Category Archives: Bush Administration

Time and Tides

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These days events and issues and the nation seem to be sweeping toward some irresistible something that’s bigger than all of us. It feels like river currents rushing toward a waterfall. Have you felt that, too?

History shows us that no status quo lasts forever, no matter how solid and immutable it seems. Sometimes changes are slow and imperceptible, but occasionally some confluence of events breaks the old order apart and sets up a new one almost overnight, or at least within the space of a few years instead of a few decades. Most of the time invasion or insurrection are involved in these changes, but not always. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a prime example of events taking over and forcing change almost overnight without gunfire.

I’m not saying I expect armed revolution or a change in our form of government. I am saying that the political status quo that has prevailed in America for the last few decades is disintegrating rapidly. I suspect the next two or three years will be disorienting for most of us.

Assuming Barack Obama wins the election — it’s looking good, folks, but it ain’t inevitable — I don’t expect a replay of the Clinton years, in which a huge right-wing juggernaut worked relentlessly to destroy the Democratic administration.

Oh, they will try. I fully expect that within two weeks of an Obama inauguration, Tony Blankley will be all over cable television explaining ever so unctuously that the Obama administration has already failed. Hell, he might not even wait until Obama is inaugurated before declaring the Obama administration has already failed.

But Blankley is complaining that other “conservatives” are abandoning the cause, leaving him to fight on alone. His old comrades in arms, like George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks have left the field of battle, he thinks.

In an Obama administration, George Will will still be an insufferable prick, Peggy Noonan will still mistake her psychological projections for insight, and David Brooks will still be an idiot. Some things will not change. What will change, I believe, is that the Right’s ability to dominate the national conversation and overwrite real issues with its phantasmagorical agenda will be much diminished. This will happen not because they’ve changed, but because the political climate of America will have changed.

The powerful Rabid Right is becoming old and shabby and, like, so last decade.

Please let me be clear that I do not expect to wake up on January 21 living in political utopia. I’m a Buddhist, remember; all phenomena are dukkha. And as I said, there will be massive disorientation while the Powers That Be figure out the new rules — indeed, until they begin to notice there are new rules. And there will be disorientation across the political spectrum, not just on the Right. It will take some time yet before Democrats in Congress stop cringing in fear of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

We see disorientation already in the way the McCain campaign evokes a “real” America that looks like the America they thought was out there somewhere, but which they are finding strangely elusive. Rosa Brooks writes,

The GOP code isn’t hard to crack: There’s the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there’s the “real” America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are … well … white. … But with each passing year, the “real” America of GOP mythmaking bears less and less resemblance to the America most Americans live in.

At the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes that “the tax argument still works.” He lays out the arguments that he thinks McCain might still employ to pull off a win. Remarkably, these are the same arguments McCain has been employing and which are not working.

Meanwhile, Karl’s masterpiece, his personal Frankenstein monster, is a pariah even in his own party. People still listen to Karl … why, exactly?

The GOP is losing because they are marketing to a demographic that doesn’t exist — America circa 1980-2004. The political shift began with Katrina. It is being accelerated by the financial crisis. We are rushing toward something that is very different from where we have been. My hope is that Barack Obama is the leader he seems to be, and will steer us into a soft landing.

See also: Joe Klein, “Why Barack Obama Is Winning.”

Don’t Cry for Me, Pennsylvania

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Frankly, the reported $150K spent on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe doesn’t strike me as outrageous. Given the obscene amounts of money a campaign costs, $150K is just pocket change. And whatever else you think of her, she looks fabulous.

Sarah, honey, do you get to keep the clothes? Or have they made you save the tags so they can return them when the election’s over? Just askin’.

Marc Ambinder writes that Republicans are disgusted.

This sort of spending is without precedent — the closest approximation for any campaign I’ve ever covered is make-up expenses for television interviews and commercial shoots — , and [McCain-Palin spokesperson Tracey] Schmitt’s weakly defensive response tonight indicates that the campaign is deeply embarrassed by it and has nothing to say in their defense.

Some people think blowing that much money on clothes and makeup when the country is moving into recession sends the wrong message. Well, I say lah-dee-dah. What better time to spend like there’s no tomorrow? You could argue that it’s just when people are feeling poor and shabby that they need a fashionista to look up to. Why do you think all those Fred Astair-Ginger Rogers musicals, in which the glam stars danced in lavish gowns and swanky tuxes, were so popular during the Depression? And let’s not forget Eva Peron’s fabulous Christian Dior wardrobe. The peasants loved her.

As I see it, Palin is just paving the way for elitism to be popular again.

You know her fans expect her to be beautiful. Why else would they have been so upset at the Newsweek cover photo that showed all of her pores? You would think that somewhere in that $150K she could have found the money for a decent facial. Or at least, tweezers.

But let us not be catty. Frankly, as a hillbilly girl in the Big Apple myself, I appreciate the need to fit in, wardrobe-wise, and not look the country bumpkin. The upper echelons of the GOP, the people who show up at the gazillion-dollar-a-plate fundraisers, probably do not shop at Wal-Mart, either.

So go for it, Sarah. And burn those tags so you can’t return the clothes.

Smart Talk

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Some right-wing blogs are discussing articulation versus intelligence. Todd Zywicki writes,

This piece by Randall Hoven on American Thinker raises a question that I’ve been wondering about, namely how it came to be that many people believe that Sarah Palin is not smart enough to be Vice-President. I think that what it probably explains it is a tendency to confuse glibness with intelligence, or perhaps more accurately, to confuse the ability to “bullshit” with actual intelligence.

This begs the question, what does he mean by “smart”? For the record, I don’t think Sarah Palin is stupid, if by “not stupid” we mean having a capacity to learn. I am guessing she has an above-average IQ.

I would say the better word is “unprepared.” Her knowledge of world affairs is, shall we say, shallow. But I think if someone gave her a job in the State Department that required her to learn, in five to ten years she might be a match for Henry Kissinger. Not that I care for Kissinger, but whatever you think of him, he’s not stupid.

For that matter, George W. Bush probably has, or had, as much cognitive capacity as most other presidents. People who know him say he’s not stupid, just intellectually lazy. If something interests him, he can learn about it quickly enough. It’s just that there’s a world of stuff that doesn’t interest him.

Lack of intelligence and lack of knowledge are both called “stupid,” but they are not the same thing. I get the impression that until recently Sarah Palin has not given much thought to issues that don’t directly affect Alaska. And that was fine, as long as her job was all about Alaska. But it’s not fine for a POTUS. And the depth of knowledge she needs to be POTUS is not something even a very bright person could pick up in a few easy lessons. It takes years.

I spent a lot of my life editing other people’s writing. I noticed a long time ago that sloppy language reveals sloppy thinking. The blog post linked above is an example; the words smart and intelligence are not used with precision. “Smart” means a lot of different things. Palin is smart in some ways and not smart in others.

And there are people who use language in lieu of thinking. Victor Davis Hanson’s verbose essays are mostly word salads, for example. Christopher Hitchens can turn out clever sentences, but he doesn’t tie his clever sentences together to make defensible arguments. He leaves gaps one could drive a truck through. His essays tend to be much less than the sum of their parts.

Some of us are better at writing than speaking. I’ve had a little experience at public speaking, and manage not to suck at it too much, but if I want to be very clear I’d rather write. I have sympathy for the candidates when their mouths get ahead of their heads and the words come out wrong. Sometimes a stumble is just a stumble and not anything to get excited about.

However, show me a person whose language is consistently sloppy, and I’ll show you a sloppy thinker. An adult of above-average intelligence, speaking or writing in his native language, ought to be able to convey his ideas coherently. His rhetoric may be wooden and graceless, and that’s OK, but if it’s fuzzy, it’s darn near certain his ideas are fuzzy, too.

Regarding Barack Obama — the blogger linked above says,

Obama has this ability to fall back on empty stock-phrases that he utters with a furrowed brow and gravitas, projecting a perception of intelligence and understanding even if what he is saying is largely devoid of substance. For instance, it seems relatively clear that neither McCain nor Obama has the slightest clue about what caused the financial crisis or what to do about it. But McCain’s discomfort and lack of knowledge when it comes to talking about the financial crisis is transparent, whereas Obama is able to cogently spout empty generalities that obscure his lack of knowledge.

It’s true that many of Obama’s stump speeches are more soaring rhetoric than substance. However, he is one of the few people in national politics who does do substance when it’s called for. The “race” speech and the “faith” speech are examples. The guy is a real thinker. You can tell he likes to dig beneath the surface of issues and understand them deeply. This is a trait I appreciate.

However, people who are sloppy thinkers themselves don’t appreciate clarity of thought. They like to wallow in the warm familiarity of stock phrases and comforting biases; all other communication bounces off them without leaving a dent. Anything that requires critical thinking to understand probably won’t register.

Collusion

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Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press:

Barack Obama’s legal team wants a special prosecutor to determine whether partisan politics is at play in a reported though unconfirmed Justice Department investigation of a voter registration effort which has been the target of numerous complaints of late, including one in Michigan.

With the election just over two weeks away, Bob Bauer, Obama’s chief lawyer, said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon that he is asking U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to to hand over to special prosecutor Nora Dannehy any probe into what Bauer called “bogus claims of vote fraud” that mirror concerns raised by Republicans two years ago.

According to a recent Justice Department report, those issues played a role in the controversy over the forced resignations of nine former federal prosecutors.

Bob Bauer was just on Olbermann’s program saying that there was an appearance of collusion between the McCain campaign and the White House. The Justice Department is engaged in “investigations” to bolster the McCain campaign’s claim that ACORN is destroying democracy as we know it.

Update: More details at Bloomberg.

Tanking

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The New York Post, which is “in the tank” for McCain, yesterday published an op ed by Charles Gasparino titled “AN OBAMA PANIC? MARKETS FEAR HIS POLICIES.”

Naturally, on the same day, the the Dow Jones industrial average rose by 936 points. News this morning is that Asian and European markets are rising again today.

The rally has less to do with either Obama’s or McCain’s campaign promises than with the Bush Administration’s decision to follow Europe’s lead and invest up to $250 billion in U.S. banks. But my point is that we seem to have entered a period in which the wingnuts cannot catch a break.

Oh, and did I mention Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics? Sweet.

Anyway — this morning the McCain campaign released Senator McCain’s plan for creating new JOBS. We know this because the title of the proposal (PDF) is JOBS FOR AMERICA: The McCain Economic Plan. So how does McCain plan to create new JOBS? I skimmed through the report looking for any statement related to jobs, and here is the plan:

  • He’s going to balance the budget by 2013. Sure he is.
  • He will lower the rate of corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent. And balance the budget.
  • He will invest in technology.
  • He wants to build 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030, which will create 700,000 jobs.
  • He will boost exports with lots of new free trade agreements.
  • Investing in clean coal technology will revitalize coal mining — another 30,000 jobs, at least.
  • “As Americans retro-fit to improve energy efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint, jobs will flow to the U.S. providers of insulation, windows, appliances, and other sources of energy efficiency.”
  • He wants to overhaul unemployment insurance to make it a program for retraining and relocating people who have lost jobs. Uh, John? What if they don’t want to be relocated?

And that’s it. It took him 15 pages to explain that.

I want to point out that he makes no provision for corporations doing anything to get the 25 percent rate. In other words, they can cheerfully export jobs — excuse me, JOBS — overseas, and still get the 25 percent rate. Why cutting their tax rates would change that is beyond me. And of course free trade agreements have worked so well for us in the past.

If you want to see something truly pathetic, check out McCain’s “JOBS for America” video. It says nothing, but it says nothing with great decisiveness. Hysterical.

Clicking for America

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This is for all the uncommitted voters the cable networks round up to be in their focus groups and who say they wish the candidates would be more specific —

If you want details, don’t wait for details to be spoon fed to you through mass media. The candidates’ websites have the details. All you have to do is click and read.

And, to say one nice thing about the McCain campaign, I think their issues page is better designed and more inviting to read than the Obama issues page, which is a bit sterile in contrast. On the other hand, when you get beneath the interface, some of McCain’s content is a bit dated. His “Relief for American Families” section still promotes a summer gas tax holiday, for example. And much of the content is vague. You read that John McCain is going to act decisively to achieve this or that goal, but often the “how” is missing.

On Obama’s site you get how up the wazoo.

  • He has bulleted lists.
  • He has lots of bulleted lists.
  • His bulleted lists have bulleted lists.

So, next time you hear people complain they want more details on how the candidates stand on issues, please email them the URL to this post and tell them they don’t even have to get off their lazy butts to find the details. Just click. Do it for America.

Post-Debate Thread

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Flipping back and forth between CNN and MSNBC, it seems on the whole a consensus is forming among the bobbleheads that this debate was not a “game changer.” McCain needed a “decisive win,” Wolf Blitzer says, and he didn’t get it.

McCain was less dismissive of Obama as in the first debate — I don’t believe he said Obama “didn’t understand” this time — but he still seemed condescending, and I don’t think this is helping him.

Taegan Goddard gives it to Obama.

Tonight’s debate wasn’t even close. Sen. Barack Obama ran away with it — particularly when speaking about the economy and health care. Talking about his mother’s death from cancer was very powerful. On nearly every issue, Obama was more substantive, showed more compassion and was more presidential.

In contrast, Sen. John McCain was extremely erratic. Sometimes he was too aggressive (referring to Obama as “that one.”) Other times, he just couldn’t answer the question (on how he would ask Americans to sacrifice.) And his random attempts at jokes (hair transplants?) were just bad.

Update: From the Right — Andrew McCarthy at The Corner —

We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case. We can parse it eight ways to Sunday, but I think the commentary is missing the big picture. …

…Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left? Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Would you have guessed that he’s pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites? Would you come away thinking, “Gee, he’s proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN”?

This view of Obama is a complete fantasy, of course, but let’s go on …

Nope. McCain didn’t want to go there. So Obama comes off as just your average Center-Left politician. Gonna raise your taxes a little, gonna negotiate reasonably with America’s enemies; gonna rely on our very talented federal courts to fight terrorists and solve most of America’s problems; gonna legalize millions of hard-working illegal immigrants.

McCain? He comes off as Center-Right .. or maybe Center-Left … but, either way, deeply respectful of Obama despite their policy quibbles.

McCain was hardly “deeply respectful” of Obama.

Great. Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn’t; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he’s qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.

The plain fact is that Obama is no terrorist sympathizer, and I think the American people finally are getting a close enough look at him to know that. However, they are also getting a close enough look at McCain to know he is an asshole.

If that’s what the public thinks, good luck trying to win this thing.

With due respect, I think tonight was a disaster for our side. I’m dumbfounded that no one else seems to think so. Obama did everything he needed to do, McCain did nothing he needed to do. What am I missing?

What the Right is missing is that the rest of the country, finally, is moving on from the fantasyland they live in

We Are Here

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I understand the Dow is up a bit today, so maybe we’re not seeing financial Armageddon yet. Time for some evaluation.

The best analogy I can come up with to describe the federal government is as an organ riddled with cancer. And the cancer is the damn supply side trickle down pro-corporation anti-regulation free market ideology liberals gonna gitcha boogaboogabooga crowd that has shouted the rest of us down since 1980.

For too long, their voices drowned out all others in our national political discourse. But for all their bellyaching about elitists and liberals and how badly their opponents ran the government, they never worked out a coherent governing philosophy themselves. As Bill Scher says, the Right’s mantra is less government, lower taxes and a strong military. Those are sales points, not a comprehensive plan for running a country.

With that in mind, let’s look at what’s happened in the past few days.

The utterly corrupt and incompetent Bush Administration has claimed for the past several months that problems in the financial sector were contained. Then, suddenly their hair caught fire, and they proclaimed the financial sector on the brink of ruin and Congress must act now now now now. Then the Administration handed Congress a half-assed proposal that did little more than shovel money in the direction of people who had caused the crisis and give the executive branch more unsupervised power to deal with it.

(I want to add that this is a very familiar pattern. I’ve seen incompetent co-workers and managers do the same thing. It’s a three-step process. One, assure the suits in the executive suites that everything is just fine when it isn’t. Two, when the disaster can no longer be hidden, tell the suits that you can fix everything as long as they give you more time and authority and don’t look too closely at what you’re doing. Finally, if you haven’t already been fired, find another job and dump the mess on someone else.)

A broad consensus quickly formed in Congress that no way were they going to pass the Bush Administration’s proposal as it was. That was a promising sign. So how did it fall apart yesterday?

I’m not a finance whiz, but those who are say that the problem should be fixed through an entirely different approach from the one that the Bushies proposed. See, for example, Joseph Stiglitz:

We could do more with less money. The holes in financial institutions’ balance sheets should be filled in a transparent way. The Scandinavian countries showed the way two decades ago. Warren Buffet showed another way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public’s downside risk and ensures that they participate in some of the upside potential.

This approach is not only proven, but it also provides both the incentives and wherewithal needed for lending to resume. It avoids the hopeless task of trying to value millions of complex mortgages and the even more complex financial products in which they are embedded, and it deals with the “lemons” problem – the government gets stuck with the worst or most overpriced assets. Finally, it can be done far more quickly.

At the same time, several steps can be taken to reduce foreclosures. First, housing can be made more affordable for poor and middle-income Americans by converting the mortgage deduction into a cashable tax credit. The government effectively pays 50% of the mortgage interest and real estate taxes for upper-income Americans, yet does nothing for the poor. Second, bankruptcy reform is needed to allow homeowners to write down the value of their homes and stay in their houses. Third, government could assume part of a mortgage, taking advantage of its lower borrowing costs.

By contrast, US treasury secretary Henry Paulson’s approach is another example of the kind of shell games that got America into its mess. Investment banks and credit rating agencies believed in financial alchemy – the notion that significant value could be created by slicing and dicing securities. The new view is that real value can be created by un-slicing and un-dicing – pulling these assets out of the financial system and turning them over to the government. But that requires overpaying for the assets, benefiting only the banks.

Not all finance gurus may agree with Stiglitz on the Swedish model, but from what I have read a large majority agree that the Administration’s basic approach is deeply flawed.

However, Congress more or less tweaked Paulson’s approach rather than try something completely different. They improved it mightily, according to many. But my understanding is that the smarter people in Congress figured the more conservative members would dismiss the smart approach outright. So instead of the best bill, they put together the best bill they thought they could sell to the right-wing troglodytes in the House.

And it still didn’t pass.

Here’s where the cancer analogy comes in. The organ is being strangled by a malignant mass and is barely functioning. The best proposals are a non-starter because the cancer has to be catered to. But the cancer won’t let a “flawed but better than nothing” bill pass, either.

Matt Yglesias says,

The House conservatives who sank the bailout didn’t do so because they were listening to loud and angry voices. They sank the plan by accident. They were trying to double-cross the Democrats. First, they wrung lots of concessions out of Democrats at the negotiating table as the price for delivering 80 votes. Then, by not delivering 80 votes and forcing Pelosi to pass the bill as a partisan Democratic bill, they were going to wage a demagogic anti-bailout campaign. But Pelosi refused to be played for a sucker and so the conservative inadvertently sank a bill that, all evidence suggests, they actually wanted to pass. They just wanted to vote “no” on it for short-term political gain.

And, of course, when Pelosi didn’t fall for the trap they complained she had been “partisan.”

Yes, a minority of House Democrats voted with a majority of House Republicans against the proposal. Some Dems did so out of cowardice; they’re in a tight race, and it’s an unpopular bill — more about that in a moment. A few, I understand, voted against it because they wanted a better bill with more protection for taxpayers and homeowners. Noble, but impractical. As Paul Krugman and others say, probably all that can be done now is to patch something together that will keep the economy limping along until a new administration and Congress is sworn in. And pray that will be an Obama administration, because McCain clearly is out of his depth on this issue and will be no better, possibly worse, than Bush.

One of the reasons the bill is unpopular is that there is a colossal vacuum of leadership in Washington, which is another symptom of the cancer. It should fall to the President to explain to people that the consequences of not addressing the financial crisis will cost them more dearly than a “bailout.” However, for all practical purposes we don’t have a functioning POTUS. Now, too late, a large majority of the American people understand that George W. Bush is incompetent and cannot be trusted. So even if he had it in him to deliver an FDR-like address on the crisis, no one would listen to it.

And here we are.

Holy Bleep

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The NYSE down 777 bleeping points today? Bleep.

I just saw this Moveon ad on television:

Thanks, Moveon.

Paul Krugman has been keeping up. See “21st century prewar crises,” “Bailout questions answered,” “OK, we are a banana republic,” “Politics of Crisis.”

Krugman quote: “Just worth pointing out: Henry Paulson’s decision to let Lehman fail, on Sept. 14, may have delivered the White House to Obama. ”

Forests and Trees and Gimmicks

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A USA Today/Gallop Poll just came out that says Obama beat McCain in the Friday night debate. This has to be disorienting for righties, who no doubt were whooping and high-fiving when the debate ended Friday. McCain was tougher, after all.

They probably believed also that patching together all the times Obama said he agreed with McCain would make a sure-fire winning video. Maybe it is — for anyone who didn’t watched the debate and thinks YouTube is a brand of toothpaste. But those are either non-voters or McCain voters, anyway.

Right now they’re pushing a controversy over the bracelet Obama wears bearing name of a soldier killed in Iraq. Obama blanked out for a second over the name — you try being on national television, with the lights in your face, and see what you blank out on. I doubt he planned to bring it up and only did so because McCain bragged about his bracelet to prove how much the troops love him.

Now they are saying the father of the soldier claims Obama was asked not to wear the bracelet. I’m skeptical; the soldier’s mother gave Obama the bracelet, not the father, and the soldiers’ parents are divorced. Divorced couples are not exactly famous for frank communication with each other.

Even if the claim is true, this is the kind of gimmicky crap that comes under the heading of “distraction.” I don’t think the electorate is in the mood for it now. It hardly balances today’s headlines about McCain’s ties to the gambling industry — read it; the headline might have been “John McCain: Maverick Reformer or Shameless Opportunist?” Plus, there are more details out about the financial relationship between McCain’s campaign manager and Freddie Mac.

And the righties are focused on a bracelet?

Joan Vennochi writes at the Boston Globe about the bracelets:

McCain is the old soldier who sees the world through the prism of the Vietnam War. He still doesn’t question the premise of Vietnam or the Iraq invasion. He still wants to win both. He said Stanley’s mother made him promise that “You’ll do everything in your power to make sure that my son’s death was not in vain.”

Comparing it powerfully as always to his own combat experience, McCain said, “A war that I was in, where we had an Army, that it wasn’t through any fault of their own, but they were defeated. And I know how hard it is for that – for an Army and a military to recover from that – we will win this one and we won’t come home in defeat and dishonor.”

Obama had to glance down at the bracelet around his wrist, as if to remind himself of Jopeck’s name. But Obama got to the fundamental question for the next president: “Are we making good judgments about how to keep America safe precisely because sending our military into battle is such an enormous step.”

If you listen carefully to what the two campaigns say about any issue, the same theme emerges. McCain sees trees, not forest. He latches onto gimmicky fixes, like firing the SEC chairman, or seems not to understand (or care) that congressional earmarks didn’t cause the Wall Street crisis. Tellingly, it’s McCain, not Obama, who mistakes a tactic for a strategy.

Obama, more often than not — I think his health care plan is an example of “not” — has a deeper understanding of the complexities of issues and proposes comprehensive strategies to address them. As president, he might not always make the best decisions, but I think he can be trusted not to make the worst decisions.

I can’t let David “Call Me Bwana” Broder’s “Alpha Male” column go without a comment.

It was a small thing, but I counted six times that Obama said that McCain was “absolutely right” about a point he had made. No McCain sentences began with a similar acknowledgment of his opponent’s wisdom, even though the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis far more than they disagreed.

That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator — an impression reinforced by Obama’s frequent glances in McCain’s direction and McCain’s studied indifference to his rival.

Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.

How many times can Broder prove himself to be a complete ass before his professional colleagues notice? Some others pointed out that McCain’s body language signaled fear, not dominance. Although I’m not sure he is afraid of Obama as much as he is afraid of his own temper. I think he couldn’t look at Obama because he feared he would lose control if he did.

The Times of London reports that the McCain campaign wants to stage Bristol Palin’s shotgun wedding before the election. A “McCain insider” thinks a highly publicized wedding would shut down the election for a week. I am skeptical about this report, also, and don’t expect it to happen. But it is the sort of stunt a wingnut political operative would think of.

The real verdict on the debate will be apparent as more polls bring out their post-debate results, and it’s possible later polls will be less favorable to Obama. I don’t want to celebrate yet, but I’m cautiously hopeful.