Category Archives: Democratic Party

Maha’s Way Cool Debate Live Blog

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Watch this space!

Oh, that’s cute. Can I call you Joe? Nice.

Palin is looking at the camera and Biden did not.

OK, we’ve got the canned remarks out of the way.

She’s pointing at predator lenders and corruption. Personal responsibility.

Joe is getting in the quote about deregulating health care.

Palin: Taxes taxes taxes booga booga booga

As mayor she left her city in crippling debt. Someone should bring that up.

Biden is repeating the middle class tax cut. There you go Joe, look at the camera.

Palin: Redistribution of wealth. I hate that term.

Government is the problem.

Crossing state lines to buy insurance; I still don’t believe that’s possible.

Biden — ultimate bridge to nowhere. Good line.

Energy plan — Palin had to take on the oil companies. She broke up a monopoly?

Ooo, the bankruptcy bill. Greed and corruption don’t have anything to do with the bankruptcy bill. But Biden wasn’t on the side of the angels with that one.

We don’t have enough fossil fuel resources to eliminate dependence on foreign oil.

Don’t care as much about the climate than we do? Foreign countries will laugh.

OK, guys, how do you think it’s going so far?

Same sex versus heterosexual couples, no discrimination, says Biden. Hospital visitations, life insurance, benefits. Property.

Ooo, she just glows when she talks about the surge.

Funding the troops.

Ooo, white flag of surrender! Here we go!

I think she’s losing it. She’s repeating her talking points and not responding to what Biden said.

Al Qaeda is defining our war.

At least she can pronounce the name of whozits of Iran.

We’re in favor of diplomacy but not with people we don’t like.

McCain has pain and won’t sit down in Spain.

I honestly don’t know how this might be going over.

Here you go, Joe! No different from George Bush’s.

Um, little girl, Kim Jung Il already has nuclear weapons.

Ooo, we’re building schools in Afghanistan. Sure.

Bosnia. Kosovo. Bosnia.

She still sees like a ditz to me, but how will an independent voter see this?

The SNL writers are taking notes.

Pointing backward.

I just flipped to CNN to see the focus group line. The gang at MyDd says the squiggly lines like Biden.

Ooh, they’re right. As soon as Joe talks the lines swing up. Women like him especially.

She’s not answering the achilles’ heel question.

Palin speaks, the squiggly lines are nearly flat. This is fun.

Joe almost choked up.

Maverick maverick maverick. Oh, and the lines just went flat. Wheee!

Joe is challenging the “maverick” thing. The squiggly lines go up.

She appoints people of all parties in Alaska, as long as they are her friends.

OK, what did you think?

Y’all go ahead and talk among yourselves.

“Dan Quayle was Metternich by comparison.”

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Sarah Palin endorses Hamas.

More tidbits:

The McCain campaign has banned Mo Dowd from the plane. I think in the spirit of bipartisanship, the Obama campaign should ban her also.

Paul Krugman on why McCain must not become president: “The modern economy, it turns out, is a dangerous place — and it’s not the kind of danger you can deal with by talking tough and denouncing evildoers.”

Shorter Stanley Kurtz: Community organizers caused the mortgage crisis.

Even shorter Stanley Kurtz: Blame black people.

Breaking: The House rejected the bailout plan.

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.

The Morning After

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So I get up this morning and make the coffee and surf around to get reactions to last night’s debate.

The first reactions from pundits and bloggers last night was that [fill in name of preferred candidate] won on points, but [the other guy] held his own, and neither emerged a clear winner. Dana Milbank and other professional commenters complained that the debate was “tepid” and boring. Politics is just entertainment, after all.

However, there is evidence the television audience saw a different debate. Polls by CBS and CNN say that independents watching the debate came away more impressed by Obama. The Frank Luntz and Stanley Greenberg focus groups went overwhelmingly for Obama.

Why the difference?

One, I think most of the television audience was getting an unfiltered look at these guys for the first time, Obama in particular. And the meme Obama’s opponents have spread is that Obama is an empty suit, unsubstantial, a good orator but otherwise clueless. But the Obama who debated last night clearly was intelligent and knowledgeable as well as articulate. He may have pleasantly surprised people who haven’t been paying close attention to the campaigns until now.

Peter S. Canellos, Boston Globe:

McCain tried repeatedly to portray Obama as a neophyte, prefacing many answers with variants of the statement, “What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand,” and later insisting that Obama “showed a little bit of naiveté.”

But Obama didn’t seem either uncomprehending or naive, and McCain seemed so frustrated at times that he almost lost his cool.

After Obama followed a McCain jab about Obama’s failure to hold a hearing of his Senate subcommittee with a return punch that McCain had once claimed the United States could “muddle through” in Afghanistan, the Arizona senator clenched his teeth, flared his eyes, and seemed on the verge of losing composure.

Finally, he came out and said what he couldn’t demonstrate.

“I honestly don’t believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience and has made the wrong judgments in a number of areas,” McCain insisted.

But the claim wasn’t backed up by what viewers had seen for the past hour.

John Dickerson:

McCain repeatedly asserted that on foreign-policy issues Obama “didn’t understand.” But Obama didn’t look like a man who didn’t understand. McCain was essentially calling Obama a Sarah Palin—but Obama didn’t look like one.

Second, I think way too much of McCain’s arguments for himself were grounded many years in the past, which to me made him seem stuck there. One of the focus group people in the video above said McCain was “sentimental,” and a young woman said she wanted to hear more from McCain about what’s going on right now.

Third is the “gumpy old man” factor. Richard Adams:

McCain refused to look in Obama’s direction – even as he was delivering his own attacks against the Democratic candidate, and so allowed his body language to undercut his spoken language, suggesting that he was uncomfortable or even embarrassed.

And that seemingly minor detail seems likely to have hurt McCain. CNN’s coverage of the debate carried an interesting feature: a real-time reaction graph from a focus group running along the bottom of the screen. Most of the time the graph was flat-lining – when McCain spoke the Republican audience members generally gave him higher marks and the Democrats gave him lower ones, with independent voters in the middle. But when McCain stridently attacked Obama his approval lines turned down, sometimes very sharply. So while grizzled journalists may have liked McCain’s fighting talk, it turned off the independent voters watching. Similarly, McCain’s aggression isn’t likely to have played well with female voters but better with male voters (according to the stereotype).

And, according to CNN, male viewers were evenly split on who won, but women overwhelmingly preferred Obama. I think women are less inclined than men to associated a hot temper with leadership ability.

Joan Walsh:

I wish I’d organized a drinking game around the number of times John McCain said, “Sen. Obama doesn’t understand,” or found some other way to sneer at Obama as naive and inexperienced. For the most part he refused to even look at Barack Obama over 90 minutes. What an ass. It was hackneyed and condescending and, to me, repellent. But did it work? …

…I think Obama more than held his own in this first debate, but if you’re looking for a grumpy, sarcastic put-down artist as president, your choice is quite clear.

Eugene Robinson:

Throughout the 90-minute debate, McCain seemed contemptuous of Obama. He wouldn’t look at him. He tried to belittle him whenever possible — how many times did he work “Senator Obama just doesn’t understand” into his answers? His body language was closed, defensive, tense. McCain certainly succeeded in proving that he can be aggressive, but the aggression came with a smirk and a sneer.

Fourth, several commenters said that after McCain’s erratic behavior for the past couple of weeks, he needed a big win tonight to “change the game” (and can I say I’m really growing tired of that phrase?). A tie might have been good enough for Obama, but not for McCain.

Fifth, as Nate at Five Thirty-Eight points out, Obama looked at the television camera and spoke to the televison audience; McCain did not.

Obama’s eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry. It is no surprise that a small majority of pundits seemed to have thought that McCain won, even when the polls indicated otherwise; the pundits were his target audience.

Further, Nate says Obama is opening up a gap in “connectedness.” By a big margin, viewers thought Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you.” This was supposed to be Obama’s big weakness — he couldn’t connect with those “ordinary” folks.

Last night, the pundits all criticized Obama for allowing McCain to hijack the first half hour or so of the debate by talking about earmarks and taxes. Nate disagrees, saying that earmarks are not an issue voters care much about right now. I don’t know how much people understand that earmarks, however egregious, did not cause the Wall Street financial crisis. However, I do think McCain might have come across as an ass by continuing to talk about Obama raising taxes even as Obama was standing there saying no, I’m going to raise taxes only on the wealthy, and close loopholes so corporations pay their fair share.

Finally — last night several of you expressed frustration that Obama wasn’t punching McCain hard enough. Given the way the post-debate memes are shaping up, I’m beginning to think Obama’s “gentlemanly” strategy may have been smart.

See also: Mark Halperin gives Obama the better grade.

Debate Live Blog

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While waiting for the debate to start — will Palin be on the GOP ticket in November? Or will she decide she needs to spend more time with her family?

McCain really is one of the whitest guys on the planet, isn’t he?

McCain isn’t being specific about what he wants to do with the fiscal package.

Did McCain just say he was going to vote for the plan?

Why is he talking about D-Day?

McCain: Heads will roll.

Is there a connection between Washington spending and the financial crisis on Wall Street? It’s all earmarks’ fault.

So far McCain is not addressing the questions he’s been asked. However, I’m not sure if the average viewer would understand that.

McCain is smirking.

How do you think the two are coming across? McCain isn’t being honest or on topic, but would a less informed viewer know that?

Oh, please, most liberal voting record in the United States Senate my ass.

McCain is just talking about cutting costs, but not what he would do.

Spending freeze?

McCain is thinking old technology.

He’s still going on about the taxes. How many times does Obama have to repeat his tax policies?

We owe China a lot more than $500 billion, btw. It’s closer to a trillion, I believe.

Lessons of Iraq!

Please, ask McCain what “victory” in Iraq means.

I’m still not sure if a less well-informed viewer would be able to pick up on the problems with McCain’s answers.

McCain is repeating W’s talking points. “Central front in war on terror.”

Does McCain know that we’re having some, um, issues with Pakistan lately?

Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb

Sending marines into Lebanon. Yes, John, remind us how old you are.

Do most Americans give a bleep about “victory” in Iraq?

We don’t like the UN, so we’ll create a counter-UN.

McCain is just about to explode.

McCain: Let’s do stuff just like W did!

McCain’s getting a bit worked up. Blow your stack, John.

McCain keeps saying Obama doesn’t understand this and that.

McCain doesn’t want to go back to the Cold War. He wants to battle the Old Russian Empire. Czar Putin?

McCain is claiming credit for the 9/11 Commission?

Largest re-organization of government. If McCain thinks that was done well, he’s nuts.

John, dear, al Qaeda doesn’t need Iraq to establish bases.

I believe Obama is correct that China is holding $1 trillion of our debt.

Good; make connection between $10 billion/month in Iraq and lack of money for domestic needs.

McCain is trying to connect Obama to Bush?

Hasn’t McCain voted against money for vets?

The fact checkers will be working on this for a week.

McCain was a POW? I didn’t know that!

Re fact-checking, Think Progress already has a lot of stuff up.

Post Game Show:

Matthews says that Obama seemed more presidential.

However, we’ve got Pat Buchanan and Norah O’Donnell saying McCain won. What’s going on on the other channels?

However, Buchanan admitted McCain seemed mean.

Joe Biden is on all the cable networks. Sarah Palin has been locked in her motel room.

Good News/Bad News

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The good news is that yesterday House Republicans rebelled against Dick the Dick.

The vice president traveled to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to silence a chorus of GOP complaints about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion plan. But House Republicans who walked into a closed-door meeting with Cheney steaming over the plan walked out just as angry, and they described what happened in between as both “a bloodbath” and “an unmitigated disaster.”

The bad news is that House Republicans are going to play the partisan politics game with the financial crisis.

Republican leaders are now hoping Democrats load the legislation with unrelated measures that would give them the political cover to oppose it, members and aides said. At the same time, party leaders are using back channels in the business community to gauge member support for a “clean” bill.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) warned his former colleagues that they would pay a price in November for backing the bailout now — and that John McCain could ride to victory over Barack Obama by persuading voters that the bailout is really the “Obama-Bush plan.”

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee yet, but I find it baffling that some Senate Democrats are waiting to see how McCain votes on the measure before they decide how they will vote. See also Digby.

Back to good news/bad news. The good news is that Obama has a clear lead over McCain in the latest Washington Post-NBC News poll. Much of this lead is coming from white women switching their preference from McCain to Obama. Obama now has a small lead among white women.

The bad news is that media are still going with the “white women don’t like Obama” story.

File this under “weird news.” Michelle Malkin blames illegal immigrants for the financial crisis. The girl belongs in a carnival freak show.

More weird news, although I’m not surprised. Pew Research says 57 percent of the public favors the Wall Street bailout. On the other hand, the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll says 55 percent of the public is opposed to the Wall Street bailout.

The Pew poll told respondents that the government is “potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure” and asked whether that’s the right thing to do. The Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll asked whether “the government should use taxpayers’ dollars to rescue ailing private financial firms whose collapse could have adverse effects on the economy and market, or is it not the government’s responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayers’ dollars?”

I extrapolate from this that about two-thirds of the public doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Anyway, the good news/bad news I see here is that, politically, it doesn’t much matter what Congress does. All that matters is how it’s explained. This opens the door to the possibility that Congress could do the right thing without political penalty. It also opens the door to the possibility that Congress could do the wrong thing without political penalty.

Sort of bad news: The Right thinks the Fannie-Freddie issue can be blamed on Democrats.

The good news is that John McCain’s campaign manager has been on Freddie Mac’s payroll from the end of 2005 until last month.

Bring it on, righties.

Update: The McCain campaign is slamming the New York Times for running the story about the campaign manager’s ties to Freddie Mac. Not true, says Michael Goldfarb. Freddie Mac did pay a monthly retainer of $15,000 to Rick Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, but Davis himself did not take any of that money.

For the record, the New York Times story published a statement from the McCain campaign saying David is not receiving income from his company. The Times also said, however, that Davis “as a partner and equity-holder continues to benefit from its income.”

Goldfarb is having one major hissy fit and complaining that the New York Times has not published any nasty investigations into whatever nefarious things David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager, is into. Press bias!

David Isikoff at Newsweek is biased also, apparently.

See also John Cole.

Is Anyone FOR the Bleeping Bailout?

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There seems to be nearly unanimous disapproval of Paulson’s $700 billion bailout, henceforth called “Plan B.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that “Liberal advocacy groups have mobilized to stop the financial bailout package, just as Bush administration officials are urging lawmakers to act quickly and decisively.” At Salon, Glenn Greenwald documents “Growing right-wing opposition to the Paulson plan.”

Righties opposed to Paulson include Little Lulu, who calls Paulson a “wrong-headed, ChiCom-promoting, liberal Democrat-installing, Gore global warming alarmist” (in keeping with Lulu’s understanding of political science — if she doesn’t like it, it must be liberal) and who wants a return to conservatives principles. Yes, I see the oxymoron, too.

One of Little Lulu’s readers responded to the question, “Will the real fiscal conservatives please stand up?” with “There aren’t any. Phil Gramm retired long ago.” They’re still willfully refusing to see that Phil Gramm and “conservative principles” caused the bloody mess to begin with. Oh, and a lot of Lulu’s readers seem to think illegal aliens are behind this, somehow.

But the point is that, wonder of wonders, the Right and the Left halves of the blogosphere are moving toward the same opinion, which is that Paulson’s plan must be stopped.

I’ve been surfing around for a respectable economist, i.e. one not on the Bush Administration’s or Republican Party’s payroll, who supports the plan. The only favorable comments I find are from last week, before details were announced. Now there is near unanimity among economists and finance experts that Plan B is a bad plan.

So, who’s for Plan B? Via Josh Marshall, the Wall Street Journal (behind firewall) says,

House Republican staffers met with roughly 15 lobbyists Friday afternoon, whose message to lawmakers was clear: Don’t load the legislation up with provisions not directly related to the crisis, or regulatory measures the industry has long opposed.

“We’re opposed to adding provisions that will affect [or] undermine the deal substantively,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, whose members include the nation’s largest banks, securities firms and insurers.

A deal killer for the group: a proposal that would grant bankruptcy judges new powers to lower the principal, interest rate or both on a mortgage as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.

So, says Josh, “finance industry lobbyists are already giving orders to Republican hill staffers not to allow any meaningful reforms or protections for taxpayers. So, just the money. No strings attached.”

(Don’t tell Lulu about not lowering principal or interest rates on mortgages in bankruptcy, or she might change her mind about the evilness of the Plan. Sticking it to the poor and distressed is what righties live for. It makes them feel superior.)

Some things don’t change —

President Bush this morning warned lawmakers against trying to make too many changes to the proposed financial bailout legislation, but Senate Democrats announced that they would add provisions to the plan that could spur opposition from the administration or congressional Republicans and bog down the measure.

In Bush World, Congress is redundant.

Dan Froomkin:

Does President Bush’s support for a radical financial bailout represent a reversal in his political ideology? Not likely.

For one, it seems to be less a reversal than a recusal. Bush appears ideologically spent, rather than transformed. He has for all intents and purposes become the bystander-in-chief, letting others in his administration do the heavy lifting.

Furthermore, the plan concocted by two Bush appointees features some distinctive characteristics of major Bush initiatives past: It would be spectacularly expensive, primarily benefit the very rich, and grant the executive branch unlimited power with no transparency or accountability.

Explained that way, one would think righties would like it. They supported just about every other plan like that that the Bushies have come up with.

See also Sean-Paul Kelley.

The Last Vacation

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By now it’s obvious that George W. Bush, who never quite got the hang of his POTUS job, or what a job is for that matter, can barely be bothered to go through the motions. He had to be pried out of the White House yesterday to deliver two minutes of platitudes about the financial crisis, an appearance Chris Matthews compared to a cuckoo popping out of a clock.

BTW, this is how a real president speaks to the nation about a financial crisis.

Things Are Being Done, but there’s grumbling that they aren’t the right things. I think we’re seeing a lot of fingers poking into a lot of holes in the dyke.

John McCain’s response so far has been so bone-headed that even Sebastian Mallaby is shocked.

John McCain has just demonstrated his vulnerability as a presidential candidate. Speaking from prepared remarks at an Iowa rally today, he said that he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This outburst demonstrates McCain’s ignorance, his impetuousness and his vindictive streak. Not bad for one remark. …

…McCain is a loner rather than a team player. He is a political brawler rather than a manager. The financial turmoil is raising questions about how he’d perform in a crisis.

Are you watching this, America?

Obama’s response:

The Illinois senator said he would be discussing the Fed-Treasury proposal with his top economic advisers on Friday morning. Among those who have been advising Obama on his response to the financial crisis are former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former U.S. Treasury secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin.

“Given the gravity of this situation, and based on conversations I have had with both Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke, I have asked my economic team to refrain from presenting a more detailed blue-print of how an immediate plan might be structured until the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have had an opportunity to present their proposal.”

Obama said it was critical that the markets and public have confidence in the Fed and Treasury’s efforts and that their work be “unimpeded by partisan wrangling.”

There’s a lot more to this statement; read at the link.

McCain’s surrogates on the cable television politics shows: “Taxes liberal taxes liberal boogaboogaboogabooga.”

McCain campaign: Barack Obama is black and will steal money from your sweet white grandmother.

Help.

Related links:

Sean-Paul Kelley, “The Day Capitalism Died”

Joseph Stiglitz, “The Fruit of Hypocrisy”

Paul Krugman, “Crisis Endgame”

Eugene Robinson, “Failing Econ 101”

Update: Why Lehman Brothers crashed.