Elections aren't decided until after the World Series, according to the old axiom. The Series seems to last longer every year, but it's an old saw worth heeding, particularly now.

The McCain camp is playing every divisive card they can find, or make up. Some Americans are pro-America, others are not. Anyone who wants to register everyone to vote could well be investigated by the incumbent government,even if the law doesn't permit the Justice Department to try to influence the outcome.

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Neo-conservatives always try to join their Idealism to Power by riding the wrong horses.

They rode the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon; "freedom fighters" like Angola's Jonas Savimbi or Afghan's Mujahideen; Iran-Contra; anti-Communist dictators Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein -- recall Rumsfeld's handshake -- and the Argentine junta (because, you see, if Communism triumphed, as in the Eastern Bloc, it would never be defeated by its captives). Neo-cons rode Dan Quayle, Pat Robertson, and Dick Cheney.Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush themselves rode real horses, so neo-cons rode Reagan and Bush, too.

This year, they tried to ride Giuliani (I helped stop that one) before battening onto poor John McCain. Watching them climb off for now is as painful as watching Americans evacuating Saigon in 1975.

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Ya gotta love Krauthammer (that's just an expression. I don't). Today, in the Washington Post, he says that he has lost his one-time respect for Barack Obama because Obama has a problem with the racist campaign being run against him.

Dr. K says it's all in Obama's head. Krauthammer, a Canadian, doesn't much believe that racism is a factor in our politics. Yes, it once was. But no more. Now things are good and blacks who complain about racist slurs are just faking their outrage.

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Have you noticed that rightists of all stripes (mostly white on white) love to call Obama "Barry." Go to any right wing website. If they are not calling him Hussein, they care calling him "Barry" or "Barry Hussein."

The source for "Barry" is Obama's admission than in high school he used the name Barry because it was more American than Barack. This is a pattern all minorities know well. In college, I knew a guy called "Irving Weiss" (real name). One fall, I returned to school, saw Irv, and called him by his name. He said, "I'm Jim now." And after awhile, that is what we called him.

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What do we think about the FBI investigating Acorn?
What do we think about the lawsuits in Ohio that aim to bar voters from the polls?
What do we think about the robo-calls ripping through the key battleground states with the transparent purpose of discouraging voters from going to the polls?

Isn't there a better way to run a democracy in the most widely and deeply informed large society in the world?

There is one book that explains the Bush presidency just about better than any other I have read -- and it hardly deals with Bush. It focuses on Vice President Cheney's all-but-in-name presidency.

Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency deserves another Pulitzer on top of the one that Gellman and co-author Jo Becker already won in 2008 for their riveting four part series on Cheney, his team, and their surprisingly large impact on the nation's economic and national security positions.

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For months, women's groups across the country have been petitioning--practically begging--the moderators of the presidential debates to include questions that addressed, specifically, the problems that women face at work and in their families.

As early as August 14, 2008, The Women's Media Center in New York launched "Show Me the Women," an email petition campaign reminding all three moderators that women are part of the "diversity" of this country. Bob Shieffer even invited the WMC to offer questions. MomsRising.com, which emerged out of MoveOn.com, also launched an email campaign to persuade the moderators to include women's and family's issues in the debates.

Did it work? Not really.

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Joe the Plumber is, it seems, a registered Republican. (Hat tip to Ben Smith of Politico, who got the item from the Toledo Blade.) Moreover, according to the logical Jed L at Daily Kos, he wasn't undecided either:

Speaking with Katie Couric, "Joe" said that he "wasn't swayed" by the debate last night, yet pretty much knew who he was going to vote for. So if (a) he wasn't swayed by the debate and (b) knows who he is going to vote for, then (c) he had already made up his mind before the debate.

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While most of the attention was rightly directed to what was said in last night's debate, what wasn't said provided as much insight.

Barack Obama was given every opportunity to slam John McCain in the way McCain had been criticizing Obama, and he didn't do it. Obama, in essence, won by pulling his punches.

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In an e-mail message, the journalist Jack Hitt sums up what it has all come down to: McCain, especially at his most folksy and sincere, now delivers a perfect impersonation of Dana Carvey impersonating John McCain.

That is no small trick, my friends. To believe as deeply as McCain does that he is sincere at this point requires a truly bottomless capacity for self-delusion. And that makes neo-con Field Marshall Wilhelm von Kristol McCain's perfect handler, for Kristol now resembles Carvey impersonating an un-American subversive posing as a genial pundit named Bill Kristol.

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Did anyone else notice how much John McCain, who promises a steady hand on the tiller, looked at times like Captain Queeg last night, attacking Obama for his "associations" the way Queeg went on about strawberries? It was sad, really.

Winning is out of the question for McCain now. He lost all three debates and,in the course of a few months, became something of a joke to most Americans. Pretty amazing for the American hero.

No matter what happens now, he goes down as one of those marginal figures in our political history who was discredited, lost, and disappeared.

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If almost all the postgame pundits thought McCain had a good night; but the snap polls show that overwhelming percentages thought Obama "won" (2.5:1 among undecideds according to CNN, 3:1 among all debate watchers according to CBS), "stated his ideas more clearly" (CNN: almost 3:1) "was seen as the stronger leader" (CNN: almost 1.5:1) and was "more likable" (CNN: more than 3:1), and that the candidate who launched more attacks on his opponent was McCain (CNN: 11:1)--what does the discrepancy tell you?

Either (a) the pundits had some extraordinary insight denied to ordinary benighted Americans, or (b) the pundits' snap judgments are worthless--in fact, a negative indicator.

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That would be guys like this who can afford to buy businesses that stand to earn over $250,000 annually, but decline to do so because they would face a higher marginal tax rate and not be compelled to provide their employees with health insurance. Because they'd rather be doing this.

Barack Obama likened John McCain to George W. Bush. McCain pointed out that he is not George W. Bush and insisted it's important we learn the full truth about Obama's associations with a "washed up terrorist," starting with the untruth that Obama "launched his campaign" in the washed-up terrorist's living room. McCain thereupon likened Obama to Herbert Hoover.

Neither candidate acknowledged that to rescue the American dream and really vindicate the American people, corporate capitalism will have to be reconfigured substantially enough to cause enormous transitional dislocation and pain.

Maybe it's asking too much for any political candidate to make a defense of paying taxes in the heat of a tough campaign, but it struck me, in listening to the Presidential Debate tonight, that Barack Obama missed a chance to talk about the role of government in a positive fashion.

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Fire away folks, last debate!

An excellent piece in the New York Times reveals something about Sarah Palin that I did not know. She became mayor of Wasilla, in part, by using hints about the supposed Jewish ancestry of her opponent, the incumbent mayor, a fellow Republican named Stein. Palin turned a municipal election into a Christian crusade.

From the New York Times: "The traditional turning points that had decided municipal elections in this town of less than 7,000 people -- Should we pave the dirt roads? Put in sewers? Which candidate is your hunting buddy? -- seemed all but obsolete the year Palin, then 32, challenged the three-term incumbent,...

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Picture Larry Summers trying to keep Phil Gramm from poking his eyes out. The Washington Post tells the story of the bipartisan quartet who thwarted attempts by Commodities Futures Trading Commission Chairman Chairperson Brooksley Born (pictured) to regulate derivatives: Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Arthur Levitt, and Phil Gramm.

It is derivatives and other upchucks of The Free Market in finance that have transformed the mortgage crisis into a world-historic giant honking financial crisis. If you allow that the Clinton Administration was composed of Democrats, about which reasonable people may disagree, then it's a bipartisan accomplishment. One of the fruits of "The New Democrats."

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"That one." (Rehashing the conflicts of the '60s, for your Internet pleasure.)

Like many Americans, Sen. John McCain is caught in the vortex of the rapidly downward-spiraling American economy. Like them, he is being pushed in directions he doesn't want to go. McCain's campaign has openly wished that something would "turn the page" away from economic issues. But yesterday, a day after Sen. Barack Obama announced a four-point program to address the nation's economic problems, Sen. McCain, slow to react in the first place but not to be outdone, did likewise.

McCain's set of proposals revolves around - you saw this coming, didn't you? - tax cuts. Tax cuts for capital losses, tax cuts for capital gains, tax cuts for corporations, tax cuts for early withdrawals from retirement accounts. His other major proposals, for mortgage refinancing, cleansing banks of distressed assets, restricting executive compensation, have all been approved by Congress and signed by the President already.

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Okay, we all should be glad that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seems to have abandoned, or at least sidelined, his TARP program and instead decided to directly inject capital into the banking system. The problem is under-capitalized banks and that is best solved by giving the banks more capital.

But, there is a big issue about the terms under which they were given capital. Secretary Paulson decided that a 5 percent rate of return on preferred share was good enough for the taxpayers. Warren Buffet got a 10 percent return for his investment.

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Even though I always thought that William F. Buckley, Jr. had a first-class temperament but a second-class intellect, and even though I know little of what his son Christopher has accomplished and/or written over the years at National Review, the magazine his father founded, I was somewhat surprised to learn of the reaction he got from its readers (and its editor, Rich Lowry) yesterday, after endorsing Obama on his website.

Not only can't young Buckley deserve the reaction he got; the conservative movement doesn't deserve it, either. Not all TPM readers will agree with me, but America needs a better conservatism than this. It certainly deserves a better conservative spokesman than David Brooks, who, as I've noted here, hasn't shown half of Buckley's character in this time of national crisis.

Todd Gitlin is right, of course, in suggesting to progressives currently giddy about polling trends in the presidential campaign that overconfidence is a bad idea in politics, as in any other competitive endeavor. And every Democrat of a certain age remembers past elections where we managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

But though Todd doesn't come right out and say it, I suspect much of his fear is from the most immediate bad memory: Election Night 2004, when many of us were half-convinced we'd already won a week or so out, and then, on reading those first exit polls, threw caution to the win and declared victory.

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By John Schmitt and Dean Baker

In his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked the American people whether they were better off than they had been four years ago. Enough voters answered "no" to give Reagan a decisive victory in the election.

Senator Obama is posing the same question today, since Senator McCain promises to continue the economic policies of the Bush administration. One of us (John Schmitt) recently compared all the major indicators of economic well-being in 2008 and 2000.

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Growing voter concerns over the financial crisis are closely connected to worries about health care. The latest Institute for America's Future Op Ed ad in Tuesday's NY Times links the two issues directly, with the headline: WILL WE LET CONSERVATIVES DO TO HEALTH CARE WHAT THEY DID TO BANKING ? As voters feel the economy go into a tailspin, they join the millions of Americans already fearful they will lose their jobs and their health coverage.

Conservatives generally ignore health care, but now all politicians are forced to say something. In just the last few several weeks, the national media have finally started to cover the stark differences between John McCain and Barack Obama on health care. And it took some active education to get them to report the story.

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Like every other breathless cosmopolitan whose veins pulse with red-white-and-blue blood (the world being at stake and all), I start the day at the keyboard, trying to put a floor under my worry, hunting excitement, relief, or both, with Pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com (just for openers), scrutinizing the state totals, then totaling them again on the assumption that each Obama figure has to be discounted by 5 points. I rummage through reports on Obama lawn signs sprouting on hitherto arid pastures and that some slow-to-decide white workers have decided that, in the words of a steelworker in old industrial Beaver Falls, PA, "It's Time to Give the Black Guy a Chance."

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I wrote here yesterday that McCain and the Republicans are forcing smart conservative and neo-conservative Republicans like New York Times columnist David Brooks to choose between their intellectual/moral self-respect and their ideological and partisan loyalties.

William F. Buckley's son Christopher has endorsed Obama. So has Ed Koch. George Will, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg and even, heaven help us, neo-con scourge Charles Krauthammer have virtually endorsed him and have certainly written off McCain/Palin.

So, what did Brooks do this morning; what does it show us; and why does it matter?

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We have seen a presidential candidate called a terrorist, a traitor, "that one", and derided as an "Arab". We may have witnessed a call for his murder in public. Media sources continue to report on new incidents like these, and our readers continue to discuss them here at TPM. Maybe the election is no place for a "race card", but we need to closely examine what's happening with race right now. I want to highlight a few posts where readers pinpoint the questions and sentiments running through our collective thoughts:

-See here as Deanie Mills outlines the currents of racism that plague this election.

-See here as Howard1 highlights the accusation that supporting Obama conceals a hidden racism.

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As it happens, when I went into government in 1993 I started reading Krugman and have now read almost all of his books and almost all of his popular writing. I haven't read all his scholarly papers!

As a policy maker and inveterate if occasional adviser to policy makers, I have never found an economist who made more sense, gave more guidance, provided more timely and useful advice than Paul Krugman.

All praise to him and the committee that singled him out for the Nobel: a noble choice indeed.

There's no doubt that the general crisis of confidence in the American economy -- most clearly manifested by the seizing up of even the most normal lending activity --- will translate to a downturn in the GDP and a sad increase in unemployment.

There's no doubt also that in the short-run some federal spending in support of ready-to-go infrastructure and state and local budgets will make for a less cold winter economically than would otherwise be the case.

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The hate-mongering politics of Sarah Palin, John McCain and
their supporters are not going to be enough to "change the subject"
from the economic crisis and the fact that most voters see Barack Obama
as being better equipped to deal with it. But pointed references to
Obama as someone who "pals around" with terrorists and somehow isn't
a "real" American with "small town values" are resonating with an increasingly
hateful and vocal minority of the electorate who don't want to see an African-
American as our next president.

While the televised talking heads have for the most part minimized this issue
by pointing to a few instances in which McCain has called Obama a "good man"
in response to questions at his rallies, Frank Rich makes clear in his Sunday
column of this week that McCain needs to do far more to rein in the hatred that his campaign has helped to fuel.

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(Hey, it's my day off.) You might not have known, the worldwide financial crisis was caused by black folks trying to buy homes, abetted by those dangerous ACORNs*:

"Republicans have also attempted to link the organization to the current financial crisis. On Friday the McCain campaign posted a Web video that accused ACORN of "bullying banks" and "forc[ing them] to issue risky home loans. The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today."

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Poor David Brooks. Really. In 2004 Nicholas Confessore detailed the New York Times columnist's maddening habit of oscillating between serious commentary and Republican hackery: In one column, Brooks would stroke his chin like a sober savant, purveying credible analysis; in the next, he'd gyrate shamelessly for ideologues and Bush operatives such as Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.

He pirouettes like this constantly to maintain some intellectual self-respect, on the one hand, and to hold onto his market niche as a conservative Republican apologist, on the other. He has tried to square this circle with forced geniality throughout Republicans' Iraq War lying, torture and warrantless surveillance, borrow-and-borrow, spend-and-spend fiscal policy, bottomless corruption, and, lately, national socialism. But John McCain is stopping Brooks' game.

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Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize is wonderful news. It appropriately honors his work as an economist -- and it will have the salutory effect of enhancing his impact as a public intellectual at a key juncture in US and world history. When it was not at all fashionable, we all need to remember, Krugman consistently spoke against the mendacity of the Bush administration. He correctly predicted the disasters in foreign and economic policy to which that administration's horrendous and corrupt decisions would lead. Bravo to him -- and thanks to the Nobel committee.

This is nice.

Almost immediately after I posted about the AIPAC Iran blockade bill here, Hill offices started getting contacted by TPMers (and others who read the post elsewhere).

This just demonstrates how the web has changed everything. In the old days, nobody but AIPAC types would have known about the bill and it would have been quickly approved. Now the web allows all of us to shine a light on activities that used to go on behind closed doors.

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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Princeton professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman the Nobel economics prize for his work on free trade. We here at TPMCafe want to offer a warm congratulations to Paul.

You have to marvel at the Times for keeping neocon columnist Bill Kristol on its op-ed page. He's not smart, he writes poorly and he's nothing but a GOP flack.

Today's column urges McCain to get rid of his campaign staff and run as the great guy he is. It's typical Kristol, all simplistic strategy, no discussion of issues. Why does Kristol care who wins? One, because the neocon drive on Iran will collapse without McCain. And, two, only a GOP administration will employ his friends.

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Before I start, I want to say that if there was one bit of advice I could give Barack Obama for the final debate, it's to note that Gabby Hayes does not understand that the current economic mess is not a consequence of corruption. His simple-minded, self-righteous clichés are not the change we need. On the corruption front, the problem is not the violation of laws. The problem is what is legal. End of advice.

Hey all you media people -- David Broder, Brian Williams, Jim Lehrer -- who think the candidates are now obliged to detail a medley of painful spending cuts and tax increases, will you please shut your stupid face? You have no idea what you are talking about.

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Anybody who's heard George Santayana's aphorism is condemned to repeat it, but what good do historical parallels really do us right now?

We know there are uncanny similarities to the beginning of the Great Depression: as in the late 1920s, credit has locked up, for all the reasons we pretty much understand. We know that a pyramid scheme ran out of bottom, only homes, not stocks, were the bubbled assets. We know that some people made fortunes from the scheme, and inequalities in income are now a disgrace and a macro-economic problem: in the short term, not enough buying power is stored up in the middle-class, whose incomes have eroded; whose net worth has taken a hit with the stock market plunge. In the long run, if unemployment rises, there will be a further spiraling down of the consumption that prompts growth.

But we know other things, too. Why forget them, of all times, now?

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Avoiding the spewing bile of McCain's dying campaign, I took a few days off to drive the backroads of New England looking for antiques. Yesterday, in the early morning light, I drove from Bethel, Maine down to Cornish on Route 5, reveling in one of the most beautiful Columbus Day weekends in many years. With lakes and the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the far vista, brilliant sunlight dappled through the fire red, orange, and yellow trees set off against the blue sky and omnipresent evergreens. Dappled light hit the white houses and churches and occasional small graveyards omnipresently nestled along Maine backroads, where life and death easily coexist.

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I know it's rude in DC policy circles to ever hold people accountable for the things they said way back when they were two weeks younger, but I like to break rules.

Remember all those folks who said that it was absolutely essential that the bailout bill be passed immediately or the economy would collapse? How can these people explain the fact that 10 days after he has had the full legal authority to act, Secretary Paulson has still done nothing with the $700 billion that Congress handed him. Doesn't Paulson realize the urgency?

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