Is the Campaign Turning a Corner?

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There are little indications here and there that the Obama campaign is regaining momentum while the Palin bubble is losing air.

There’s a tiny uptick for Obama in the Gallup daily tracking poll. Some other polls show that Sarah Palin’s popularity is fading fast.

The Obama campaign has released a two-minute ad explaining Obama’s economic plan. I understand this is already beginning to run in battleground states.

If you can stomach it, you can watch McCain’s new ad about the economy here. It amounts to blah blah blah American workers blah blah reform blah.

There’s a discussion at Washington Monthly about whether a two-minute ad is a good idea. Personally, I like it, and I think it is a good idea. The American people on the whole aren’t as stupid as some make them out to be. We have more than our share of idiots, yes, and the idiots make a lot of noise. But, particularly regarding domestic issues, most Americans really can come to sensible conclusions and sort shit from shinola if they are given accurate information. That last part is nearly always the catch. But not always.

For example, remember when President Bush was going all out to sell his social security privatization scheme to the public (and ain’t it good that didn’t happen)? A majority of Americans pretty much figured out by themselves — because news media weren’t helping much — that Bush’s plan was dangerous. The more they heard about it, the less they liked it.

One commenter at Washington Monthly remembered Ross Perot’s infomercials, which went on for a whole lot longer than two minutes. Think what you want of Perot (and you’re probably right), those infomercials helped a lot of Americans understand for the first time why a big federal budget deficit is bad.

This sort of calm, straightforward explanation of complex issues was a hallmark of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and people loved FDR for it. Are Americans appreciably dumber now than they were then? We’ll see.

Meanwhile, news media are actually pointing out the McCain campaign’s, um, lies. See CNN:

Here’s the Associated Press — Yeah, I know, it’s the Associated Press, but I’m going to link to it anyway — “McCain has 2 faces: Washington in- and outsider.” So much for Mr. Straight Talker.

See also: Elitism for Elites.

Unbalanced

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Matt Yglesias makes an important point that’s not being discussed enough. Of the de-privatization of Fannie, Freddie and AIG, he says,

I’m a little surprised to learn that this is legal without some kind of legislation. It seems pretty far afield from the Fed’s traditional domain. I guess in a storm people don’t care about the niceties. … It seems to me that there this step has uncertain implications far beyond the world of high finance.

I’d like to see commentary on what the feds’ options were regarding AIG. In other words, what kind of ripple effect would we be looking at had it gone under? I honestly don’t know. Certain persons on the right blogosphere are screaming about “bailout-palooza,” and I agree that government takeover of the finance and insurance sectors is, um, way bad. I don’t like it at all. But given the circumstances, what alternatives were there?

Q. And who got us into this mess, anyway?

A. Reaganites and “small-government” conservatives who called for more and more deregulation in the name of “getting government off our backs.”

Nancy Pelosi denied that Democrats had anything to do with the financial crisis. I disagree with that. Plenty of Democrats went along with the deregulation craze without a murmur, and some actively bought into it.

But the mess originated on the Right, and it was the Right that made “regulation” a dirty word. You can argue that some Dems who probably knew better went along with deregulation because they would have lost elections otherwise. But essentially we’re looking at a mob mentality that began on the Right and spread throughout the land in all directions.

Can we, as a nation, learn anything from this? Um, wake me up when it happens. If real-world experience could have taught the “get government off our backs” crowd anything, it would have happened after the saving & loan crisis in the 1980s.

Granted, it probably was written last week, but George Will’s latest column in Newsweek is all about the beautiful natural balance of markets. “[The] point is that markets allow order to emerge without anyone imposing it. The ‘poetry of the possible’ is that things are organized without an organizer.” And there’s a lot of truth in that, especially if you’re talking about consumer goods. The overall experience of centrally planned Communist-style economies is that they are utterly dysfunctional. It is more efficient to allow supply and demand to determine how much bread to bake or how many flashlights to manufacture.

But the Right assumed that if one extreme is bad, the other extreme must be good. They insist that free market theories will somehow fix public schools and the health care crisis, even though competition, supply and demand for these services do not function the same way they function for consumer goods.

The fantasy is that “free markets” will always balance without human intervention, and problems will correct themselves. In a perfect world, that might be true. In this world, the forces of greed, hubris and just plain stupid will outweigh everything if not kept in check.

What we’re seeing now is how “natural balance” really works. Years of moving in one extreme direction — reckless deregulation and privatization — have created a crisis, causing the government to swing to the opposite extreme — nationalization — to correct it

Pursuing a middle way is more likely to keep one from swinging in extreme directions. This is essentially what us barking moonbat loony liberals and crackpot progressives have been saying for years, while the sensible and adult conservatives have been pushing us to extremes.

The other worrisome matter is that the executive branch is acting without even pretending to consult Congress. Like Matt, I question whether this is constitutional. It shows us that the Bush Administration, incompetent as it is, has done a heckofa job dismantling the Constitution and the checks and balances of the federal government.

Palin Could Run America, but Not Hewlett Packard?

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Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, now an adviser to John McCain, says Sarah Palin lacks the experience to run Hewlett Packard. Michael D. Shear writes for The Trail:

Fiorina made the comments on the McGraw-Hill Show on St. Louis KTRS Radio, a statement that was first reported by Huffington Post.

During the final minute of the interview, the host asked: “Do you think she has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett Packard?”

“No, I don’t,” responded Fiorina. “But you know what? That’s not what she’s running for.”

There’s also a “McCain invented the Blackberry” story going around. This clearly is an attempt to get even for the phony “Al Gore invented the Internet” story the Right pushed awhile back.

Greg Sargent has the text of a speech Obama gave today. Really good. The economic crisis has suppressed the stupid “lipstick on a pig” distractions, for a time, anyway.

Update: McCain, Obama or Biden couldn’t run Hewlett Packard, either, Fiorina says. And Fiorina’s bio says she couldn’t run it, either. Must be a tough job.

Bogeyman Regulations

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John McCain is calling for a “9/11 Commission”-style probe of the financial crisis to find out what caused it, although he has already decided the blame resides with “the old-boy network and the corruption in Washington.” Meanwhile, his running mate Sarah Palin said “We are going to reform the way Wall Street does business and stop multi-million dollar payouts and golden parachutes to CEOs who break the public trust.”

Although the commission idea has a certain amount of retro charm, I don’t believe the causes of the financial crisis are any big mystery. And the “multi-million dollar payouts and golden parachutes to CEOs who break the public trust” are just a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.

One factor the wingnuts cannot truthfully blame on the financial mess — which of course doesn’t mean they won’t do it — is excessive government regulation. The nondepository institutions like Lehman Brothers that are collapsing right now got government off their backs several years ago. In fact, that’s when the trouble started.

There’s a good background article by David Lightman at McClatchy Newspapers that explains what happened, and I urge you to read it all. In a nutshell, what happened was the Reagan Revolution and the fantasy that markets and securities can regulate themselves without government oversight.

This isn’t just a problem with “Wall Street.” The entire financial system is breaking down. Further, the rolling disaster we’re seeing now could not have happened had some critical New Deal regulatory programs been left in place. For example, Lightman explains how dismantling the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act led directly to what’s happening on Wall Street.

Lightman also says that President Clinton signed the Glass-Steagall “reform” into law, which is true. But the driving force behind getting rid of Glass-Steagall was then-Senator Phil Gramm, who is now Senator John McCain’s economic adviser and a co-chair of his presidential campaign.

The talk is that if McCain is elected, Gramm would be first in line to be treasury secretary.

The free market true believers remain in denial of what’s actually happening, which tells me they will not learn from experience, and there’s no point pretending they will. Our only recourse is to be sure they aren’t the ones making real policy.

Good Reads:

Sasha Abramsky on McCain’s pathetic attempt to capture the Reagan magic.

“In Candidates, 2 Approaches to Wall Street” reveals McCain’s bottomless hypocrisy.

“On Wall St. as on Main St., a Problem of Denial.” Or, why smart executives make stupid choices.

Economy in Meltdown?

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When Paul Krugman begins a column this way, it does get your attention:

Will the U.S. financial system collapse today, or maybe over the next few days? I don’t think so — but I’m nowhere near certain. You see, Lehman Brothers, a major investment bank, is apparently about to go under. And nobody knows what will happen next.

People with online brokerage accounts probably put their sell orders in last night. This will not be a happy day at the New York Stock Exchange.

At the Agonist, there’s a discussion among some of the smartest people in the blogosphere about what’s happening with financial institutions. I recommend it. The consensus is that we’re unlikely to see a massive 1929-style stock market crash, followed by the second Great Depression. We are more likely to experience a series of dips and recoveries over the next few years, but overall the market will be drifting down, not up.

In any event, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the feds are shoving everything they’ve got under the markets to keep them propped up until after the November elections.

Expect all candidates to be spitting out the word “change” at machine-gun pace today. McCain and Palin will continue to talk about “cleaning up” Washington and, thereby, Wall Street. However, when McCain and Palin talk about “change” and “reform,” they are talking about cleaning up corruption, not changing the system. As I understand it, today’s crisis wasn’t caused primarily by corruption, in the sense of doing something illegal for personal gain. It was caused by the system.

The McCain-Palin campaign (or should that be Palin-McCain?) also opposes the very kind of “propping up” that the feds are doing. They’ve been calling the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “spending the cookie jar.” The takeover is likely to cost the Treasury $100 billion to $300 billion. $300 billion is roughly equal to three years in Iraq War dollars.

Yes, this is seriously bad, but McCain-Palin are focusing on symptoms, not the disease. They continue to pledge allegiance to deregulation and Reaganomics.

Andrew Leonard writes at Salon:

Over the last three decades Wall Street sought, and received, a climate of deregulation and minimal oversight that allowed it to create new markets at will, permitted investment banks and commercial banks to commingle their activities, and exempted critical new innovative financial products from any meaningful government restraint.

Now, we are staring at the kind of mess you get when you give two-year-olds a few buckets of paint and tell the baby-sitter to take the day off. Clean-up is going to be a bitch.

“Last three decades” = rise of Reaganomics. Thanks so much, Ronnie. Note that the rise of Reaganomics to some extent preceeded Saint Ronald’s ascension to the presidency. To some extent the right-wing “deregulation uber alles” ideology was also promoted by the Carter Administration. Some of the deregulation that Saint Ronald gets “credit” for actually began under Carter. But Reagan accelerated it, big time. There’s some historical background here (scroll down a bit).

Short-term, the challenge to the Obama campaign is to get people to understand that we face a systemic crisis more than a crises of corruption, and that Palin-McCain’s “change” message is not about the kind of change that’s needed. People need to hear, over and over, that Palin-McCain’s economic policy proposals are no different from what George W. Bush has been doing. Long-term, the sad fact is that, thanks to Reaganomics, there will be no money to do much of the good stuff Obama wants to do.

Teh Stupid, It Runs Our Country

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In “Making America Stupid,” Tom Friedman writes of the GOP’s “Drill Baby Drill” mantra:

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

He goes on to say that McCain is running on nothing but cultural wedge issues to hide the fact that he has no more clue what to do about the economy than George W. Bush did.

Steve Benen says Friedman’s new membership in the “enough” club is significant, because Friedman is a major conventional-wisdom shaper.

And if you want to read a defense of McCain that’s bleeping hilarious, go here. Begin with the sentence. “Let us look at what oil is. It replaced whaling in provided fuel for lamps. This saved the whale,” and keep reading. If this guy were a satirist he’d be brilliant. Unfortunately, he isn’t.

Kevin Drum asks why McCain is running such a sleazy campaign.

So why is McCain doing this? Obvious answer #1: he’s just running a standard Republican campaign. Nobody should really be surprised by this. Obvious answer #2: This is hardly the first time McCain has sold his soul. He’ll regret it later, of course, but this is just who he is, despite the layers of maverickiness he’s managed to cover himself in over the years.

Kevin also suggests McCain genuinely believes Obama would be a bad president, and thus McCain feels morally justified in doing whatever it takes to stop him. I can think of one other possibility, which is that McCain is too mentally impaired to make his own decisions, and Karl Rove or a clone therof is actually running the campaign behind the scenes.

I don’t know what went down on the Sunday bobblehead shows, but some parts of America’s news media seem to be doing some real journalism for a change. This is the kind of reporting they should have done when Bush was running in 2000, and didn’t.

New York Times: “Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes”

Washington Post: “As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood”

MSNBC: “Palin’s ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ Line Returns”

Boston Globe: “As governor and mayor, Palin hired friends for public posts”

San Francisco Chronicle: “Campaign check: Lies and half-truths outed.” This article analyzes six campaign commercials and finds them deceptive. Five of the six are McCain’s ads. It also found three statements made by McCain and Palin in speeches or interviews that were, um, wrong. One other item it found deceptive was an anti-Palin email, but there’s no evidence it originated with the Obama campaign. So — 8 McCain deceptions, 1 Obama deception, 1 source unknown deception.

Now, on to serious issues — a number of rightie bloggers are complaining that a “lib” photographer deliberately made McCain look sinister for a photo used on the cover of The Atlantic. Except I’ve got the bleeping issue of the Atlanic right in front of me, and there’s nothing the least bit sinister about the photo. If anything, McCain looks slightly noble and wise, if way wrinkled, in the photo. Apparently the photographer had some fun with “outtakes” — not the photo actually used — and bragged about it on a personal blog. Some rightie bloggers have twisted this into a claim that The Atlantic used one of the “sinister” photos on the cover, which one look at the cover reveals is not true.

This is not a press bias issue; it’s a personal expression issue. Once again, we see that righties hate freedom of expression, and if they had their way they’d ban any speech with which they don’t agree. And they’d do it in the name of “liberty.”

WTF?

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I’m seeing McCain-Palin television ads in the New York City media market. This reaches into southern New York state, maybe a piece of Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey, as well as NYC. Does McCain think he’s got a shot at New Jersey?

Thinking Out Loud

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I am gloomy about the election campaign, but I keep reminding myself that previous election seasons have had dramatic shifts in the polls. For example, in the Reagan-Carter contest of 1980, until a week before the election the polls were very tight, and some showed Carter slightly ahead. And, of course, Reagan won by a landslide.

The shift was caused by the candidates’ performances in their last debate, held one week before the election. Internal tracking polls showed there was almost an immediate shift after the debate, when huge numbers of Americans decided to vote for Reagan.

Debates don’t always count. I thought Kerry absolutely clobbered Bush in their 2004 debates, especially the first one, but it doesn’t seem to have made much difference. I suspect people had been too well conditioned to like Bush and dislike Kerry to trust their own eyes.

The point remains that much can happen between now and election day that could push the results decisively one way or the other.

I think Joe Biden has it in him to put away Sarah Palin in their debate, and he can do it by being courtly to her while gently and patiently pointing out what she doesn’t understand about the world. If he plays it right, she will look shrill and ditzy in comparison. I know some of you will disagree with that, but if he beats her up too much, so to speak, it could backfire and grow sympathy for Palin even if she reveals she doesn’t know China from cheese.

It’s outrageous that we have to play mind games like that, but that’s where the last several years of scorched-earth politics have brought us.

More than anything else, in their debates Obama will have to be more likable than McCain. And he can do that. But he also has to take care not to seem to be showing off his intellect, and everyone fears he will actually answer questions intelligently rather than spout the “crisp” but empty prepackaged rhetoric bits that the pundits always prefer to real answers.

In both cases I think the Dems should keep a principle of martial arts in mind — using your opponent’s momentum and force against him. Unless McCain is allowed to bring Joe Lieberman on stage with him to whisper the correct answers in his ear — or obtain the mysterious “back box” that Bush sported in a debate against Kerry — McCain will be confused about many things. Since the McCain campaign has declared war on news media, I think news media are in less of a mood to let such things slip by these days. The shills on Faux News excepted, of course. Anyway, at such times, Obama should step back and let McCain be McCain.

Now that it has become conventional wisdom that Palin didn’t exactly cover herself in glory in her first interview, the excuses are coming out. One excuse is that ABC News deliberately edited the tape to make Palin look stupid. However, I’ve looked at the transcript of the complete first interview, and the stuff edited out doesn’t seem to me to make her any less frivolous that the stuff left in. See what you think.

Another excuse is that there are many versions of the “Bush Doctrine,” and Palin couldn’t be expected to know which one Charles Gibson referred to — except that he deliberately and clearly defined the precise version he was inquiring about. And while there are many fine points, if fine is the right word, about the Bush Doctrine that can be interpreted in diverse ways, Palin clearly didn’t know any of those points, nor did she seem to know there was such a thing as a “Bush Doctrine.”

Shorter Steven Hayward: If we don’t elect idiots, we’re betraying democracy.

Maybe it’s because I live in New York and nobody’s campaigning here, but I never see the candidates. He see news about the candidates and brief clips showing some little slice of the candidates’ day, but I keep feeling that I’m not seeing the actual candidates anywhere. How is it where you live?

Ike

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Word is that Ike is a terrible storm.

Where is all the sincere Republican concern that was displayed over Gustav? Two weeks ago, as the Republican National Convention was about to begin, President Bush flew to Texas so he could be filmed strutting around in an emergency control center, pretending to be doing something.

Today, Bush stuck to his fundraising schedule.

Hardly anyone cares about what Bush does or doesn’t do any more. Even so, we may wake up tomorrow to a new landscape, geographically and politically.

May all beings in danger find sanctuary.