have stepped forward with a plan that would have allowed us all to take an active part, however small that part might have been, in placing ourselves and our country in a stronger, more secure position in the world. Instead of a plan, though, we were asked to pay fewer taxes and shop more. And here we are, almost seven years later, with $4.00+ gasoline and an unprecedented consumer debt level (not to mention the banks, the record deficit, the national debt, the cost of two wars, etc., ugh).

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Now this is nice.

It's bad enough that Emily's List would back any challenge to Steve Cohen, one of the most liberal members of the House.

But now Emily's favored candidate is using racial and anti-semitic charges to defeat Cohen.

What gives? Does Emily's List believe that, by definition, any woman is better than any man? Does Emily's List condone anti-semitism? Or racism?

Or is everything permissible when you know you are a liberal? Sickening.

Over at TPM, Josh Marshall is asking the question of why McCain would risk his reputation as a truth teller for independants by continuing his low road "Obama is just a celebrity" ad campaign. It seems to me these ads are aimed at getting the Rush Limbaugh crowd back on board the McCain campaign. Limbaugh has been trumpeting the "Barack, The Magic Negro" meme for months. Now the McCain campaign has essentially adopted this same theme of "uppity", in a slightly more politically correct manner and Limbaugh has begun to embrace McCain after months of mocking him.

The ad campaign may get the hard core dittoheads excited, but it's not going to change the essential electoral map which hasn't budged in weeks. Obama wins with over 300 electoral votes and McCain is going to have to spend serious money defending Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina. Who knew?

He's not going to the GOP convention, according to CNN, which is to be congratulated for hiring somebody who can write tart:

A Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll from June showed that while 31 percent of Americans had a positive opinion of President Bush, only 23 percent had the same feeling for Cheney.

Cheney may be the only non-incarcerated politician in America who's less popular than President Bush.

Thanks to Todd and Matt for their great posts and I want to pick up on a point that Matt made about the importance of context in great speechwriting. Matt was absolutely right to highlight it: the most effective campaign speeches have generally been those that most closely reflected the desires of the American people.

As Todd Gitlin noted, Herbert Hoover's "tribute to rugged individualism" was a product of a specific moment in history - the calm before the storm of the Great Depression. As the famed historian Richard Hofstadter said of our 29th President, "The things Hoover believed in - efficiency, enterprise, opportunity, individualism, substantial laissez-faire, personal success, material welfare - were all in the dominant American tradition. The ideas he represented - ideas that to so many people made him seem hateful or ridiculous after 1929 - were precisely the same ideas that in the remotest past of the nineteenth century and the more immediate past of the New Era had had an almost irresistible lure for the majority of Americans."

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I got a call from an Israeli friend the other day. He wanted to know when I'd be over. I told him and planned a nice dinner in Jerusalem together.

He then asked what I thought about Obama vs. Mc Cain. (He knows I'm for Obama, of course).

I said, "Let's save this for when I see you. If we argue about it now, we'll both decide not to get together."

He said: "Wrong. I'm for Obama."

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It emerges that Paris Hilton can articulate an energy policy better than the presidential candidate of the Republican Party. My respect for her has grown in leaps and bounds, so to speak, and if she needs any more policy advice I'm totally available.

On the nuke front, somebody should ask that silly little man what he would do with nuclear waste. Nobody should be allowed to advocate more nuclear power without being obliged to disclose a plan for disposing of the inevitable waste products. Where are you going to put it, how are you going to get it there. How about Arizona? It's like proposing specific tax cuts along with non-specific spending cuts, all the while trumpeting your intention to balance the budget.

A little more arcane but in the same vein: would the tribune of free markets eliminate any subsidies for nukes, including Federal coverage of liability in the event of accidents? And how would our addle-pated conservative improve our swiss-cheese system of regulation, to guard against accidents? After all, a nuclear mishap is not quite like a toxic Jalapeno pepper.

Belated Postscript: Don't let any pseudo-economist tell you a windfall profits tax is nutty. It doesn't solve a world of problems, but there is nothing wrong with it either. See Mark Thoma, Robert Waldmann, and Andrew Leigh for details.

P.P.S. Since people are saying my portrait frightens the children, I have submitted one with a more noble aspect.

Here's a clip of Obama today in Berea, Ohio, rightly accusing the Republicans of lying about his energy program when they reduce it to tire inflating. He's indignant but not irate. He plays at disbelief that his opponent could be so crass. He sounds like a triumphant man, a man who knows he's in the right and yet has been kicked in the kneecap--ineffectually--by losers. His tone says, Can you believe this? "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." The crowd jumped to its feet.

He's right, of course, but also, I suspect, effective. I suppose somebody could argue that when he says the Republicans would be better off consulting energy experts than dwelling on Britney and Paris, there are voters with whom this won't go over so well. The populace is supposed to detest experts. They're, you know, elitist, and so must the president be if he wants to talk to them. For myself, I would be happy if he kept striking this gong. Imagine: "John McCain is the man who hugged George Bush--the president who thought he could do without the Iraq experts, the man who could do without the hurricane experts, the man who turned the whole government over to lobbyists instead of people who know what America needs. John McCain and George Bush--two privileged men who think they have a right to sneer at people who know something. The leaders of the Ignorance Party."

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Why didn't George W. Bush do better as a leader? Why didn't he win the election of 2002, and why, despite his almost-inevitable war-time re-election four years later, did his approval ratings sink as low as those of European leaders in multi-party democracies where majority approval barely exists?

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Not the upbeat topic I had been hoping for with my inaugural post here, but it is difficult not to hold a dour view for our economy in the near future considering the current climate, and this raft of recently updated economic indicators does not give much reason for a brighter mood.

On July 29, the updated (and widely reported) S&P/Case-Shiller Housing Index was released for May, revealing a 15.8% drop in home prices across its 20 city index since May 2007, which represents the largest decrease ever for the Case-Shiller. This report is not all bad, however, as the index posted only a 0.9% drop since April 2008, which is one of the smallest decreases ever and may indicate some slowing of the price slide. Seeking Alpha delves into this issue in greater detail, and they highlight that the losses are very much regionally based, as seven of the twenty metropolitan areas actually posted modest gains in home values over the past year. Most losses, which were heavy, were sustained in Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas, and other areas of aggressive subprime mortgage lending.

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Thanks, Michael, for inviting me to participate and comment on your book. Let me pick up on one thing you said in your post: I would argue that while words and ideas certainly matter in any presidential campaign oratory, I think there's a third factor at work here, beyond the words and the ideas behind a particular speech -- namely, the intersection of social currents and the larger context in which any speech is given.

Michael, in essence, makes this argument in his book -- providing perceptive analyses of the speeches he includes, describing the larger world of ideology, social movements, and political rivalries that help frame and make a speech memorable. Similarly, Garry Wills and Thurston Clarke wrote books about single speeches (Lincoln's Gettysburg address and JFK's inaugural, respectively), shedding new light on seminal addresses by examining the wider world in which the speeches were delivered.

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As that Dean Baker person just said, drilling in ANWR is thought by the Gov to reduce world oil prices by between .4 and 1.2 percent. Last night on the teevee, they said keeping your tires inflated properly would reduce your gas costs by 3.3 percent, which is like, more.

Now ordinarily I'm not a fan of calls for voluntary acts of virtue as a substitute for public policy. But in this case, for anyone who cares for more drilling, they have available a personal solution that does not require the Gov to act.

Many of us have been trying to argue with folks like John McCain, the Flat Earth Society and National Public Radio that drilling in offshore protected areas will not affect the price of gas because there is too little oil there to make a difference. At least that is what the Energy Information Agency tells us, and no one has produced any evidence that suggests a qualitatively different story.

But, evidence obviously doesn't matter with such people. So, let's give em what they want. They get to drill anywhere, with one small qualification. Since they insist that drilling will bring down the price of gas, we take them at their word. The deal is that we put a 100 percent windfall profit tax on gas prices in excess of $3 a gallon.

If they believe what they claim, they should jump at this deal. After all, drilling everywhere should get us back to $2 a gallon gas in no time. What do you say Senator McCain?

Thank you, Michael. It's good to have these speeches within paper covers--Humphrey with McGovern, Hoover right next to FDR. And the latter juxtaposition is where I'll start my little meditation on the significance of great speeches, and also their limits.

I don't think I've ever read a Hoover speech before. You know, this one, a week before he beat Al Smith, isn't half bad. Of course, a tribute to rugged individualism sounded better on October 23, 1928 than it would have on July 2, 1932, when Roosevelt gave his great "New Deal" speech. But for all its stuffiness, it hangs together. It addresses the voters as grown-ups. It makes an argument. It And--bonus!--it even embraces liberalism as "a force truly of the spirit." This liberalism, Hoover insists, "is no system of laissez faire." (French yet!)

But the difference between Hoover's speech and Roosevelt's is not just four years of crash, unemployment and social misery. It's also the difference between an uninspired speech and an inspired one. Roosevelt makes an argument, of course, but he's witty, too: Trickle-down theory "belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776." He's clear about who the adversaries are: not the "Republican Party" but the "Republican leadership" (Barack Obama, are you listening?). He's sparing with metaphor but trenchant when he indulges: "During the past ten years a Nation of 120,000,000 people has been led by the Republican leaders to erect an impregnable barbed wire entanglement around its borders through the instrumentality of tariffs which has isolated us from all the other human beings in all the rest of the round world."

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The Democratic controlled Congress should let it be known that any promises, agreements, and changes in regulations the Bush Administration is rushing to dish out in its waning days will be subject to review after the elections. American and foreign special interests should be warned that they would be unwise to take these deals as firm, given the ways in which they were struck -- without proper hearings, Congressional consultation, and above all, public notice. This hold true for all deals, but especially the particularly harmful ones concerning the proliferation of nuclear materials.

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Let me first take this opportunity to thank Josh Marshall, Lila Shapiro and all the folks at TPM for giving me the opportunity to talk about Live From the Campaign Trail. It's always humbling to be asked to write about presidential politics; but even more humbling to be asked by the best political blog on the web.

One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I believe that presidential campaigns are actually far more substantive than we generally assume - and that great campaign oratory is not only the best evidence of this phenomenon but is a key element of the success or failure of a presidential candidate. Luckily for my thesis, Barack Obama decided to run for President in 2008.

However, along with Obama's meteoric political rise have come some rather pointed questions about the power of campaign speechwriting - is Obama getting by on his great felicity with rhetoric while glossing over substance? Are his campaign speeches "just words" as some McCain supporters (and former Hillary Clinton backers) like to assert? Beyond the more direct questions about Obama's skills as a speechgiver, there are deeper questions to examine: can Obama's fundamentally affirmative campaign message overcome the recent negative attacks from John McCain that have tightened up the race? And, are campaigns actually less substantive than I assume and do TV ads, debate performances, even GOTV operations make the real difference on Election Day - and not campaign oratory?

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At first glance, the new national defense strategy released by Bush administration Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last week seems like a fresh start. He seems to be intending to position it as "post-Bush," with much talk of working with allies and, heaven forbid, other U.S. government agencies. Gates's realist approach, which suggests a greater balance in the tools used to pursue U.S. security interests, positions him as a sort of "anti-Rumsfeld." The question is, how deep are the differences between the two?

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I don't like the polls. That is because I, unlike lots of Democrats, don't simply ignore the bad ones and latch on to the good ones. I'm cursed. I read them all and I don't like what I see.

I've already said that I believe that the entire campaign against Obama will be based on race. That is all the Republicans have and, assuming they know history, are safe to believe that white fear of African-Americans will win it for them.

I think there is a 50% chance Obama will win, but no more than that. All the young folks around these part who think that America is post-racial need to get out more -- out of Manhattan, Ann Arbor or Cambridge.

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This week Michael Cohen, professional speechwriter and senior research fellow at the New American Foundation, is joining us to discuss his new book on presidential campaign rhetoric Live From The Campaign Trail. How important are candidates' speechmaking styles vs their key campaign talking points? What have been the most important and compelling speeches of this race thus far? Why are so many of McCain's speeches so-- and there's really no other word for this-- bad? Michael's first post will be up shortly, and he'll flesh out the arguments and questions more thoroughly.

Along for the ride: former Gore speechwriter and West Wing contributor Eli Attie, Andrei Cherny, chief speechwriter for John Kerry in 2004 and author of The Candy Bombers, sociologist and political writer Todd Gitlin and Matt Dallek, Adjunct Professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. Should be a great discussion. Join us!

In September of 2001, Bruce Ivins was just an unappreciated bio terror researcher in a lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He lived just off the base and many days walked to work. Though we now know he was probably suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, he had access to the most dangerous toxins in the U.S. Army's unrivaled storehouse. Ebola, Anthrax, smallpox, you name it, Bruce could get his hands on it. And then Bruce probably realized he didn't have to be the mousy nerd any more. And he carefully sent out some anthrax letters.

F.B.I. investigators have long speculated that the motive for the attacks, if carried out by a biodefense insider like Dr. Ivins, might have been to draw public attention to a dire threat, attracting money and prestige to a once-obscure field.

If that was the motive, it succeeded. In the years since anthrax-laced letters were sent to members of Congress and news organizations in late 2001, killing five people, almost $50 billion in federal money has been spent to build new laboratories, develop vaccines and stockpile drugs.

After the attacks, for example, an experimental vaccine Dr. Ivins had spent years working on moved from the laboratory to a proposed $877 million federal contract, though the deal collapsed two years later. Federal documents suggest that Dr. Ivins, along with several colleagues, might have earned royalties had the contract gone forward, but the deal ultimately collapsed.

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Congress has probably done all that we can expect to prevent foreclosure with the housing bill passed last month. Because of its poor design, the Congressional Budget Office projects that it will only help 260,000 families facing foreclosure.

This bill also gave Fannie and Freddie a pass, bailing out its stockholders and its hugely overpaid and incompetent managers (competent managers don't put companies into bankruptcy) while imposing no real conditions on these companies' conduct. Congress only imposes conditions when the issue is welfare for poor people.

Among other things, Congress could have required that Fannie and Freddie follow the model that Sheila Bair of the FDIC is pursuing following its takeover of the bankrupt subprime lender IndyMac. She has stopped foreclosures on IndyMac's mortgages and is trying to arrange workouts with homeowners.

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