I've started giving serious thought to the high likelihood that Barack Obama is about to inherit this mess.
On a separate but obviously related front it's distressing that a lot of very respectable economists think that Henry Paulson is dragging his feet -- the G7 and IMF meetings seemed to produce statements of unity and purpose, but no real action.
Finally, yes, it seems to be unquestionably good news that Paulson has jettisoned his first idea (government purchase of 'toxic' mortgage debt) in favor of British/Swedish model partial government purchase of major banks. But the fact that he rammed through his bailout bill as absolutely essential to saving the economy, only to decide a few days later that we need something dramatically different, does not inspire me with great confidence in his grasp of the nature of the crisis.
Late Update: This passage, which Atrios picked out of the current Timesarticle, gets right at what's so unsettling ...
Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation's banks -- in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.
As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.
The Treasury Department's surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.
We've been having a fascinating dialog with readers in response to last night's post about those exchanges John McCain had with those rabid supporters in Minnesota. I want to post some of your emails. But before that I want to go back to this question of just what that female McCain supporter said to him before he snatched the microphone away from her.
As I said there were conflicting reports about whether the woman, Gayle Quinnell, said Obama was an "Arab" or an "Arab terrorist." I've now seen reports that suggest that she said the latter but either the mic was cut or she didn't have the mic in range. In any case, the citizen journalism site theUptake.org has video of an interview with the woman just after the rally. It's done with a cell phone camera. But uptake.org is a known quantity site. And CNN's Dana Bash and NBC's Adam Aigner appear in the video. So with those caveats, I think we can be confident of the provenance of the video.
You can see the video I've embedded below. The gist is that Quinnell apparently did say "Arab terrorist." (ed.note: It would be more accurate to say that she insisted he was one in the interview. It's unclear from interview whether she actually used the second word with McCain.) She got the idea from a pamphlet she got not from the McCain campaign but from a fellow volunteer at the local McCain headquarters, where she's a volunteer. She's been sending the pamphlet to people in her area. And she thinks that McCain really knows that Obama's Arab but didn't want to get into it with her on camera. (You can read a transcript at the Uptake.org site.)
Now, this video and Quinnell I think kind of speak for themselves. But what a number of readers have pointed out about the first video (where she's speaking to McCain) is this telling moment after McCain says, "No, Ma'am" the first time. Quinnell says 'no?' But the tone is the key. She's surprised. Apparently genuinely surprised. Almost like, wait, I got something wrong? The reply really captures everything that's going on here.
As every day brings new instances of McCain-Palin crowds denouncing the Democratic nominee as a "terrorist" or "traitor" and in some cases even calling for his blood, Michael Barone bemoans the "Coming Obama Thugocracy." If the American right has lost its electoral edge and standing with the public at large, it has not lost its telltale imperviousness to irony.
In many ways it seems Barone is settling in to be one of the spokesman of the high-brow version of the revanchist paranoid right we're seeing on display in many of those McCain rallies.
This afternoon on the campaign trail, John McCain began dialing back (or began trying to appear to be dialing back) the rising tide of hatred and verbal violence he and his running mate have been whipping up over recent weeks. After all we've seen over recent months, I think it would naive to conclude that McCain did this for any other reason but that the attacks appeared to be backfiring. Perhaps that's ungenerous. But to think so requires a leap of faith, a judgment not grounded in any evidence from the last year of the man's behavior. The aim of such a bludgeoning assault is to force the subject of Obama's relationship to Ayers back to the center of the campaign dialogue. But that's not what happened. By week's end that campaign narrative was all about the ferocity and recklessness of McCain's attacks.
There's something else to note too. Over the last 48 hours several name brand Republicans have come out and either chided or denounced McCain's borderline incitement. And given how taboo it is to level such criticism of your own nominee at this stage of the election you have to assume these criticisms were only the tip of the iceberg, with a far more intense and angry barrage of criticism voiced privately.
Here are a few clips put together by CNN that are worth watching.
The first passage to watch starts at 25 seconds in. A participant tells McCain he's "scared" of any Obama presidency and McCain responds that he "is a decent person and a person you do not have to be scared [of] as President of the United States."
Those are the words. But look at the facial expressions. McCain looks down as he says it and has the countenance of someone who been forced to tell someone else they're sorry. There's some mix of gritting your teeth and saying something you don't want to say mixed with some sort of shamefacedness. Look at the video. Because while I feel like I intuitively 'get' the gestures I find it hard to quite capture them in words. Perhaps you'll do better and you can share your thoughts with me.
In the next clip McCain is speaking up close with a woman in the audience who says she can't trust Obama and then blurts out that it's because he's "Arab". Some reports have it that she said 'Arab terrorist'. But at least on this tape only 'Arab' is audible.
McCain shakes his head, as though losing his patience and snatches the mic back out of woman's hands. "No, Ma'am. No, Ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues." Again, there's a lot there when you actually see the video. And I encourage you to watch.
I get from his expression a sense of a man that is, in addition to all the other things he's angry about, is frustrated or angry at the situation he's gotten himself into. But he has sown the wind and now he's reaping the whirlwind. "Even," says TPM Reader RB, "as he says 'You don't have to be scared of an Obama presidency' to a handful of followers (and, more importantly, of national reporters), he is spending millions to bombard as many people as he can with the ad named "Dangerous". The small hand giveth, and the large hand taketh away."
And yet this conveys too much suggestion of planning and intent. I have more the sense of someone desperately casting about and losing control of the situation itself. Even hypocrites can get in over their heads. Indeed, in a more nuts-and-bolts strategic sense McCain has really gotten himself into a hole because the campaign he's been running has almost entirely been premised on the claim that you should be scared of an Obama presidency. Not that McCain, if he'd run a very different campaign, couldn't have run on issue disagreements with Obama. But right now if you take away fear of Obama becoming president, there's almost no reason not to vote for him since McCain has basically conceded the issue agenda to Obama. If you look at every poll for months, voters are dying for change. Fear of Obama is the only thing keeping him from leaving McCain in the dust. Take that away and McCain's done.
I'm not sure what else to say about this episode. But it is something to behold.
I need your help. And I'd really appreciate it if you can spare a little time for this.
As you know the current TPM commenting and blogging set up leaves a lot to be desired. And this weekend we're doing some final testing of our upgraded system that we're hoping to roll out on Monday. The features are much more robust than the current setup. And they make it easier to follow conversations you're participating.
But we need some more readers to volunteer to test the new set up before we launch. It doesn't take a lot of time. We just want you to try out the new version of the site which is currently on a non-public server as we get the final bugs out. Trying the new commenting system, do a test blog post, try out a few of the new tools.
Like I said, I'd really appreciate it if folks can help us out with this. It doesn't take much time and it will help us give you a much better experience in the time you spend on all the TPM network sites, and especially here at TPMCafe.
If you can help us tonight that's great but over the weekend will help too. If you're game please send an email to tpmbeta (at) gmail.com and we'll get you set up and ready to go.
The McCain campaign is now broadening their attack on Obama's past association with William Ayers to include Michelle Obama -- even though McCain has repeatedly said spouses should be off limits during the campaign.
The attack? Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers' wife and fellow former Weatherman, went to work in 1984 for the major Chicago-based national law firm of Sidley & Austin, and three years later, Michelle joined the mega-firm as well.
That's the entire attack. We wish we were joking. But we aren't.
The U.S. Secret Service is looking into reports that a crowd member yelled,"Kill him!" while Gov. Sarah Palin was talking about Sen. Barack Obama during her Clearwater rally Monday.
The incident reportedly occurred after Palin questioned Obama's patriotism because of his acquaintance with William Ayers, a Chicago university professor who was an anti-Vietnam War radical in the 1970s.
Apparently the only public evidence of the "kill him" shout is a Washington Post news story Tuesday by reporter Dana Milbank, who covered the rally.
Milbank later was quoted in an interview with the Politico Web site as saying he thought the shout may have been a reference to Ayers, not Obama.
A few points are worth noting here. Milbank appears to be the only direct source for this. We've had numerous angry audience members, cries of 'terrorist' and 'treason' and so forth. But this was definitely one of the most inflammatory. Perhaps Milbank misheard. Let's hope so. Regardless, it makes sense to look into it and find out just what happened.
Earlier this afternoon I wrote about the ACORN story and the right's effort to lie to people and fool them into thinking this has anything to do with voter fraud. This email just came in from TPM Reader DW ...
McCain's team has been pushing it on reporters today and just put out one of the most obvious web videos yet.
I say "obvious" because the implication of the 24/7 Fox coverage is made blatant. It's transference. It's saying to white voters, "we know you're angry about the economy. Don't blame Wall Street. Blame the n-----s."
McCain's going to lose, and he knows it. This is a 90-second ad aimed at the base who are watching Fox News. But he's setting up a large proportion (maybe the majority) of the GOP base to believe that scary blacks stole the election for Barack Obama. He's stoking race hatred. He is scum, and if in 10 years his name isn't synonymous with Lester Maddox and George Wallace than historians won't have done their job.
It's really true. The essence of McCain's campaign now appears to amount to prepping McCain's base to believe they didn't really lose the election. The election was stolen from them by Barack, his army of gangsters and black street hustlers, and possibly Osama bin Laden too.
How long after the election before John McCain shows "contrition" for how he campaigned?
Late Update: TPM Reader ST thinks we'll be waiting a long time ...
McCain will never apologize. This is his last shot, and he knows it. Maintaining his viability after embarrassing losses is what all of the previous apologies were for. Should he lose, he will no longer have any viability to protect, so he will switch to a shrill defense of his actions until the day he mercifully fades from the public eye.
The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.
ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.
I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.
To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News ...
At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.
But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.
Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.
The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.
Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.
Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.
It's that simple.
Late Update: McCain's sleaze and disgrace just runs deeper and deeper. This just in from TPM Reader DW ...
McCain's team has been pushing it on reporters today and just put out one of the most obvious web videos yet.
I say "obvious" because the implication of the 24/7 Fox coverage is made blatant. It's transference. It's saying to white voters, "we know you're angry about the economy. Don't blame Wall Street. Blame the n-----s."
McCain's going to lose, and he knows it. This is a 90-second ad aimed at the base who are watching Fox News. But he's setting up a large proportion (maybe the majority) of the GOP base to believe that scary blacks stole the election for Barack Obama. He's stoking race hatred. He is scum, and if in 10 years his name isn't synonymous with Lester Maddox and George Wallace than historians won't have done their job.
It's really true. The essence of McCain's campaign now appears to amount to prepping McCain's base to believe they didn't really lose the election. The election was stolen from them by Barack and his army of gangsters and black street hustlers.
With John McCain descending further every day toward sleaze and hate speech, 'how low can he go' is a question that has to be revisited almost every day. But it seems time again to review the ugly, hypocritical record in full ...
John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.
At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, "Kill him!" At one of your rallies, someone called out, "Terrorist!" Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee - an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.
Shame!
John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.
You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.
Some McCain campaign officials are becoming concerned about the hostility that attacks against Sen. Obama are whipping up among Republican supporters. During an internal conference call Thursday, campaign officials discussed how the tenor of the crowds has turned on the media and on Sen. Obama.
Borderline criminal incitement will do that. But hey, whatever it takes.
(ed.note: This is not a laughing matter. So I want to be clear what I was alluding to when I referred to "borderline criminal incitement." John McCain has a first amendment right to smear and (at least free of criminal penalties) slander Barack Obama by suggesting he's in league with terrorists. But as we've seen many times, even offhandedly threatening comments directed at a Secret Service protected individual, can earn you a visit from the guys with the earpieces. And McCain and Palin are now routinely holding rallies in which they whip supporters into such a delirium by castigating Obama as a dangerous terrorist-lover that members of the audience shout what can very reasonably be interpreted as threats against Obama's safety. Am I saying they're breaking the law? No. But I do think they're nudging up against the envelope and getting near that line beyond which, if McCain were not a presidential candidate, his rallies would be getting some attention from those charged with protecting Obama's safety.)
Here's the exchange between McCain and an audience member today in Wisconsin (courtesy of this diarist at Daily Kos, and confirmed against the original video by me) ...
Audience member: Will you assure us that as president you will take immediate action to investigate, prosecute and name the names of the people actually responsible?
McCain: I will. And it is already a matter of record that members, Democrat members of Congress fought against reform and it is a matter of record and hearings that they said everything was fine. Senator Obama a year ago said that these kinds of subprime loans are, quote, fine with him. And the fact is that the same people that are now claiming credit for this rescue are the same ones that were willing co-conspirators in causing this problem that it is. And you know their names. And you will know more of their names. Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd are two of them.
In advance of tomorrow's release of the Alaska legislature's report on the troopergate investigation, the McCain-Palin campaign has released its own investigative report clearing Palin of any wrongdoing.
As two major developments become increasingly likely - a Democratic presidential victory on November 4 and a sustained economic crisis - Barack Obama faces a difficult choice: does he begin now to prepare the electorate for tough times, or does he continue to maintain a politically contrived optimism on the assumption that he can shift gears after election day.
The short-term incentives are all on the side of maintaining a happy face: As things stand, Obama keeps moving ahead in the polls, winning debates and expanding his hold on battleground states. Why junk a winner?
Conversely, Obama and his aides have to calculate how the rhetoric of his campaign will influence his ability to govern. On this score, there is wide disagreement, with political scientists, strategists and political analysts - in responses given to the Huffington Post - all over the map.
"All of the things they said about Barack Obama in the TV, on the TV, at their rallies, and now on YouTube ... John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him ... In my neighborhood, when you've got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him."
After the election, in the interests of national reconciliation, I imagine Obama and Biden may allow McCain to make special non-custodial visits to his testicles.
The image is coming into focus. Even McCain's confidants are now suggesting that it was his anger and frustration with Obama that led him to embrace Steve Schmidt's Willie Horton-on-Steroids campaign for the White House. And whether it's the appearance before the Des Moines Register Editorial board or his tense refusal to make eye contact during the first presidential debate, I don't think many people would deny at this point that McCain's hostility and contempt for Obama -- what even Wolf Blitzer calls his "disdain" -- is palpable.
After the first debate many people wondered aloud whether it was hostility and contempt or fear and intimidation that kept McCain from looking Obama in the face even once. But with two weeks and more evidence to consider, it is clear that it was both: Hostility that is magnified by the person's mortifying inability to face the person who inspires it. That's the kind of unchanneled, clogged up anger that makes you unsteady, that makes you make mistakes.
McCain's moral cowardice has been one of the subtexts of this campaign ever since he wound up the nomination and turned his attention to Barack Obama. But I did not realize it would reveal itself in such a physical dimension.
The tell came this week as McCain unearthed the Ayers story which, for whatever its merits, was fully aired months ago and has no clear relation to the particulars of October other than McCain's collapsing poll numbers. He's on it. Palin's on it. He's releasing slashing new TV ads like this one. Both of them are ginning their crowds up into spiraling gyres of right-wing delirium -- a ready-made Lord of the Flies (and let's admit that's a gentle allusion, given the tone of these barnburners) if Obama happened into one of the auditoriums at the wrong moment.
He ever swaggered on for a couple days about how he was going to 'take the gloves off' when he met up with Obama in Nashville. But when the two of them were there in each others physical presence ... nothing. By a myriad of gestures and reactions Obama owned him.
Nor is it a matter of shifting off the tactics, because as soon as McCain made his hasty retreat from the stage at Debate #2 he was right back at it. In every other aspect of life, high and low, refined and unlovely, we have a word for that kind of behavior: cowardice.
And now Obama can lightly taunt McCain with that very cowardice, his inability to just say it to his face. And if my take on the inner workings of McCain's mind at the moment is right that should simply unhinge him even more.
Couldn't agree more with my friend Sullivan -- the idea that Obama drove McCain to become a lying sleaze by refusing to agree to the 78 townhall debates or whatever it was just doesn't wash.
In his statement to the legislative inquiry (which was supposed to remain confidential but promptly released to the press by the McCain campaign) Todd Palin admits that he'd been trying to get his trooper brother-in-law fired for years. But he insists, improbably, that that didn't have anything to do with the subsequent dismissal of the guy he and Gov. Palin were pressuring to fire him. That, and he too says, Walt Monegan, the Commissioner of Public Safety at the center of the story, was not fired but rather resigned.
In one of the odder parts of the deposition, he seems to have implied that two reasons Monegan was actually fired were for emailing the governor reports that she'd driven with her newborn son without a car seat and that he didn't have a state plane available enough for her trips.
For those of you keeping score, the Palins' purported rationales for firing Monegan are tellingly similar to those originally put forward for firing those US Attorneys -- vague and barely consequential complaints that no one ever seems to have mentioned before the press started asking questions, peppered with occasional defenses of the reasons for the firing which they claim aren't even the real reasons.
And oh yeah, he wasn't fired. He was reassigned but decided to quit.
With any luck the voters will spare the country from this intemperate, thuggish man.
"I am surprised that, you know, we've been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn't willing to say it to my face. But I guess we've got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate."
You'll remember that new plan to refinance people's mortgages that John McCain sprung on everyone in last night's debate in a typically mavericky fashion. Well, after about twenty hours of thinking it over, it seems McCain wants to make the plan completely different.
As seen at recent McCain events, this afternoon's crowd was vocal in their support for McCain and their anger with Senator Obama. At one point one man could be heard yelling, "Off with his head," when McCain spoke about Obama's tax plan. That enthusiasm was even more present during Palin's remarks, and as other observers have reported in the past, today there was a sizeable number of people making their way towards the exit after McCain's running mate left the podium.
Like I said, I think it's going to take a few burning in effigies to catch people's attention at this point.
Laissez-faire taboos and financial benchmarks get knocked down with dizzying speed in recent economic news. But this article just out from the Times seems like a pretty big deal.
As regular readers know, I've been closely following the opinions of economists like Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and others who have been arguing that the concept behind the original Paulson plan is fundamentally flawed -- not because of the size itself, or even so much because of who might benefit, but because it does not directly address what they see as the fundamental nature of the crisis. Rather than buying up 'toxic debts', they say we should be taking this vast sum of money Congress has just appropriated and injecting the capital directly into the banking system. In more nuts and bolts language, that means the US government buying big stakes in many of our largest financial institutions.
My read of what Krugman was saying a week or more ago was that the bill Congress passed was better than nothing since it was flexible enough to allow either this or the next Treasury Secretary to, in effect, accomplish that recapitalization through the back door.
In any case, if this late Times report is accurate, the folks at the Treasury have come around to the idea of doing it through the front door and soon. As an economist friend just cautioned me, the devil's very much in the details. But on the face of it at least the Times seems to be saying that the pressure of events, and the failure of everything else they've tried to date, is pushing the folks at Treasury to embrace some version of the Swedish model Krugman, DeLong and other have championed.
My lack of economics knowledge makes it the better part of wisdom to leave it at that till other more knowledgeable people weigh in. But we may be seeing a real sea change here.
Late Update: It seems Paulson may have telegraphed that this was where he was heading in a press conference earlier today.
John McCain himself has admitted that he is not the best student of the economy, but tonight the Republican nominee for president missed the official mark by a fairly long-shot with his discussion of unemployment during the Great Depression.
The question came up in those "presidential questions'' that CBS News has been asking of the candidates. The series aired tonight included the candidates' views of the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to this nation.
Both McCain and Democratic rival Barack Obama agreed that the best thing was the founding of the nation, the drafting of a Constitution that has served Americans through the centuries. But the Depression was the worst thing, in McCain's view, and slavery was the worst thing, in Obama's view.
"Maybe the worst thing that happened to America, in modern times is the Great Depression,'' McCain told CBS Evening News' Katie Couric. "It affected probably more, a greater percentage of our population than any other economic or other impact that we experienced. And literally, half the population, or 40 percent. Whatever it was, huge numbers that are incomprehensible were out of work. And people literally starved in America. And that, we can't ever repeat.''
It was big, all right. But, "whatever it was,'' it wasn't 40 or 50 percent. At the height, or nadir, of the Great Depression, unemployment reached 24.9 percent.
In most political speeches, the common refrain is "my fellow citizens".
John McCain just referred to the country as "my fellow prisoners."
"Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners and the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent."
Late Update: For what it's worth, my own hunch is that McCain's just gotten so in the habit of peppering his speeches with gratuitous POW references that it's hard to keep the two things separate.
Latter Update: Longtime TPM Reader GG says I'm being too kind: "If a Dem had made that statement (my fellow prisoners) and in that context, the repubs would loudly proclaim the man mad as a hatter and unfit for the presidency. And judging from other recent actions, he may very well be unfit and it would not be a service to the country to gloss it over."
Seems like almost every day now there's a McCain-Palin rally where the campaign has the candidates introduced by someone who hits on "Barack Hussein Obama". Just happened again in Bethlehem, PA. After the fifth or sixth time you pretty much know on the orders of the campaign. It is obviously with tacit approval (to believe anything else is to be a dupe at this point); and quite probably on the campaign's specific instructions.
Given the regularity of the cries of "treason" and "terrorist" and the like, and the frequency with which the screamers seem in oddly convenient proximity to the mics, we should probably be considering the possibly that these folks are campaign plants. It happens all the time. It's just that usually they don't scream out accusations of capital crimes.
Late Update: A thought. At what point do they start burning Obama in effigy at the Palin rallies?
It turns out that that "overhead projector" John McCain claimed Barack Obama tried to get a $3 million earmark for was actually money to rebuild Chicago's Adler Planetarium, the oldest planetarium in the United States.
McCain's "overhead projector" is the apparatus that runs the planetarium, which is a bit like calling the Palomar Observatory a new set of glasses.
We know Sen. Norm Coleman gets a special deal on his Capitol Hill pad. And a few days ago, Harper's Ken Silverstein got word that another one of his supporters, Nasser Kezeminy, covers the tab for Coleman's clothing budget.
This week a campaign trackerreporter for the Pioneer Press tried to get Coleman to say whether it was true. The answer? It's all about the angry bloggers ...
Late Update: Coleman's flack on the hot seat, too:
Now things are really heating up! Raul Martinez and state Democrats at a Miami press conference today looked to tie Lincoln Diaz-Balart to Puerto Rican senator Jorge de Castro Font, who was arrested by the FBI.
Dems charge that de Castro Font has "implicated" Diaz-Balart by alleging to "have traveled to Miami with Congressman Luis Fortuño of Puerto Rico to deliver a suitcase full of cash for Diaz-Balart's re-election campaign." The money was allegedly from a prominent PR family.
Diaz-Balart's campaign has called it a "desperate attack" and the congressman told reporters today that he got two checks from the family in 2006 -- totalling about $400.
Lots of you are addicted to polls and the latest political news in these final weeks before the election. Not just the bumpy daily presidential tracking numbers, but all the house and senate and state presidential numbers from around the country.
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As I said in my initial reaction, I thought this was a victory, though not a big one, on points for Obama. But in the context of the campaign, I think that's a substantial win for Obama. And like the first debate, I suspect this will continue the solidifying, reassuring effect that -- in retrospect -- was the key result of Debate #1.
One thing that occurs to me after taking some time to mull the exchange is this: where were McCain's new fisticuffs? Bill Ayers, Obama as a liar, terrorist, all the sludge we've seen over the last 72 hours? Yes, he was aggressive on policy. But that's what debates are about. But McCain didn't take any of the shenanigans from the campaign trail into this debate. Almost like he was unwilling to say any of it to Obama's face. Or at least that he knew he couldn't get away with it in front of a non-party-line audience.
On that note, let's review the McCain-Palin sludge-a-thon in today's episode of TPMtv ...
Late Update: TPM Reader ES sends in these thoughts, a different, but overlapping take ...
My intuition is that McCain conceded tonight. Sure, he shot a few across the bow (the 'that one' moment in particular) but he did not go nuclear. He did not engage Obama in the way Palin does on the stump with her references to Ayers, Rezko and Wright. It's as if McCain couldn't bring himself to do so. All his attacks were kind of half-hearted. He's given it his best shot, but when the time came to go for the killer punch, or at the very least, attempt one on prime-time national TV, he blinked. While he clearly despises Obama, he also clearly thinks too highly of himself to get down and dirty with his opponent. He'll do some on the stump, but not in a debate. Hence the show of disdain (and even the naked lies) - that's how McCain negotiates the contradiction between his anger, his frustration at losing to "that one," and his very elevated view of himself. It's like his nonstop talk of honor and victory in Iraq - everybody knows it is not about actual victory (whatever that may mean in Iraq) but about the perception and the narrative of a victorious and honorable exit. So from now on he's gonna let Palin take on the role of the bad cop and make a complete fool of herself (err, as if she had not already done that). He will play the whiny, droopy-eyed good cop. Since he can't have the presidency - quite the narcissistic wound - he will settle for the love of the Washington press corps.
Later Update: A few more responses from around the web ...
"John McCain had a very strong debate tonight. It's too bad for him that it came on a night when Barack Obama was nearly flawless." -- Stephen Hayes, The Weekly Standard.
"Foreign policy didn't come up much in tonight's presidential debate; but when it did, Sen. John McCain--whose strengths lie in this realm--seemed surprisingly unsteady while Sen. Barack Obama came off as more sure-footed than he did in the first contest." -- Fred Kaplan, Slate.
Noam Scheiber has a good summary of what happened at TNR. Obama dominated in what was supposed to be McCain's format. His answers were just much more clear and coherent than McCain's. And he unpacks an exchange that I referenced briefly in my live blog -- the key point in the debate when McCain repeatedly tried to point himself forward as the 'cool hand' at the tiller, appearing either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the last three weeks have made 'steady' one of the last words a lot of people associates with John McCain. As I wrote in the live blog, "Is McCain suddenly running against himself?". (See the video here.) Let's pick it up from Noam ...
More importantly, I thought the Pakistan exchange was the moment when son overtook father in the Oedipal drama that's been a subtext of this campaign. After Obama gave his initial response, McCain pressed the absurd line that his opponent didn't understand talking softly while carrying a big stick--that he was, in other words, erratic.
Coming from a candidate whose name has been synonymous with "erratic" these last several weeks, it left McCain dangerously exposed, and Obama didn't miss with his counterpunch. "This is the guy who sang, 'Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,' who called for the annihilation of North Korea. That I don't think is an example of 'speaking softly,'" he said. "This is the person who, after we had--we hadn't even finished Afghanistan, where he said, 'Next up, Baghdad.'" As if to add insult to injury, Obama nearly straight-armed McCain when he tried to interrupt, underscoring not only his intellectual advantages but also his physical ones.
I wasn't quite sure what to make of this when it happened. It sounded demeaning, but it happened as I was writing one of my posts. So I didn't get a chance to listen closely enough on the first round. But you be the judge ...
Late Update: Amazing how quickly they can get up new URLs these days.
You can see our initial comments on this below. And here's the video -- make your own judgments ...
Late Update: A few readers say the two shook hands right after the conclusion of the debate, at that moment where Brokaw told them they were in the way of his teleprompter. Here's what TPM Reader KP said ...
Hey, i watched the video of the debate. The moment right before Tom Brokaw told them they were in his way, they clearly shook hands vigorously. Then they took a moment to stand side by side for the audience and Brokaw was like, hey move it.
The moment you showed on video was when McCain was obviously presenting his wife to shake Obama's hand.
On the other hand, in the video above, Blitzer seemed to think they had no yet shaken hands.
Special Late Night D'oh Update: It turns out KP's right. They did shake hands right at the end of the debate, at the point where they got in the way of Brokaw's teleprompter. It wasn't on CNN or NBC but we just found it on ABC. No question. They shook hands before McCain later snubbed him and then ran off in a huff.
This debate struck me as a marginal victory for Obama on points, but because of the state of the race a substantial victory in terms of the overall race. Obama more than held his own. I think Obama's answers were more coherent. And there were several exchanges where I think Obama had very strong answers, which I noted in the live blogging. That said, McCain did fine. I think his supporters will think he put in a solid performance. But the bottom line is that right now McCain is losing. He has to shake things up. But he didn't.
Late Update: We just looked at the video. There's some room for interpretation. But it certainly looks like McCain left Obama hanging when Obama put his hand out to shake. But before you make up your mind, you should see the video. We'll have it for you shortly.
Later Update: We're getting conflicting reports on this handshake story. We're getting flooded by emails. So a lot of people definitely think they saw it. But like I said, we're going to be pulling the video shortly. So you can see for yourselves. One reader says that it was actually that moment where they were blocking the teleprompter that they were shaking their hands. The truth is, I think, that on TV it was hard to be sure quite what happened. So let's wait to see the video. And then we'll try to find out more about what happened.
10:20 PM ... I think McCain was just about to say, a tiny country in a tiny part of the world.
10:24 PM ... I think Tom Brokaw just won the contest for most positively stupid question of the evening.
10:32 PM ... Very strong conclusion by Obama. I think he served himself very well with that. Through the debate his answers have been more coherent; he's connected them better to ordinary concerns.
10:34 PM ... Really don't know if this 'steady hand at the tiller' line is a winner for McCain.
10:34 PM ... Okay, I'll give Brokaw that one. He ended on a funny line.
9:55 PM ... That's some of the best hair transplant debate humor I've heard in a while.
9:56 PM ... Lucky Obama jumped in there before Brokaw said time was up.
9:59 PM ... I think when you're the only one laughing at your jokes, there's a problem. ... (ed.note: 10:06 PM ... a number of readers say they heard one people laugh at this joke: Brokaw.)
10:00 PM ... I didn't realize that Brokaw would be so in the tank for McCain. I guess he's still the emissary?
10:02 PM ... Very solid turn of the question from Obama on Iraq/foreign policy. (I'm surprised Brokaw isn't cutting him off in the middle.) On the other hand TPM Reader JG, who says he's an Obama supporter, says I'm being too hard on Brokaw, he's just had a hard time controlling the time, but not unfair.
10:07 PM ... Is McCain suddenly running against himself? Saying we need a "cool hand at the tiller"? Someone who understands our limits?
10:09 PM ... Curious what people think. But even trying to judge this from the vantage point of an undecided voter, I don't get the sense that McCain is scoring many points in this foreign policy phase of the debate.
10:13 PM ... Has Brokaw ever interrupted McCain?
10:14 PM ... Green behind the ears? Guess that's a new metaphor. (10:23 PM ... Hmmm, learn something new every day. Readers are sending me links to this phrase. I thought it was 'wet behind the ears' and that you can be 'green'. Didn't know they combined.) On the other hand, saying how McCain's a loose cannon freak is pretty good.
9:29 PM ... Except for defense, veterans affairs and "some other vital programs". Wow, that's pretty air tight.
9:30 PM ... This debate's so boring I don't even know what to tell the staff to upload to youtube.
9:33 PM ... $20 for whoever can grab John McCain's notepad and let me see it.
9:37 PM ... Man, McCain's one humongous liar on tax policy.
9:37 PM ... Tom's a complete Washington insider so he basically knows Jack about Social Security. And yet, he thinks he knows a lot. So sad. What a fool. I'll try to explain more on this front tomorrow.
9:41 PM ... Wheezy. "Social Security's not that tough." Just phase it out and replace it with private accounts.
9:42 PM ... Exactly. A Medicare Closing Commission.
9:43 PM ... Why does Brokaw always cut off Obama?
9:44 PM ... Why is Obama so hung up on Nuclear safety?
9:47 PM ... Wow, what's Brokaw's deal? What a silly whiner.
9:49 PM ... Can Brokaw keep the McCain love in check? Please?
9:50 PM ... TPM Reader AL doesn't think much of Brokaw's job as moderator either: "I've observed better fairness by officials of the World Wrestling Federation."
9:52 PM ... When is Brokaw going to tell McCain how good a job he's doing?
9:00 PM ... Wondering if McCain's gotten any eye contact lessons since the other debate.
9:05 PM ... Nice townhall meeting crack!
9:08 PM ... I'm really curious to hear how this buyout would work.
9:09 PM ... We're told this audience was selected to be a cross-section of the local community. But is it not obvious that it's weighted to bald men?
9:16 PM ... Brokaw: Mr. Obama, are really saying that the economy is about to explode and we're all going to lose our homes and die? Hmmm. Seems he phrased the question a bit differently for McCain.
9:18 PM ... Sir, In my hand I am holding a letter, and Sen. Obama's name is not on it.
9:21 PM ... Can't we have the angry McCain?
9:22 PM ... McCain: Just go look at the ratings of some right-wing groups. They don't like Obama at all.
9:25 PM ... Think we're having some coherence problems in this answer.
9:27 PM ... (If I weren't worried about having clever things to say, I'd say that both are doing decently. But McCain sounds kind of old and a little incoherent. And Obama's answers are more clear and organized. Also doing better at connecting answers to families. Also Brokaw's a bit of a whiner, no?)
I don't want to alarm anyone. But you should be aware there's a significant chance we'll see some real tire-swinging from tonight's moderator Tom Brokaw. Brokaw is a pro with a long and distinguished career. But he does appear to have a real thing for the tire-swing. As the Timesreported at the end of September, in recent months Brokaw has served as NBC's emissary to the McCain campaign "to assure the candidate's aides that -- despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular -- Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News. Mr. Brokaw said he had been told by a senior McCain aide, whom he did not name, that the campaign had been reluctant to accept an NBC representative as one of the moderators of the three presidential debates -- until his name was invoked."
And remember that it was Brokaw, during the Democratic convention, who went on at some length how Bill Clinton and all Democrats had to be really careful about criticizing John McCain because of his time as a POW ...
Again, I'm not saying Brokaw's some hack. He's definitely. not. But he does seem to have remained captive to the McCain myth, long after many of his generational pundit peers have hopped off the tire-swing for good.
Even those of us who didn't go into the campaign with an over-rosy view of McCain have been stunned at just how big a lying sleaze-peddler and hypocrite he's turned out to be. In today's episode of TPMtv, we take a look at the awful truth ...
I saw this on CNN early this morning. John Roberts was talking about the smear campaign, trying to do the equivalency dance, and actually said (I'm paraphrasing) "Obama is trying to tie McCain to the Keating Five". Now, maybe I'm wrong, but isn't that like saying John Lennon was "tied" to the Beatles? He was a Beatle! John McCain WAS one of the Keating Five.
Politico's Mike Allen seems to have bought into the idea that John McCain has become so angry and grumpy because he's been forced by Barack Obama's high poll numbers to run a sleazy, dishonest campaign. But sleazy and dishonest isn't the real John McCain. So he's grumpy about it.
But isn't the more straightforward explanation that McCain is angry and grumpy because all the elite pundits who used to fawn over him now think he's a dishonest sleaze?
As we saw yesterday, John McCain's latest gambit is to juice up his and Palin's crowds into calling Obama a "terrorist", hurling racial epithets at black reporters (presumably, there aren't many in attendance as supporters), or just random calls for murder. This morning there was more ...
In the latest instance of inflammatory outbursts at McCain-Palin rallies, a crowd member screamed "treason!" during an event on Tuesday after Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of criticizing U.S. troops.
"[Obama] said, too, that our troops in Afghanistan are 'air raiding villages and killing civilians,'" Palin said, mischaracterizing a 2007 remark by Obama. "I hope Americans know that is not what our brave men and women in uniform are doing in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is fighting terrorism and protecting us and protecting our freedom."
Shortly afterward, a male member of the crowd in Jacksonville, Florida, yelled "treason!" loudly enough to be picked up by television microphones.
Everyone knows the second presidential debate is tonight. But I'm not sure everyone knows this one is in the townhall format. As a general matter, I'm not sure which of the two candidates is better in that format. What I do know is that townhall-style debates are almost always rough going for the candidate who's on the attack. Partisans like attack politics. And while persuadable or independent voters may be affected by harsh attacks, they seldom 'like' it when they see it. And that puts McCain in something of a box, because he's the one who needs to shake things up in a big way.
So my question is whether it's going to be the tooth-n-claw McCain who shows up tonight or the 'honor song-n-dance' McCain.
McCain had said that racially explosive attacks related to Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are off limits. But Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in an interview published Monday: "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
So we have McCain today getting his crowd riled up asking who Barack Obama is and then apparently giving a wink and a nod when one member of the crowd screams out "terrorist."
And later we have Sarah Palin with the same mob racket, getting members of the crowd to yell out "kill him", though it's not clear whether the call for murder was for Bill Ayers or Barack Obama. It didn't seem to matter.
These are dangerous and sick people, McCain and Palin. Whatever it takes. Stop at nothing.
Al Franken seems to be having some luck tying Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) to Sen. McCain's health care plan. Sounds like something other senate candidates might try.
Here's Coleman's spokesman Luke Friedrich repeated ducking questions about whether his boss supports or opposes McCain's plan ...
Did John McCain really just say that Barack Obama gets "touchy" and "angry" whenever he gets questioned on his credentials or policies? I know that projection is a common psychological phenomenon, especially for those who find themselves in desperate situations. But for a set piece speech that must mean it's afflicted McCain's entire campaign.
I mean, you remember McCain's boil over performance at the Des Moines Register editorial board last week ..
And now a member of the paper's editorial board, who I assume was in the room, is asking whether McCain is just too touchy and unstable to be a safe person to have as president.
You can feel it in the clenched muscles in his throat, the narrowing of his eyes, the controlled tone with which he handles a question he doesn't like, as if struggling to contain something that might spill out. We've seen that body language on TV. But around a Des Moines Register table Tuesday, the anger and tension were palpable. And unsettling.
Eeesh ...
I think the lesson is that it's hard to take potshots about the other guy being 'angry' when you're in the midst of having your own on-air breakdown with fifty years of anger and resentment boiling to the surface.
Late Update: TPM Reader NB chimes in ...
What a weird spectacle McCain's speech was this afternoon. It was as though McCain went out of the way to take every criticism that has come his way and attribute it to Barack Obama. In addition to being jarringly at odds with reality, it also seemed to undermine the larger questions that the campaign seems to want to be raising.
McCain rallies start in referring to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama.
Late Update: We're here at TPM World HQ listening to McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds be interviewed by Andrea Mitchell. And the subtext of even Mitchell's questions seem to be that McCain is pretty much wall-to-wall sleaze at this point. One interesting thing to consider is that we may be on the verge of seeing McCain not only lose the presidency but his entire reputation as well. He'll lose everything but the houses and the fancy lifestyle. Joe Klein has a run-down on all McCain's latest sleaze.
McCain's course correction reflects a growing case of nerves within his high command as the electoral map has shifted significantly in Obama's favor in the past two weeks.
"It's a dangerous road, but we have no choice," a top McCain strategist told the Daily News. "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose."
Faced with health care plan numbers that didn't add up, McCain's economics advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin has just announced that McCain will make up the difference with big cuts to Medicare. I guess they really are writing off Florida.
Let me be clear, on the face of it, Neel Kashkari looks impressive. But VP isn't even a high position at Goldman. And his background appears to be in tech investing, though he has been leading up Treasury's response to the housing meltdown (a ambiguous recommendation in itself.)
In any case, I want to be clear. I'm not saying Kashkari is another Michael Brown. But he is going to be in charge of upwards of a trillion dollars, in a task that would challenge an economics and finance genius from any era, and one rife with ethical and conflict of interest pitfalls.
I think we need to hear a lot more about the thinking behind this appointment.
For weeks, many of you have been asking me, why haven't the Democrats been bringing up McCain's history as a member of the Keating Five? Especially since it ties so clearly into today's financial crisis, his wife's company's ties to Keating and his history of supporting lax banking and finance industry regulation? When is the Obama campaign going to bring this up, I keep hearing.
Palin hops on the Race-Bait Express and rides it hard. Even the APsees it ...
By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.
And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.
John McCain being interviewed by Mother Jones magazine in the Nov/Dec 1998 issue (emphasis added) ...
MJ: You not only have had combat experience in Vietnam, but you were also a prisoner of war. When you look at terrorism right now, with people like Osama bin Laden, do you have any reservations about watching strikes like that?
John McCain: You could say, Look, is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that's depicted? Most of us have never heard of him before. And where there is a parallel with Vietnam is: What's plan B? What do we do next? We sent our troops into Vietnam to protect the bases. Lyndon Johnson said, Only to protect the bases. Next thing you know.... Well, we've declared to the terrorists that we're going to strike them wherever they live. That's fine. But what's next? That's where there might be some comparison.
(ed.note: Special thanks to TPM Reader SM for the tip.)
