I was so impressed with the policy chops of the seventh-grade singers and dancers we posted about earlier today that I did some reading on the school they attend, the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta. As I suspected, it is no ordinary middle school but an incredibly media-savvy private institution. (Check out the professional head shots of the teachers. They look like the cast of a network television drama.) The school was founded by 36-year-old Ron Clark, the 2001 Disney Teacher of the Year, Oprah darling, and author of best-sellerThe Essential 55. Perhaps Clark's Southern upbringing was at play in creating his teaching philosophy and the book that explains it, a compendium of basic social rules he believes children need to be taught. Examples: "If you are asked a question in conversation, you should ask a question in return." "Do not save seats." "When you win, do not brag; when you lose, do not show anger." I totally support these rules and can be quite a stickler for etiquette. But as one online reviewer quipped, "Clark reminds me of those parents who think that everybody should have perfectly disciplined children because she does. I don't like them much, either."

In any case, Ron Clark isn't a public charter school. It is a year-old private academy with corporate sponsors including Dell Computers, Delta (which sent the students on field trips to six continents), and Promethean (manufacturer of interactive whiteboards). The school is housed in a converted warehouse and features an amusement park-like atmosphere complete with a giant slide. And while it's clear the teachers there are working themselves to the bone and doing amazing work, this is no ordinary group of disadvantaged, innercity kids. Tuition is $14,000 annually, though there is a sliding scale depending on family income, and Clark does extensive fundraising for scholarships. Fifty out of 350 applicants were accepted for the first academic year, only after an extensive interview process. Parents must commit to 10 hours of volunteer service each quarter. That's 40 hours per academic year -- an entire week of work.

In other words, this school is practicing exactly the kind of "skimming" that critics point to as a major shortcoming of the school-choice movement. The Ron Clark Academy is the kind of project John McCain and his chief education adviser, Lisa Graham Keegan, would hail, with their record of support for school privitization experiments and vouchers. Undoubtedly, this school and its students are, in every way, extraordinary. But if this campaign had focused at all on education, the candidates would have debated the implications of using schools like Ron Clark as the model for national reform. Alas, that never happened.

--Dana Goldstein

I snapped this picture at a Sarah Palin rally in York, Pennsylvania this afternoon:

Now these little guys were not dressed up for Halloween (although many kids, including Piper Palin, were), and they were most definitely on the youngish side for this crowd, which was probably about half folks I would peg at being over 50. But Palin-love wasn't just a geriatric thing; there were a lot of young families on hand too, and, like the little boys in the picture, they were being primed to believe that Barack Obama wants to steal their money.

There's been a lot of talk about Palin's future in the Republican Party. She was a lot more impressive in person than I expected; she threw some policy substance into her speech (some of it, on Obama's tax policy, inaccurate), and she spliced the requisite amount of fear-mongering about, as she put it, "the far left-wing of the Democrat Party getting ready to take over the entire government," and the creeping "socialism" that might entail.

Before she even arrived (with the Straight Talk Express pulling right into the small arena just feet away from the crowd, in a moment of high drama), people I talked to had bought right into the scary socialism theme. Everyone I spoke to either thought Obama was a socialist (or, as one woman put it, "a Marxist, and how far away is Marxism from Communism?") or "tended toward socialism."

Palin invoked Reagan's name once or twice -- and usually that gets a big rise from an audience like this. But the positive reaction for Palin herself, and the booing for Obama, eclipsed that.

Most people here are, despite the polls, confident of a McCain win on Tuesday. But one young woman told me that although York County is typically solid Republican, she's worried because she knows a lot of Republicans voting for Obama. But if they lose on Tuesday, I would not count Palin out for 2012. I was just a few feet from her in the rope line, and she has a certain magnetism that conservatives adore.

--Sarah Posner

• Barack Obama has expanded his final advertising buy to not only Arizona, but also to North Dakota and Georgia, according to a morning conference call with David Plouffe. Do they think they can win, or is it a head fake? Look, this isn't too hard to figure out. They have the money to burn, so it's not a calculation based on resource allocation, and clearly those states are on the periphery of being winnable -- that is, they have nothing to lose, and potentially something to gain by competing there. And yes, it is a head fake -- if they lose in AZ, GA and ND, it won't cost them the election and the final push fits in, belatedly, with the initial "50-state" strategy espoused earlier. But if they win it buttresses the inevitable "mandate" talk that is sure to follow the election.
• John McCain's closing argument is being broadcast in battleground states for his final push, and the ad mostly summarizes the same themes we've heard for months now: Country, duty, and service. Too bad his behavior for the past few weeks hasn't lived up to those noble goals.
• Reihan Salam takes on the task of explaining why we should vote for John McCain on Election Day and advances an ill-conceived argument: "Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps the US will have to take." The comparison makes little sense. It was Nixon's career-spanning anti-communism that made him an unlikely yet ideal figure to open China. In McCain's case we have someone who has mostly been reviled by the conservative movement, particularly in the last decade, who we are to understand is the best figure to make movement conservatives less ideologically rigid. I have no idea who -- if anyone -- can rescue conservatism from the depths to which it has sunk, but that figure certainly isn't John McCain.
• Sarah Palin is concerned about our First Amendment rights (see Adam's take here): "If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media." Palin's advanced this argument before, and it boils down to this: "questioning the veracity of my smears instead of dutifully and uncritically repeating and legitimizing them is a threat to free speech." Palin's ignorance and Bush-like stubbornness remain perhaps the most chilling aspect of this campaign.
• Cinque Henderson makes a good observation -- something I've wondered myself -- regarding Obama's at-arms-length approach to Muslims: "I'm not looking forward to his [inaugural] speech, so much as his official swearing in, which will constitute the first interesting challenge of his Presidency. The challenge being, will Obama say, 'I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States'" (emphasis in original). I understand Obama the candidate's desire to be cautious on the campaign trail, but if he finds himself on the Capitol steps repeating an oath administered by John Roberts, I hope his better -- and more humane -- nature kicks in and lives up to his talk of getting over the "smallness" of the politics of fear and bigotry.
• More electoral map porn courtesy of Google.
• You know your campaign is doing good when your biggest concern is the "struggle to keep your donors worried."
• I think the Golden Wingnut for most outrageous Obama conspiracy theory has to go to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who provides reams of compelling evidence that Barack Obama's real father was...get ready for it...Malcomn X! I feel as though the circle is now truly complete.
• Don't let Election Night inebriation keep you from your charge to follow the most competitive races and initiatives around the country! Download, print out, and cherish TAP's 2008 Election Night Guide. This has been your first warning.

--Mori Dinauer

Prospect fearless leader Mark Schmitt talks to Cato's Brink Lindsey. Here's a clip of them talking about the potential Obama transition and the possibility of a mandate and what that would mean:

And here's the whole thing:

--The Editors

I just noticed today's Brooks column, in which he endorses "a major infrastructure initiative" that he calls the "National Mobility Project." The goal would be to update our transportation network to reflect the regional growth taking place across the U.S. Brooks' solutions? "[C]ongestion pricing, smart highways, rescue plans for shrinking Midwestern cities, new rail and airplane technologies."

Some of these policies, alas, are more tailored to our current environmental and economic crisis than others. Driving on a futuristic "smart highway" -- in which a computer in your car and signs on the road give you minute-to-minute information on safety, weather, congestion, and available parking -- certainly sounds fun. But those billions would be better spent giving suburbanites and and exurbanites the option of light-rail travel, which most of them currently don't enjoy, and expanding existing mass transit systems. Still, it's good to see Brooks delving into this issue.

--Dana Goldstein

Update on my piece from this morning, Time to Nationalize a Bank:

As I noted, Barney Frank, plans hearings on why the banks that have received bail-out assistance are refusing to lend, and why Paulson has been so reluctant to push the banks. Frank has now scheduled hearings for both November 12 and 18. He just put out this statement:

“I am deeply disappointed that a number of financial institutions are distorting the legislation that Congress passed at the President’s request to respond to the credit crisis by making funds available for increased lending. Any use of the these funds for any purpose other than lending—for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc.— is a violation of the terms of the Act.
“I appreciate the fact that the Secretary of the Treasury has reemphasized that increased lending activity is the only legitimate purpose for taxpayer funding of these institutions. He must make it absolutely clear to any participating entity that the federal government will insist on compliance.

--Bob Kuttner

As a welcome companion to Steven Calabresi's silly ranting about how -- horrors! -- Barack Obama may completely transform the federal courts (if a whole bunch of relatively young judges retire en masse, of course), Charlie Savage brings some data about the extent to which Bush has transformed the federal courts. Democrats control exactly ... one of the 13 federal circuit courts (with 2 being evenly split), and overall Republican appointees represent a whopping 62 percent of the federal circuit courts. Moreover, these numbers probably understate the reactionary tilt of the federal courts; recent Republican presidents have tended to be much more committed to appointing strong conservatives than Democratic presidents have been to appointing strong liberals.

In his first term, Obama will just be attempting to restore balance to the courts. And what they would look like after a couple more Republican terms is something I don't even want to contemplate. And I hope that Obama will look beyond the cautious moderates he seems attracted to for some appointments.

--Scott Lemieux

According to research, only if the endorsement contradicts a reader's perception of the paper's political biases. In other words, the Chicago Tribune's endorsement of Obama is powerful (mitigated, I think, by the fact that it is his hometown paper). The New York Times' -- not so much.

Hat tip: Ryan Avent.

--Dana Goldstein

Riffing off of the Rashid Khalidi situation, Spencer makes a good point about how ensuring that Muslim Americans are fully engaged and welcome in American society is important to our national security interests. In turn, let me use that as a jumping off point for my increasingly relevant article from earlier in the week:

Many have suggested that Obama's election would be a symbolic victory, both in public diplomacy abroad and here at home, over the forces of discrimination. Muqtedar Kahn, an expert in Muslim Americans at the University of Delaware, wrote in a recent report that Obama seems to be "designed specifically to bridge every divide threatening to tear America apart today." The question remains though, whether Obama has gone far enough in ensuring that his message of hope and inclusiveness includes this community. The Muslim community in the United States is unlike most others outside the Muslim-majority world in that it is not an incubator for extremism. It is unfortunate that a presidential candidate who has shown boldness in addressing the deepest divisions in America -- racism, sexism and partisanship -- can't make a bolder statement in support of a growing community whose engagement in American life isn't just right but critical to beating back militant political Islam worldwide.

"If there is one thing that Muslims really yearn for, it's to feel that they're included in the fabric of America," Amanullah said.

--Tim Fernholz

Palin, the bright, shining avatar of the right wing id, explains their position on the First Amendment:

If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

This understanding of the First Amendment, not as freedom of speech, but as freedom of speech limited to me and those who share my political views, coupled with a freedom from criticism of those views, is the most frightening interpretation of the Constitution I've ever heard in my life. Those "attacks" from the MSM are protected under the Constitution, Palin's "right" to be "free" from such "attacks" (read: critical coverage) is most definitely not.

But this bizarre interpretation is at the core of the right's complaints about unfavorable media coverage. Rush Limbaugh typically invokes this "understanding" of the First Amendment when criticizing groups like Media Matters, accusing them of being "Stalinist" for recording his nationally broadcast programming and calling him out on inaccuracies or flagrant bigotries. In Limbaugh and Palin's minds, the First Amendment protects not only their speech but shields any criticism of said speech.

And as Ben Smith points out, the First Amendment exists to protect people from government, not the other way around, which is what makes Palin's interpretation of the Constitution so deeply alarming. Imagine how an administration that believes the First Amendment protects political leaders from criticism would govern.

Barack Obama rightfully believes that the original Constitution was flawed. Palin on the other hand, doesn't seem to have actually read it. At all.

--A. Serwer

Ken Duberstein, a GOP lobbyist who was a major player and the final chief of staff during the Reagan administration, just announced that he's going to vote for Barack Obama, in part because Colin Powell's endorsement of the Democratic nominee was a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." Duberstein, whose Reagan connection ought to prevent any questions of his conservative credentials, was known to be close to McCain and supported him during his 2000 run. Bossman Mark Schmitt flags this Newsweek article from that election, and in particular this paragraph dealing with Duberstein's role in the campaign and his work mediating Powell/McCain tension:

About two years ago McCain began talking to Ken Duberstein, Reagan's last White House chief of staff and a close friend of Gen. Colin Powell's. McCain wanted to know: was Powell thinking of running? Left unstated was the reality that there wasn't room for two American heroes in the presidential race. Duberstein assured McCain that Powell would stay out of the campaign, and the two men began talking about "upping McCain's profile," says Duberstein. McCain, who had a book coming out about his own military career, had watched with fascination as Powell ran a book tour in 1995 that resembled a coronation parade. "How did Colin do it?" McCain wanted to know. The senator also quizzed Duberstein about President Reagan. How had the Gipper won over so many Democrats as well as Republicans? Duberstein offered contacts (his corporate clients include Goldman Sachs and General Motors) as well as sage advice. He began to quietly expose McCain to corporate bigwigs (and potential campaign donors), hosting a breakfast for 25 business leaders with Henry Kissinger in New York that December.

That's gotta hurt.

-- Tim Fernholz

Editors' Note: Stuart Whatley, a fall 2008 Prospect editorial intern, did a great job finding the best places to get election results next Tuesday so that we could link to them in our 2008 election night guide (as it turns out CNN.com is probably your best bet most of the time). We asked him to break down the best and worst state Web sites:

While some state government Web sites are on the ball and have already set up a page for tracking election results, others seem to be unaware that there is even an election at all. For those hoping to track results in their home state next Tuesday, here is a cursory list of just a few of the best and the worst state government election sites.

Worst

Minnesota: Though it's a state with an extremely close and important Senate race, the Minnesota Secretary of State's Election Board website seems to be pretty worthless where it really counts. Though it has some of the necessary features, such as a vaguely labeled icon for "Voter Information" and information on the candidates, it doesn't indicate that it will have timely results on the actual night of the election. Those who wish to keep an eye on this state's results next Tuesday should stick with CNN.com.

South Carolina: It should come as no surprise that a state we've heard almost nothing from this election season has, well, literally nothing about the upcoming elections on its Secretary of State website. One wonders if the only races South Carolina cares about this year involve four-legs and a dirt track, making this site another member of the "Axis of Timely Election Information Deficiency."

New Mexico: New Mexico's state election website isn't nearly as terrible as South Carolina's. But, it's still pretty bad. Most of the voter service links, such as absentee ballot information, are listed down the right side and look like spam advertisements. Front and center on the page is a schedule, sample ballot, and then a large icon that links to a PDF of Constitutional Amendments proposed by legislators with arguments for or against. Only upon scrolling down, will one find candidate information and the results from the primary, but there does not appear to be any obvious avenue for accessing election night results. The site is basically about as navigable as the Arctic Ocean in February.

Best

Alaska: What do you know, Alaskans seem to take election information pretty seriously with a remarkably user-friendly State Division of Elections website. Replete with schedules, how-to's, and candidate/party overviews, the site even furnishes visitors with three different choices for unofficial election results. Playing the "comparison game" between these three will make for some good clean fun on Tuesday night.

North Carolina: Though it's no Alaska, North Carolina's state election website proves to be manageable and adequately informative. It's got some interesting statistics right along the banner on the front page, such as the number of registered Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians. Additionally, it has the much-needed sample ballots to avoid confusion, absentee information, and -- knowing that scavenger hunts should be reserved for Easter--it has "2008 Election Night Returns" visibly front-and-center for all to see.

Arkansas: Arkansas' election page takes a click or two to find, but it makes up for this in its simplicity and ease of use. Divided into "Results by Contest," "Results by Location," "Voter Turnout," and "Candidate Information" it provides varying avenues for visitors without overwhelming them. Notably, it also provides a MYElection button so that you can track individual races.

--Stuart Whatley

The TAP online team is excited to introduce our 2008 election night guide. We've listed some key House, Senate, and gubernatorial campaigns as well as swing counties, demographics, and ballot initiatives, and explained why each is important. We focus on regions where the polls close early in the evening so that, without knowing the results from places farther west, you can still have a good idea of where things will stand at the end of the night. For updates as results roll in Tuesday, visit us here at TAPPED.

Tim Fernholz on Swing State Counties
Stuart Whatley on the Senate
Sam Boyd on the House
Dana Goldstein on Ballot Initiatives
Adam Serwer on Demographics
Carolyn Petri on Governors

--The Editors

Lame duck, schlame duck, sez The Washington Post:

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

They're trying to get them finished as fast as possible -- the White House's deadline is tomorrow -- because a new president could block later orders, just as the Bush administration did for late-breaking Clinton regulations in early 2001. The regulations proposed by the Bush administration could be problematic for progressives on a number of levels: restrictions on family and medical leave, exemptions for power plants under the Clean Air Act, etc. There's not much that can be done to change them right now, save for filing protests during the review period, until a new president with the will to reverse the process comes into office.

This reminds me, incidentally, that while we often think of transition as a time for appointing officials, there are a lot of other components. I interviewed President Bush's transition director, Clay Johnson III (now the deputy at OMB) the other day for a story on Cabinet picks, and he mentioned to me a few other key priorities for the transfer of power besides vetting potential executive branch officials: organizing White House staff and the presidential schedule, determining the post-election message (especially key right now amid two wars and an economic crisis), organizing legislative priorities, and figuring out what kind of executive orders the president plans to issue or negate from previous administrations. This last concern will be key for dealing with these last-minute deregulation attempts.

--Tim Fernholz

TAP alumna Kay Steiger has an excellent article about how vulnerable Roe is under the current Supreme Court, which quotes yours truly. The bottom line for me remains that the argument that Roe's overturn is imminent depends on the belief that Kennedy has changed, and I just don't think there's any evidence that he has. To add a couple of points:

• Leaving aside the question of how "political" we can expect the Court to be, I don't understand why a politically savvy Court would wait until Democrats hostile to their views controlled every branch of the federal government to overturn Roe. I don't see how it becomes any better for the GOP to overturn Roe explicitly in 2010 than it is now. If anything, a politically savvy Court would have seen 2008 as a likely Democratic year anyway and gotten it over with if it wanted to do it.
• The idea that Roe would be explicitly overturned also ignores the extent to which Alito and Roberts have gone out of their way to nominally "uphold" precedents they're not seriously applying. If they're not willing to explicitly overturn precedents that almost nobody in the general public cares about, they're certainly not going to be anxious to do so on a high-salience issue where such an outcome would be very unpopular.

On the edge of a potential Obama triumph, Ta-Nehisi Coates says light skinned brothers are making a comeback:

That's what the I'm talking about. All you Morris Chestnut chocolate boy wonders. All you Denzel Washington mocha macks. All you Mekhi Phifer/Omar Epps/Michael K. Williams/Derek Luke/Pete Rock mofos, I got two words for you--Time's. Up.

Honestly, did we ever leave? Because between Colin Powell, Benjamin Jealous, Sean Paul, Wentworth Miller, Damien Marley, Ludacris, Terence Howard and Warhawk I feel like the comeback, if it happened, preceded Obama. And I mean, LL never left.

Besides, the news that Terence Howard was bounced, without being told, from his role in Iron Man by Don Cheadle may be a harbinger of the eventual backlash. Alan Keyes is waiting in the wings...

--A. Serwer

A year ago, anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly set the goal of placing his misleading “civil rights initiatives” on the ballot in five states. But after legal challenges and accusations of signature fraud, Connerly’s organizers succeeded in only two -- Colorado and Nebraska -- both of which are likely to ban affirmative action programs on Tuesday. That doesn’t just mean an end to considerations of race and gender in college admissions. As I reported last year, an affirmative action ban in Colorado would…

…affect a variety of state programs, some of which wouldn’t be called “affirmative action” at all. The University of Colorado at Boulder’s Simply the Best program offers after-school technology enrichment, field trips, and visits to college campuses for African American and Latina teen girls. Colorado gives special health-care training to minority and bilingual professionals, which ensures more patients have access to culturally competent care. And the Colorado Minority Business Office helps people of color understand how to apply for state contracts.

Pro and anti-affirmative action forces aren’t advertising on TV, but below is a video produced by Colorado progressives opposed to the ban. It highlights Connerly’s shady business dealings and paints him as a carpetbagger, framing the issue as a distraction from everyday concerns such as higher gas prices. Here you can listen to a Connerly radio advertisement airing in Colorado. It references Amendment 82, a failed attempt to put a pro-affirmative action initiative on the 2008 ballot.

—Dana Goldstein

It's been a bit since we talked economics, but Steven Pearlstein makes the argument against recapitalization and in favor of buying toxic securities:

Now, many of the same people are shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that the banks aren't using the money to make new loans to households and businesses, as they had assumed, but are using it to maintain dividend payments to shareholders, pay this year's bonuses to executives and traders, or squirrel it away for future acquisitions.

I hate to say it, but I told you so. Sprinkling money around a highly fragmented banking system when markets were panicked and everyone was scrambling to reduce leverage was always akin to shoveling sand against the tide.

I'm not convinced that buying the toxic assets would have been any more effective or any cheaper, but it's also clear that recapitalization isn't having quite the effects we hoped it would, as the banks are not injecting their government largess into the economy at large. And while the credit crunch appears to be loosening at least a little, it's not enough yet.

BK suggests we nationalize a bank. I'm sympathetic to the case, but it may be easier to convince Congress to heavily regulate the use of federal money (as Barney Frank is trying) than to convince the Bush administration to actually take over one of the banks; as well, I'm not aware of any failed banks lying around for them to snap up.

UPDATE: Our own Dean Baker rebuts Pearlstein here.

--Tim Fernholz

It took me a while to figure out why I love, no luuurve, this video. Of course in part it's the catchy song and cute kids [Eds. Note: That's why I passed it around the office.], but what I really like is that, without taking sides, it is premised on the idea that you should vote because of, y'know, issues. Doesn't sound like much, but it's a huge step up from the usual Rock the Vote "you should vote because it's, like, awesome and ... Democracy... and puppies!" malarkey.

--Sam Boyd

While John McCain has been making coded racial appeals by using well-worn tropes like "welfare" and superimposing Barack Obama's face over maps of the Middle East, in the South Republicans are being considerably more forthright about their feelings, especially with regard to black turnout. In Florida, local GOP county chairman David Storck blasted out an email warning Republicans that black folks were (gasp) voting!

It begins with the words "The Threat," and, referring to an early voting site in Temple Terrace, reads in part: "I see carloads of black Obama supporters coming from the inner city to cast their votes for Obama. This is their chance to get a black president and they seem to care little that he is at minimum, socialist, and probably Marxist in his core beliefs. After all, he is black -- no experience or accomplishments -- but he is black."

The McCain campaign reportedly denounced Storck, but this isn't an isolated incident. In Georgia, Sen. Saxby Chambliss himself is outwardly warning supporters about those "other folks":

The Republican is outwardly confident, but there’s urgency in his voice as he tours North Georgia, trying to boost turnout in his predominately white base: “The other folks are voting,” he bluntly tells supporters.

The idea that whites are supposed to be terrified by black voters exercising their right to vote appears to be a theme on the campaign trail for Chambliss:

“There has always been a rush to the polls by African-Americans early,” he said at the square in Covington, a quick stop on a bus tour as the campaign entered its final week. He predicted the crowds of early voters would motivate Republicans to turn out. “It has also got our side energized, they see what is happening,” he said.

Ed Kilgore says that the sight of black voters turning out in droves in the South has driven local news since the start of early voting, a development that he suggests could spark a backlash among whites and motivate them to the polls. This is, after all, what Chambliss is counting on. As I've written before, Obama's run upends an informal racial hierarchy that some people instinctively want to preserve. I'm not even sure that they're entirely conscious of it, but I believe it accounts for some of the insanity on the right, particularly with regard to criticisms of Obama being "Marxist" and "socialist." McCain himself has had trouble expressing what exactly is radical about the kind of "redistribution" Obama is proposing by raising the tax rate 3 percent, and the reason is that the redistribution is not one of income or hard resources but one of power and hierarchy. And it scares some people to death.

There's been a great deal of talk about how Barack Obama winning the presidency would be a bookend to America's problematic racial history. But the fact is that prominent Republicans are comfortable, even bold, about attempting to turn out their base by invoking fears of black political power. Neither that nor the underlying attitudes that make said appeals possible will change if Obama wins. Yesterday The Economist hoped that an Obama victory would "lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism." Contrary to conventional wisdom, black people do not speak through one voice named Al Sharpton. Still, I find this notion that black people hold themselves back by blaming everything on racism laughable given the fact that the politics of the past fifty years have been premised on white grievance and white identity -- perhaps never more so than in the past few years, when everything from problems in Iraq to Sarah Palin's inability to string together a coherent sentence on policy matters without flash cards is blamed on liberal intolerance.

It may turn out be the case that a politics of grievance is inherently self-defeating, but it certainly hasn't been the case for the Republican Party in a very long time. If, in fact, black folks hold themselves back by blaming their problems on racism -- and I'm skeptical that an acknowledgment that racism remains powerful in society is the same thing as acquiescing to it -- the distinction is that America is a place where white grievance is a path to political power and black grievance is a path to isolation. That's a double standard that argues both for not dwelling on racism to the point of self-destruction, and also for acknowledging that an Obama presidency will change nothing more than what has already changed.

H/T Brownsox

--A. Serwer

Robert Kuttner makes the argument:

The U.S. Treasury, at taxpayer expense, is pumping out an initial $124 billion in bailout money to 24 of America's biggest banks, in hope of getting them to start lending again. But many of these banks are so traumatized that they're reluctant to lend.

So why waste the money on them? If the government took over a failed bank outright, instead of throwing money at banks that it can't or won't control, government could do the job properly.

--The Editors

Adam Serwer has a definitive take on ACORN, how the GOP is wrong about it, and why, nonetheless, the organization still has serious problems:

While ACORN has previously been in Republican cross hairs, Obama's connections to the group have made it even more of a lightning rod. Neither camp has been entirely honest in making its case. In the last presidential debate, Obama maintained that his only connection to ACORN was that he represented the organization as a lawyer in a court case alongside the Justice Department. In fact, the Obama campaign paid ACORN affiliate Citizen's Services, Inc. $800,000 for get-out-the-vote efforts during the 2008 primary but not for registration, as conservatives have claimed. In addition, Obama's 1992 involvement with Project Vote occurred before the group came under the auspices of ACORN in 1994, according to Project Vote spokesperson Sarah Massey.

Nevertheless, ACORN is in many ways a troubled organization. Dale Rathke, the brother of the organization's founder, embezzled nearly $1 million dollars from ACORN between 1999 and 2000. The organization later tried to conceal the embezzlement from its donors. In addition, concerns of impropriety have risen over ACORN's stewardship of Project Vote, which is a federally tax exempt nonprofit and must be nonpartisan. The New York Times reported last week that the board of Project Vote was staffed entirely by members of ACORN, which is a nonprofit but is not tax exempt and therefore not subject to the same restrictions on political activity. ACORN also owes back taxes to several states and the IRS.

Recently the group overstated the number of new voters it has registered. ACORN first reported that it had registered 1.3 million new voters, but the exact number of new voters seems to have been 450,000, with close to 30 percent of the forms filed turning out to be faulty in some way, with many either being incomplete, duplicates, or having false names. As for the argument that ACORN is trying to swing the election through fraudulent forms, Brian Kettenring argues the organization is in fact, being victimized by employees who are being paid for not actually doing any work.

And Harold Meyerson reports on how the Obama campaign's overwhelming pull is suffocating liberal 527 groups in Ohio:

This year, Barack Obama's presidential campaign has more money, organizers, and volunteers than the 527s (or anyone else in American political history) could even dream of. (Newsweek's Howard Fineman recently estimated the national number of volunteers at a mind-boggling 5 million.) Within Ohio, says state campaign communications director Isaac Baker, Obama has 89 field offices, an unspecified number (but surely in excess of 450) of paid organizers, and thousands of volunteers, 10,000 of whom walked precincts on the weekend of Oct. 18-19. The revitalized Ohio Democratic Party, its fortunes bolstered by Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. Sherrod Brown, both elected in 2006, now has 75 offices of its own around the state, and is campaigning hard in five currently Republican congressional districts.

So what has become of the parallel party of 2004? What has become of all those organizations that arose when Democrats feared the new campaign finance reform laws would leave them at a competitive disadvantage unless their allies in the labor, feminist, and environmental communities, funded directly by such mega-donors as George Soros, could field get-out-the-vote operations of their own? What's become of ACT, and of America Votes, which four years ago coordinated the activities of all those groups?

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

—The Editors

Politico's Mike Allen kicked off his influential Playbook email this morning with the following excerpt from the AP's analysis of its recent poll:

a stubborn wedge of people ... somehow, are still making up their minds about who should be president. One in seven, or 14 percent, can't decide or back a candidate but might switch, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll of likely voters released Friday. Who are they? They look a lot like the voters who've already locked onto a candidate, though they're more likely to be white and less likely to be liberal. And they disproportionately backed Hillary Rodham Clinton's failed run for the Democratic nomination.'

Overall, Obama led in the poll 51-43. And as political scientist Michael McDonald told the AP, voters who are still undecided at this late stage may not vote at all. But we could be hearing a lot more of this Hillary-nostalgia in coming days if polls tighten further, or if Obama fails to hit home runs in states like Indiana and Ohio. The important thing to remember is that whole other demographics, from young people to African Americans, are likely to turn out in greater numbers than they would have if Hillary had been the nominee. Just because today's undecided voters once supported Hillary, it doesn't mean that Hillary would have been a stronger general election candidate.

--Dana Goldstein

This one is tougher! Especially after a conference call this morning with David Plouffe, who sounded pleased as he rattled off early vote numbers, which are very high, trending Dem and also contain a high percentage of sporadic or newly registered voters. Plouffe also announced that Obama will be airing ads in Georgia, North Dakota, and Arizona, seeking to push those states -- which, though red, hint at Obama support and also have good campaign organization on the ground -- into Obama's win column. But here are some problems that Obama could yet face:

-- Apathy on Election Day. People get complacent, don't go vote. People point at younger voters and newly registered voters for this one. I actually doubt this happens, between Obama's strong anti-complacency message (and that irritating/effective "CNNBC" video) and the campaign's strong GOTV operation.

-- White panic. White people get in the voting booth, panic about a black man running for president, and don't vote for him. While there are people who think this will happen, I don't. America is better than that, hope, etc.

-- Rashid Khalidi is the last straw among Obama's former associates / the L.A.Times videotape will change the election. No one knows who Khalidi, is outside of the media and high-information voters, and an even smaller universe of people cares. The attacks by McCain are reprehensible -- "neo-nazi" indeed -- but ultimately this is not an election about small stuff. This is a big stuff election.

-- McCain's taxes and socialism message will get him over the top. Maybe, maybe. But as Ambinder notes, his message is ... confused. Thus far, it's unclear that he's actually closing in the polls, but if he is, he's not closing fast enough.

--Tim Fernholz

Example 1: Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who endorsed McCain, says "I don't think at the moment [Sarah Palin] is prepared to take over the reigns of the presidency." He then says that, in time, she may be "adequate." A ringing endorsement for the vice-presidential nominee. One wonders if the gold-star feminists on the right will call Eagleburger sexist, as they have called most other critics of Palin.

Example 2: The McCain campaign is releasing a new ad today that highlights Barack Obama's praise for McCain's climate change record. Look, fellas, here's the thing: Totally with you on the whole jujitsu -- use your opponents words against him if he agrees with McCain. But! We've also spent three months on the "just words," can't trust his soaring rhetoric, too flashy to be trusted stuff. That doesn't work too well in this context. Also, I thought he was a socialist? John McCain, you have been palling around with Barack Obama. How Extreme. (TM)

Substantively, this isn't very good either. Obama has said nice things about John McCain throughout the campaign, and it hasn't hurt him before. Climate change hasn't even been a major issue in the race; the spot might be effective if it were Obama saying how much he liked McCain's economic and foreign policy.

-- Tim Fernholz

"Problems for Barack Obama" coming later in the day...

• Barack Obama's schmaltzy yet effective 30-minute infomercial was viewed by one-fifth of American households, or about half of the audience for the second McCain-Obama debate. As to the purpose of the ad, I'll outsource my commentary to television critic Tom Shales: "The film conveyed feelings, not facts -- specifically, a simulation of how it would feel to live in an America with Barack Obama in the White House. The tone and texture recalled the "morning in America" campaign film made on behalf of Ronald Reagan, a work designed to give the audience a sense of security and satisfaction; things are going to be all right."
• John McCain tells Larry King yesterday that he doesn't think racism will play a significant factor in the election, and that he doesn't believe Barack Obama is a socialist, but that his policies support spreading the wealth around. Meanwhile, the RNC's independent expenditure arm makes the case that just as we don't want amateurs flying our planes or performing our surgeries, we can't afford to have a novice in the Oval Office, either. I guess I missed that clause in the Constitution that explains the credentialing association charged with signing off on qualifying presidential candidates.
• This radio ad in Virginia channels McCain's inner Goldwater, informing the audience that "[Obama wants] more for big government, less for you. Just as you suspected." McCain: in your heart, you know he's right.
• McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on quasi-2012 presidential aspirant Sarah Palin's Alaska oil revenue wealth-sharing plan not having "undertones" of socialism: "No, in Alaska it's a unique state because all the residents there have a unique share of the natural resources, that the oil companies come in and use, so therefore they share the revenues of the resources. ... Alaskans have an ownership stake." So an ownership society and socialism are different … how again?
• John McCain is now running robocalls in Arizona. Man, you just never know what he's going to do next! Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is recruiting volunteers in The Copper State.
  
• Does John McCain have the electoral equivalent of dark matter, whose power will only be realized upon Election Day? Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin say eh, not so much.
• While the Beltway chatter is now focused on an Obama administration's theoretical relationship with a Democratic Congress, Obama has quietly been raising money in the last few months for his presidential transition team. Meanwhile, some crank at GOPUSA puts forth Obama's "dream Cabinet." I especially liked this one: "no one personifies Barack Obama's view of American foreign policy better than Noam Chomsky ... He would be the perfect secretary of state to carry out Barack Obama's feeble foreign policy initiatives." Get it? Noam Chomsky! The radical anarchist! Man, these guys are so far ahead of the curve, they've landed smack-dab in the middle of the 1970s!
• In Colorado, an alliance of voting-rights activists have reached an agreement with the secretary of state to ensure that 20,000 purged voters will still get to cast a ballot. Read more in TPM's helpful Republican vote suppression guide.
• For the curious, libertarian magazine Reason polled its staff and contributors to determine who they're voting for this year. Demonstrating the rigid ideological consistency that burdens the libertarian mind, the staff split -- by my count -- between Obama (3.5), McCain (1), Bob Barr (5.5), no vote (6) and "anybody but McCain-Palin" (1) (half points awarded to leaners). At any rate, it's not easy to tally, that's for sure.

--Mori Dinauer

On his radio show today, Focus on the Family's James Dobson announced that he would be on hand at The Call in San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium on Saturday as part of the last drive by anti-gay activists to rally support for California's Proposition 8, which, if passed, would amend the state's constitution to take away the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Dobson lives in Colorado, of course, but he believes the rejection of Proposition 8 will lead to the downfall of Western civilization, as he tearfully laid out on his radio program today. He interviewed Jim Garlow, a California pastor who has been at the forefront of organizing churches to get out the vote in support of Prop. 8. In today's USA Today, Garlow has an op-ed in which he piles on the fear, claiming that "Failure to preserve the definition of traditional marriage has resulted in profound losses of personal freedoms," and that "When same-sex relationships — especially marriage — acquire government sanction, anyone in opposition to it must be intimidated, silenced, fined, jailed or at least threatened."

A few months back, after asking a perfectly innocent reporter question of the spokesperson for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) -- I wanted to know whether the "legal counsel" referred to on a public pro-Prop. 8 Web site was, in fact, the ADF -- someone accidentally copied me on a chain of e-mails between ADF, Garlow, and other Prop. 8 supporters. They feared that I would surreptitiously listen in on one of their strategy conference calls. One of the respondents in the e-mail thread wrote that the group "should not discuss campaign strategy, and that everyone should assume the conversation is recorded and accordingly avoid inflammatory rhetoric and gratuitous attacks." So, I wonder, if they're willing to make inflammatory and gratuitous claims like gay marriage will take the rights of Christians away in one of the most widely read newspapers in America, what might have someone said in that conference call that would have been off-limits?

Needless to say, I did not hack into their conference call, so I have no idea what was said there.

Back to Dobson: Garlow had requested Dobson's presence at The Call, part of a series of stadium events organized by evangelist Lou Engle, who worries about "Antichrist legislation" like the legalization of gay marriage. For more on Engle and The Call, and the Pentecostal-charismatic leader's growing clout in the religious right, check out this piece I wrote this week for Religion Dispatches, which details how Engle believes his movement of fasting, 24/7 prayer, and, as one follower told me, "continuously being bombarded by the preaching of the end-times" will change the outcome of the election.

How effective is his movement? Engle believes it turned the election in 2000 and 2004 for Bush, and that it resulted in the nomination of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

--Sarah Posner

Ezra Klein argues that John McCain actually isn't the same as George Bush:

Give the Obama campaign this: They have message consistency. John McCain is "more of the same." He voted with George W. Bush "more than 90 percent of the time." He even admits to "[sharing] a common philosophy of the Republican Party" with Bush. Obama campaign allies have taken up the call with a single-mindedness not seen since Republicans discovered the political potency of summer footwear in the 2004 election. In one of the best-received lines at the Democratic Convention in Denver, Bob Casey, Jr. said, "John McCain calls himself a maverick, but he votes with George Bush 90 percent of the time. That's not a maverick. That's a sidekick." Paul Begala just released a book called Third Term: Why George W. Bush (Hearts) John McCain, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund partnered with Media Matters and Progressive Accountability to produce a documentary of the same name (full disclosure: I was interviewed for the health care portion of the film). It's been an impressive concentration of focus, particularly as compared to the McCain campaign, which has exhibited the attention span of a fruit fly.

Alexander Wohl looks at the next president's ability to shape appellate courts:

But often neglected in the hype surrounding the future makeup of the Supreme Court and the hot-button issues that frequent its docket, is the considerable opportunity for the next president to shape the legal landscape through appointments to the 13 federal appellate courts. The Supreme Court hears arguments in only about 75 cases a year, while the geographically representative federal appeals courts provide the final decision in more than 60,000 cases annually. For most Americans therefore, it is the so-called lower federal appellate court, rather than the justices in their fabled marble temple in Washington, that will truly be the "court of last resort." This year, the potential impact of the next president on the federal courts of appeals is especially noteworthy.

Alyssa Rosenberg wonders what will become of TV shows with characters who are dissatisfied with their jobs now that the economy is in trouble:

Earl Hickey, Pam Beesly, Liz Lemon, and Jack Donaghy have next to nothing in common. They are, respectively, a small-time crook obsessed with heavy metal and karma, a receptionist with a flair for practical jokes, a TV writer unable to resist carbs, and a General Electric executive taken with the power of the market. But as the central characters in the three comedies that form the core of NBC's Thursday-night lineup, they have one thing in common: Their jobs are driving them crazy.

And, in our races to watch series, Carolyn Petri reports on endangered Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski and his challenger, anti-immigration icon Lou Barletta, and Brentin Mock reports on congressional candidate Josh Segall in Alabama.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

—The Editors

Brentin Mock talks to Alabama congressional candidate Josh Segall:

One hundred and fifty thousand new voters have been registered in Alabama since last December and almost two-thirds of them are under the age of 30. That must sound beautiful to 29-year-old Joshua Segall, the Democrat looking to unseat Republican incumbent Mike Rogers in Alabama's 3rd Congressional District, the quietest of three competitive House races in the historically red state.

Segall is an unlikely Southern candidate. Though he was raised in Montgomery (next door to George Wallace) he went to college at Brown University and worked on the campaigns of Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold. He's Jewish, pro-choice, and opposed school vouchers if they result in reduced investment in public schools. All of that considered, Segall came from 40 points down to pulling within 9 points of Rogers (with 18 percent undecided) in the latest Capital Survey Research poll.

Previous Races to Watch:
Pennsylvania 11
Ohio 15
Minnesota 3
Senate and Gubernatorial Races

--The Editors

Sarah Palin's favorite publication, The Economist, seems to have snubbed her ticket by endorsing Obama:

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

[...]

The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Just to be clear, the reason the story of Obama's Boston relatives could blow up is because the aunt and uncle may be in the U.S. illegally, though there's no proof of that. Even if they are undocumented, I have trouble believing this will become the much ballyhooed "October Surprise." McCain has supported a path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The rabidly anti-immigrant GOP base has largely been shut out of this general election. And these relatives have a distant, if any relationship at all to Obama, who, after all, met his father only once and saw his Kenyan family only on rare visits as an adult.

--Dana Goldstein

The Times of London has discovered that Barack Obama's father's half-sister, the woman he calls "Auntie Zeituni" in Dreams from My Father, is living in public housing in Boston. A second relative, "Uncle Omar," described in the memoir as dropping out of touch with the Kenyan family after immigrating to the U.S., was apparently also living in Boston, where he was evicted from public housing for failing to pay $2,324.20 of his $500 monthly rent. Omar was the victim of a violent crime in 1994, held up at gunpoint while working at a Boston convenience store.

Some Obama supporters will worry that revelations of the candidate's close connection to urban, immigrant poverty will turn off white swing voters. In actuality, the tale of Zeituni, who scrimped to donate $260 to her nephew's campaign, is quite touching. And while it's unclear what, if any continued relationship Obama has with his Boston relatives, this story serves as a reminder that Obama is truly, extraordinarily different from other recent American presidential candidates. He is in touch with aspects of the American experience that simply are not familiar to his opponent.

--Dana Goldstein

Seems to me he got his money's worth:

The combined overall household rating for Senator Barack Obama’s Wednesday night infomercial, in the top 56 local television markets where Nielsen maintains electronic TV meters, was 21.7. [...]

In comparison, the final debate between the two presidential candidates received a 38.3 household rating in the top 56 local TV markets. The candidates’ first debate on September 26 received a 34.7 household rating in the top 55 markets; their second debate, on October 7, received a 42.0 household rating in those markets. [...]

One rating point equals 1% of the total TV audience in a given market.

--Sam Boyd

With the news that our economy is now contracting -- for the first time since 1991 -- at .03 percent annually, few could deny that a recession has begun. The hit mainly comes from contracting consumer spending in response to job losses and other economic problems. The candidates used the news to snipe at each other, but neither said anything interesting substantively. I'll include their statements after the jump anyways, because, hey, there's no word limit on the internet, right?

I don't have too much commentary on the announcement itself; we knew the economy was shrinking, now we know by (roughly) how much. The question, as always, is what is to be done? The answer is stimulus. And it's not just me and my liberal pals who think so! No, my friends, it's Martin Feldstein as well. The conservative economist and McCain adviser has stepped into the breach and dealt what is hopefully a death blow to neo-hooverism by writing the following:

Another round of one-time tax rebates won't do the job. The rebates that Congress enacted this spring failed to stimulate consumer spending: More than 80 percent of tax rebate dollars were saved or used to pay down existing debt.

The only way to prevent a deepening recession will be a temporary program of increased government spending. Previous attempts to use government spending to stimulate an economic recovery, particularly spending on infrastructure, have not been successful because of long legislative lags that delayed the spending until a recovery was well underway. But while past recessions lasted an average of only about 12 months, this downturn is likely to last much longer, providing the scope for successful countercyclical spending.

A fiscal package of $100 billion is not likely to be large enough to revive the economy. The fall in household wealth resulting from the collapse of the stock market and the decline of home prices may cut aggregate spending by $300 billion a year or more.

The president-elect should focus on developing a mechanism for identifying and funding spending initiatives that can occur quickly and that would otherwise not be done. While it would be good if some of the increased spending also contributed to long-term productivity, the key is to stimulate demand. Any plan to finance this spending by raising taxes, even if postponed, as Sen. Barack Obama has suggested, would hurt the recovery by causing affected taxpayers to cut their spending now.

The increased government spending should include not only money for infrastructure such as bridges and roads but also for a wide range of equipment. Rebuilding some of the military capacity that has been depleted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be done relatively quickly and should be part of the overall package.

-- Tim Fernholz

Today, Doug Holtz-Eakin, McCain-Palin 2008 Senior Policy Adviser, issued the following statement on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) number:

"Today's announcement that third quarter GDP fell at a 0.3 percent rate confirms what Americans already knew: the economy is shrinking. Barack Obama would accelerate this dangerous course. According to the independent Center for Data Analysis, Barack Obama's new policies will destroy nearly 6 million jobs over the next decade.

"Barack Obama's ideologically-driven plans to redistribute income will impose higher taxes on families, small businesses, and investors; expensive, rigid, job-killing health mandates on employers; energy policies that fail to promote domestic oil, natural gas, and coal, and will impose a massive Washington-driven regulation of everything from home furnaces to factories; isolationist trade policies that endanger one out of every five jobs; and massive new spending plans that that will burden the economy and saddle our children with debt. Barack Obama is change Americans cannot afford.

"John McCain's comprehensive reforms will clean up Wall Street, clean up Washington, and create nearly 2 million more jobs over the same period. John McCain offers a new direction and a real choice: lower taxes and under control spending; lower health care costs and portable insurance; an energy policy that declares independence from dangerous and unstable sources, values the environment, and supports growth; serious reforms to taxes, education, and trade to promote global competitiveness, and short-run plans to help the seniors, savers, homeowners, and workers hurt by the financial crisis."

Below is a statement from Senator Barack Obama on today’s decline in our GDP

“This morning, we learned that GDP has fallen for the first time this year, which means America is producing less and selling less and our economy is shrinking. American consumers were especially hard hit, experiencing their largest decline in spending in 28 years as wages failed to keep up with the rising cost of living. The decline in our GDP didn’t happen by accident – it is a direct result of the Bush Administration's trickle down, Wall Street first, Main Street last policies that John McCain has embraced for the last eight years and plans to continue for the next four. These policies didn’t work then, they won’t work now, and I’m running for President to end them. We need to grow our economy by creating jobs, providing tax relief for middle class families, and helping people stay in their homes, and that is exactly what I will do as President,” said Senator Barack Obama.

Ah, the silliness.

--Dana Goldstein

I can't really tell what exactly is supposed to be frightening about Rashid Khalidi or his relationship with Barack Obama, but it's very clear the McCain campaign is doing a successful job of keeping his name in the news. From what I can tell, Khalidi is a Palestinian academic who has been critical of Israel and has done work trying to promote democracy in the West Bank, and was trustworthy enough for McCain to have given Khalidi's group nearly a half a million dollars in grants while McCain chaired the International Republican Institute.

So I basically have two observations: the bony finger of right wing McCarthyism now extends itself to Israel, so that any and all criticism of Israeli policy is suspect and potentially anti-American. Not only that, but anyone who knows or is friends with a Palestinian, or a critic of Israel, is potentially disloyal to Israel and therefore the United States. In fact, if you are Palestinian, I would suggest that you stay away from other Palestinians so no one thinks that you're doing something suspicious. Don't bunch up in a group or anything. The second is that McCain knows that there is nothing particularly dangerous about this guy, that being a Palestinian critic of Israeli policy is about as dog-bites-man as it gets, and that Khalidi was never in fact, a "spokesman" for the PLO as I erroneously blogged yesterday.

But with the Republican Party releasing web ads and sending out mailers with Obama's face superimposed over maps of the Middle East, I suppose that getting the media to repeat Obama's name alongside Khalidi's every five minutes reflects a perverse kind of message discipline. It was less than two weeks ago that Colin Powell was asking "is there something wrong with being a Muslim in America?"

Clearly, the McCain campaign hopes you think so.

--A. Serwer

Parental notification laws never really made sense to me. Let's say you believe that abortion is a scary, potentially traumatic surgery, and parents should know if their daughter seeks one out. Isn't birthing and raising a child equally anxiety-provoking, infinitely more permanent, and much more difficult in the long run? And yet, nobody suggests pregnant teens get a permission slip from mom and dad to carry to term. And of course, no one suggests teenagers get written permission from their parents when they're just considering pregnancy, say, by engaging in unprotected intercourse.

In any case, nobody asked me, so parental notification is on the ballot next week in California, as Prop 4. Let's check-in with the debate. Here's a handy chart that will show you the legal wrangles and "waiting periods" a California girl will have to go through to either obtain her parents' permission for an abortion or get a judicial bypass. Sounds like a terrible first introduction to the legal system. The anti-Prop 4 ad raises the specter that girls will opt for back alley abortions rather than go through the steps imposed by the measure. The pro-Prop 4 ad smartly avoids abortion politics by having an actor play a "child predator" who has sex with teen girls and then takes them to get abortions.

Hat tip: Feministe

Previous ballot initiative ad features: Michigan stem cell research - Gay marriage in Arizona and Florida - North Dakota abortion ban - Colorado “right to work” - Colorado’s “personhood” amendment - California’s anti-gay marriage amendment

--Dana Goldstein

In jumping-the-shark news, a press release of staggering importance:

--Tim Ferholz

• The McCain campaign thinks there's an insidious connection between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi -- outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause and currently a professor at Columbia -- and believes The Los Angeles Times is sitting on video footage of Obama attending a party in 2003 where the Democratic nominee supposedly concurs with some anti-Israeli sentiment espoused by Khalidi. The Times has the footage but is not releasing it to anyone (per an agreement with the person who provided the video), throwing conservatives into a hissy fit, even though, as the Huffington Post reports, McCain himself has disbursed funds to Khalidi's Palestinian work in the past. Oops!
• Obama mocks the "socialism" charge that the McCain campaign has made its predominant electoral pitch, saying that "by the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in Kindergarten."
• Ben Smith asks why Obama is holding a rally in Iowa on Friday, suggesting this might be a response to McCain's constant efforts to make the state competitive. I'd argue instead that this rally is a reminder for Iowans to actually get out and vote for him instead of assuming an easy victory.
• Schadenfreude watch: Politico on the mass exodus of GOP staffers from D.C. should Democrats consolidate control over the federal government next year.
• Nate Silver has a good analysis of how early voting turnout from state to state is correlated with the size of the black population.
• Thomas Edsall reports that Senate Democrats, notoriously conservative about sharing their warchests in election years when they themselves aren't running, have only given the DSCC about $11 million this cycle -- even though few if any face a serious challenge and their hoard of donations exceeds $100 million when combined.
• Here in Oregon, we vote by mail, and even though turnout is less than at this point in 2004 (mainly due to low turnout in red counties, however), it certainly beats standing in line to vote, especially if it's raining. Weather.com breaks down your Election Day forecast.
• Apparently fearing a wave of socialism following an Obama presidency, Miami Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga plans to sell his controlling interest in the team prior to the presidential transition so he won't get dinged by higher capital gains taxes. Cry me a river.
  
• Elizabeth Dole jumps on the greatest-hits-of-the-conservative-movement bandwagon, accusing opponent Kay Hagan of being "godless." I think this is rather redundant. After all, everybody knows Democrats are socialists (or worse), and of course such people don't believe in God, so clearly Dole doesn't respect the intelligence of her base to make these connections themselves.

--Mori Dinauer

It's kind of hard to be shocked when McCain does something dishonest, but his attempt to capitalize on Obama's relationship with Palestinian professor and former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, and to accuse The Los Angeles Times of bias* for not releasing a tape of a farewell party Obama attended on his behalf has to be one of the most craven:

"The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public. I'm not in the business of talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?

In that case, John McCain has some explaining to do, because McCain distributed several hundred thousand dollars to Khalidi's Center for Palestine Research and Studies while he chaired the International Republican Institute. Scott Horton describes the work as promoting "civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank," which sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Unfortunately, to McCain, it sounds like Nazism, which begs the question of why exactly he gave the group so much money, and whether McCain himself has been replaced by some kind of robot controlled by a right wing blogger in a secret compound somewhere.

All indications are that McCain's connections to Khalidi are much closer than Obama's. But if Obama's relationship to Khalidi is somehow disqualifying or dangerous, then McCain's is even more so, and reporters should ask him about it when he chooses to bring up Khalidi's name. Of course, it doesn't sound like Khalidi is a bad guy at all, and that the work he did and that McCain funded was completely worthwhile.

--A. Serwer

*The LA Times has said they were given the tape on condition it not be released, but they wrote an article describing it.

Looks like the idea of stripping Joe Lieberman of his Homeland Security Chairmanship is being floated publicly. Obviously, given his stumping for McCain (including at the GOP convention), the Democratic leadership should show no mercy towards him; the only question is which punishment is most consistent with the party's interests. I still like the idea of making him commit to voting cloture on every Democratic bill as a condition of keeping his chairmanship, but if Reid thinks that it isn't necessary just booting him works too.

With respect to the Select Intelligence committee, I would see Rockefeller leaving as good news, but Dianne Feinstein taking over is just marginally less bad news. Easing Byrd out of of his Appropriations chair seems like a good idea too.

--Scott Lemieux

Jay Newton-Small wonders why Sarah Palin is giving a series of policy speeches this week. I think Newton-Small is implying that Palin is trying to build herself up for 2012, but the real reason the McCain campaign has her on this task, I propose, is simply because voters don't take her very seriously as a candidate, and her dismal poll numbers are hurting McCain. This seems to be an effort by the McCain campaign to staunch the bleeding before election day by making her seem like a more serious political figure, rather than a name-caller-in-chief. Indeed, the real question, given Palin's teleprompter reading abilities, is why she hasn't been delivering more policy speeches. Not that she's a particularly credible messenger for any kind of serious policy roll-out, but had she done a number of them over the course of the campaign it might have seemed that way.

Other questions for TAPPED? Leave 'em in the comments.

--Tim Fernholz

The stem cell research proposal on the ballot in Michigan is quite moderate: It would allow stem cell lines to be drawn only from frozen embryos that would otherwise be discarded, and whose donors agreed the embryos could be used for that purpose. But Christian right opponents, calling themselves MiCAUSE (Michigan Citizens Against Unrestricted Science and Experimentation), are running a truly misleading TV ad. Watch below. The commercial makes it totally unclear whether voting "no" on Proposal 2 would limit or expand stem cell research. As the Detroit News notes today, when voters are confused by ballot language, they tend to vote "no." That could be why Proposal 2 looks more and more likely to be defeated.

Check out how straight-forward the "yes" ad is.

Previous ballot initiative ad features: Gay marriage in Arizona and Florida - North Dakota abortion ban - Colorado “right to work” - Colorado’s “personhood” amendment - California’s anti-gay marriage amendment

--Dana Goldstein

Not content with calling Obama's middle class tax cuts "welfare" or pushing reporters to cover the Ashley Todd hoax, the McCain campaign is going for the full Willie Horton, based on that 2001 radio interview (see Tim's take here):

ABC News' Imtiyaz Delawala Reports: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin went beyond her running mate's recent attack on Sen. Barack Obama -- inaccurately claiming that Obama called the lack of "redistributive change" during the civil rights movement a "tragedy" -- and used Obama's 2001 interview to insinuate that he wants to re-write the U.S. Constitution and appoint radical Supreme Court justices and judges who would confiscate the property of American citizens.
[...]
"There he was talking about the need for quote 'redistributive change,'" Palin said on the campus of Shippensburg University Tuesday night. “Sen. Obama said that he regretted that the Supreme Court hadn't been more radical. And he described the Court's refusal to take up the issues of redistribution of wealth as a tragedy. And he said he also regretted that the Supreme Court didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers there in the Constitution”.

ABC does a great job of pointing out that Obama actually said the opposite, that the court's job isn't to focus on redistributive change, and that in fact the "tragedy" was in reference to civil rights activists relying on the court for change. What Obama actually said was:

I think the tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movements became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing, and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.

But the basic idea behind the "redistributionist" language, complete with welfare references, is that as a black person, Obama will take away white people's property and give it to black people. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, Zimbabwe tried having a black leader, and white people were deprived of their property, so it's only natural to assume the same thing would happen if Obama was elected.

--A. Serwer

It's a heady return to the old all-Palin, all-the-time days of early September here at TAPPED, and I for one won't be left out. ABC's Imtiyaz Delawala notes that Palin has been getting way out front of, well, everyone, in going after Obama's utterly anodyne radio interview from 2001. You'd like a taste?

"There he was talking about the need for quote 'redistributive change,'" Palin said on the campus of Shippensburg University Tuesday night. “Sen. Obama said that he regretted that the Supreme Court hadn't been more radical. And he described the Court's refusal to take up the issues of redistribution of wealth as a tragedy. And he said he also regretted that the Supreme Court didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers there in the Constitution”

Obama had in fact argued the opposite in the 2001 interview, saying that the civil rights movement had become too focused on making change through the judicial system, rather than from the ground up through community organizations.

... But Palin then went beyond any argument McCain has made, using the 2001 interview to insinuate that Obama wants to re-write the U.S. Constitution and appoint radical Supreme Court justices, while also suggesting that under Obama, judges would confiscate the property of American citizens.

... The comments were similar to remarks Palin made at rallies this weekend in Iowa, where the Republican vice presidential nominee seemed to move from accusing Obama’s economic plans of having elements of socialism to also allude to the problems faced by communist systems.

Palin is really a McCarthyite figure, isn't she? Let me run you through the steps: Take an economic plan based on the long-standing principles of American regulated capitalism. Call it socialism because it includes market interventions, even though your economic plan includes market intervention as well. Then, well, there's no step here, Palin just starts calling it communism and scaring people with talk of state confiscation of property. One more disjointed leap and you're in Jonah Goldberg territory. I'm tempted to say that Palin is a malicious liar, but judging by some of the reporting coming from her campaign -- "Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues" -- that she's just saying whatever comes into her head.

--Tim Fernholz

Ohio Republicans are ratcheting up their efforts to cast doubt on the results of the election in Ohio, unless of course, they win, in which case the results will be completely legitimate:

The Ohio Republican Party launched Tuesday a radio ad that opens with the sound of a ticking clock and asks, "Could Ohio's election be stolen?"

In suggesting that "many" voting registrations in the state "may be fraudulent," the 60-second spot cites the case of a Cleveland man who has told election officials and news reporters that he signed multiple registration cards in exchange for cigarettes. The ad says that the man was "bribed to register 72 different times and vote illegally."

As The Washington Post notes, the latter claim is a complete fabrication.

Mike West, a spokesman for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland, said Tuesday that the board has uncovered 80 registration cards with Freddie Johnson's name on them that were submitted since January, "but he has never voted. ... We have no record of him ever voting."

The ad also accuses Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner of "concealing evidence" by refusing to give the Ohio GOP a list of 200,000 mismatched voters, although the ad never specifically says what "evidence" she is concealing. But in this case, the Supreme Court of the United States of America is an accessory to Brunner, since it sided with her when the Ohio GOP sued to get the list.

At this point, it may be less about actually winning the election than casting enough doubt on the result to create a backlash should Obama win the state.

--A. Serwer

This probably isn't the most convenient time for Kim Jong Il to die.

South Korean intelligence indicates that ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il suffered a serious health setback and has been hospitalized, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

The report in the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper cited an unnamed government official in saying intelligence obtained Sunday suggested "a serious problem" with Kim's health. The report did not elaborate.

Kim, 66, reportedly suffered a stroke and underwent brain surgery in August. North Korea, however, denies he is ill.

--Robert Farley

Yesterday, I discussed Rush Limbaugh's odd defense of slavery in an attempt to demagogue a 2001 statement from Obama that the original Constitution was "flawed." Obama also said that the Constitution is "a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now," a statement I would agree with: the strength of the Constitution is that while it did not always make good on the liberty it promised, it was amenable to changes that would fulfill that promise. Nevertheless, Limbaugh asks:

How is he going to -- I asked this earlier -- how is he gonna place his hand on the Bible and swear that he, Barack Hussein Obama, will uphold the Constitution that he feels reflects the nation's fundamental flaw. Fundamental. When he talks about a fundamental flaw, he's not talking about a flaw that can be fixed. Fundamental means that this document is, from the get-go, wrong.

The Constitution's acceptance of slavery, and its valuation of slaves as "three-fifths" of a person, was a fundamental flaw that contradicted the very principles outlined in the Constitution. It was fundamental precisely because it occurred at the moment of the document's creation. But the genius of the Founders was in establishing a political document that could change, if necessary, to extend the freedoms it initially denied. This, as I argued yesterday, reflects the recognition of the Founders themselves that the Constitution could be flawed in some way, for this reason it contains a process for amending it. Among others, our communist Chief Justice John Roberts believes that the amendment process ""did allow some fundamental flaws to be addressed like slavery." Indeed, Roberts notes that these fundamental flaws were serious enough to drag us into a bloody civil war by the 1860s. Creeping Sovietism.

Nevertheless, I'm mostly happy with the way the Constitution is today, with the exception of its disenfranchisement of residents of the District of Columbia. I would support an amendment to grant the District statehood. The founders may not have anticipated that the District would become a metropolis in its own right, and if they had wanted the Constitution to be treated like religious dogma, they would not have included a process by which the document could be changed. Yet the right insists on treating the Constitution like the Bible, which may be related to their tendency to project their own religious views upon it. Does this mean I believe the Constitution is "flawed"? In this small way, yes.

But I'm not alone. It's clear that Sarah Palin believes the Constitution to be flawed, because she wants to change it, by adding an amendment to establish marriage as exclusively being between a man and a woman.

I have voted along with the vast majority of Alaskans who had the opportunity to vote to amend our Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman. I wish on a federal level that's where we would go. I don't support gay marriage.

As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yet Palin insists that the Constitution be changed from its original flawed design in order to include a restriction on personal liberty, something that may be in accordance with the cultural sensibilities of the founders but certainly not the principles of the document they created. Yet, if Palin does not believe the Constitution is "fundamentally" flawed, she certainly believes it is flawed enough to encourage changes that are as antithetical to its fundamental principles as to beg the question of whether or not liberals should be asking the same thing of Palin that Limbaugh asks of Obama. 

--A. Serwer

Unlike, Tim, I don't really like this new Obama ad. It ridicules Sarah Palin for being inexperienced on the economy without mentioning her actual record. Instead, we're treated to footage of one of her (in)famous winks, which makes her seem silly and effeminate without really explaining why she's unqualified.

--Dana Goldstein

Eli Lake hits on the key point regarding the political fallout of the strike inside Syria's border:

The big mystery now is whether the next administration will dismantle this policy or permit Petraeus to follow it to fruition. Obama has said nothing about Sunday's strikes in Syria (a silence that has rightly earned him taunting from the McCain campaign). On one level, this new policy conflicts with Obama's stated desire for opening up diplomatic channels to places like Tehran and Damascus. On the other hand, this is precisely the type of policy that he has repeatedly promised at least for Pakistan, whose territory is believed to host Osama bin Laden: If America has actionable intelligence on al Qaeda leaders, and the country housing those terrorist sits on its hands, we will act. His campaign rhetoric has now become the official war policy he will inherit. Is this a development that pleases him?

--Robert Farley

The Obama campaign has a new widget detailing McCain's budget proposals that's worth looking at. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that these kinds of interactive, multimedia message devices are the future of political campaigning, or at least the future of political nerdery. But check it out, because it's pretty informative, especially in terms of the relative unimportance of earmarks.

In other Obama campaign news, they have a new ad up that, as Ezra notes, goes after McCain on the Sarah Palin choice for the first time. The lack of dialogue is a good choice and will make the ad stick out more on over-crowded channels. In the spirit of equal time, I'm also including McCain's new ad below the jump. The difference between the two ads is striking.

Obama's makes an argument: The GOP nominee says he doesn't know much about the economy, that he may have to rely on his vice president, and then presents the unpopular vice president as the coup de grace. McCain's ad basically says that this really popular guy isn't ready to handle the economy because ... he's going to tax and spend. And that's it; there aren't even any citations. As if McCain doesn't intend to tax and spend. McCain's ad isn't making an argument; it's just issuing declarations of tired old attacks that don't appear to be working. After all, how often do you see The Wall Street Journal declaring, "Republican Party No Longer Owns the Tax Issue"?

--Tim Fernholz

Obama's ad:

McCain's ad:

You know about Prop 8 in California. But did you know that gay marriage bans are on the ballot in two other states, as well? A constitutional ban on the ballot in Florida would outlaw marriage for gay couples and domestic partnership for all couples. A Mason-Dixon poll found 55 percent of Floridians favor the measure, but 60 percent support is needed for it to become law. Arizona rejected a gay marriage/domestic partnership ban in 2006, becoming the first state to do so. But this year's Proposition 102, which doesn't penalize hetero domestic partners, is likely to pass.

Proponents of the Arizona and Florida ban are showing the same slick, nostalgia-fueled TV ads funded by Focus on the Family, slightly edited to fit each state. The Arizona version is below. The equality crowd in Florida has a smart commercial appealing to straight folks' desire to have domestic partnership rights. That message is especially applicable to retirees, who may get into serious relationships after the death of a spouse without remarrying. In Arizona, opponents feature soft-focus brides and grooms, but segue into a more libertarian, anti-government message, which is a good fit for the state.

Previous ballot initiative ad features: North Dakota abortion ban - Colorado “right to work” - Colorado’s “personhood” amendment - California’s anti-gay marriage amendment

--Dana Goldstein

• The RNC's independent expenditure arm has started running ads in Montana of all places. I suppose this is part of McCain's grand plan to eke out a win by carrying MT, WV and Maine's second congressional district.
• I knew McCain didn't really care about the substance of his policy proposals so long as they made for good Republican sound bites, but I did expect more from McCain's policy advisers, from whom we get an admission that the GOP contender's health care plan isn't all that great. What do you know -- straight talk is pretty refreshing.
• Speaking of policy, McCain is jumping on some goalpost-shifting vis-a-vis Obama's tax cut proposal. This would be great news for McCain ... if the change actually amounted to anything.
• Voting shenanigans forever: An official-looking flyer telling Democrats to vote on November 5 in order to "ease the load" on local precincts has been found in Virginia. Meanwhile in North Carolina, ballot vagaries are expected to ensure that a large number of people won't actually cast a ballot for president. Now this is not disenfranchisement, obviously, but a case of poorly-designed ballots exacerbating the carelessness with which many voters participate in the political process. Finally, perennial favorite Ohio might not be capable of aggregating Election Day and early ballots until the following morning because of electronic voting machines.
• Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's decision to extend early voting hours on Election Night means the Sunshine State is ready to repair its rep this year.
• Mmm, that's some good hyperbole. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), speaking at a Sarah Palin rally (tell me again why the McCain campaign thinks it can win here?), describes life under an Obama administration: "when you take a lurch to the left you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship. There is no freedom to the left. It’s always to our side of the aisle." I assume at this point the crowd began reciting, from memory, passages from The Road to Serfdom.
• Apropos of Ezra's contribution to our cover story on why the President doesn't matter, this Politico story on Harry Reid's Robert Byrd problem provides a good overview of the Senate chairmanship changes likely to occur in the 111th Congress. On a related note, John Ensign says Senate Republicans would accept Joe Lieberman into their caucus "with open arms."
• Nearly 40 workers at a call center walked off the job rather than read some robocall garbage about Obama being "soft on crime" and "coddling criminals." Greg Sargent reports that the workers weren't fired, but were not compensated for the day.

--Mori Dinauer

Indiana's Republican Secretary of State, Todd Rokita, who recently announced he will be pursuing an indictment against ACORN, had this to say about black voters last year:

During a speech Thursday at a Republican event, Todd Rokita said 90 percent of blacks vote for Democrats.

"How can that be?" Rokita said. "Ninety to ten. Who's the master and who's the slave in that relationship? How can that be
healthy?"

Rokita seems to have answered his own question: black people don't vote Republican because Republicans are given to reductive and dehumanizing racial commentary about black folks. But it's easy to see how someone who would make a statement like this would be hostile towards a mostly African-American activist group that does the work of registering voters in low-income communities.

--A. Serwer

My bitter, gun-toting, church-going rival Tim Fernholz has an exceptional piece up today on the effect of the Obama campaign's flight from Muslim voters in an attempt to tamp down wrongheaded speculation that Obama himself is a Muslim:

But Powell's directness has been missing from the Obama campaign's response. His campaign has done an admirable job of standing up to guilt by association when it comes to its candidate but has been reluctant to engage in the same spirited rebuttal when Muslim American staffers, or issues, are in question. Attempts by the McCain campaign to associate Obama with terrorism by referencing his service alongside former '60s radical Bill Ayers on the board of a charitable foundation have been promptly fought by the campaign. But in several cases where Muslims working on the campaign have been challenged by the same standards, the Obama campaign hasn't stood up against the charges. Political calculation is one impetus -- it's much easier to write off a low-level staffer than to write off the candidate -- but a larger motivation is that being called a Muslim or an Arab bears a more pejorative association than have most other smears after September 11.

It's one thing to laud the bravery of Colin Powell in denouncing the Right's efforts to turn "Muslim" into a racial slur, but it's also worth acknowledging that the Obama campaign has spent less time fighting those efforts than it has trying to protect its candidate from them.

--A. Serwer

Reacting to the news that Republican Governor Charlie Crist has extended early voting in Florida upon anticipation of extended turnout, David Kurtz asks:

That seems notably, even surprisingly, non-partisan and inclusive. Is there a catch?

On the contrary, Crist appears to be that rare politician in either party that seems to care more deeply about American citizens excercizing their right to vote than in giving his party a political advantage. Crist has done a great deal of work to lift procedural barriers to voting for the formerly incarcerated. Last year, Crist issued an executive order that voter registration applications be included along with rights restoration certificates sent to former convicts, in order to make it easier for them to vote. Crist did this despite a longstanding Republican hostility to ex-felons voting, believing the formerly incarcerated should be further punished beyond their prison terms by being denied one of their most fundamental rights as American citizens. There could be a catch, but it wouldn't be out of character for Crist if there wasn't.

--A. Serwer

That's the less than charitable interpretation of Limbaugh's butchering yesterday of that 2001 Obama interview:

Obama, ladies and gentlemen, calls himself a constitutional professor or a constitutional scholar. In truth, Barack Obama was an anti-constitutional professor. He studied the Constitution, and he flatly rejected it. He doesn't like the Constitution, he thinks it is flawed, and now I understand why he was so reluctant to wear the American flag lapel pin. Why would he? He says "and, to that extent, as radical as, I think, people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted.

Of course, what Obama was actually saying was that the Supreme Court has no standing to deal with economic redistribution, and that it shouldn't have. Moreover, Obama was referring to redistribution the sense of things like public education, not say, state ownership of the private sector. But if you're wondering what "flaw" Limbaugh says Obama sees in the Constitution, it's ... the document's failure to extend freedom to American slaves:

The original Constitution, as well as -- as well as the Civil War amendments, but I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture -- the colonial culture nascent at that time. African-Americans were not -- first of all, they weren't African-Americans. The Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the framers.

One can only conclude that if Limbaugh sees nothing "flawed" about a document that proclaimed freedom for some and slavery for others, that Limbaugh finds slavery perfectly acceptable. More likely he was just distorting Obama's comments beyond recognition for the purpose of accusing him of saying something he didn't say. Media Matters has a list of prominent government figures, including Chief Justice John Roberts, who acknowledge this very basic tragic flaw in the original Constitution, one that allowed for millions of Americans to be denied basic freedom and humanity and eventually led to a bloody war between the states.

What makes Limbaugh's comments even more absurd is the fact that the Founding Fathers themselves understood the Constitution was imperfect, or might need to be changed, which is precisely why they included a process by which it could be amended, which it eventually was in a manner that extended constitutional freedoms to former slaves. The founding principles behind the Constitution were an empty promise that nevertheless paved the way for that promise to eventually be fulfilled, which is precisely why Obama, later in the interview, described it as a "remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now." But by Limbaugh's measure, the Founding Fathers, like Obama, were simply America-hating communists. To be honest, this was something I always suspected.

--A. Serwer

A press release touting a new ad from the McCain campaign. Let's take a look ...

The ad is even more pertinent today as Haaretz reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy views Barack Obama's Iran position as "utterly immature" and based on "formulations empty of all content."

Huh. Nice to see the GOP and the French getting along again. Note that those aren't direct quotes but rather second-hand, and the French government calls them inaccurate.

What else? It's an ad script, accusing Obama of not taking Iran seriously and calling it "tiny." We've heard this before. They're literally recycling the lies of late August. But this time, the McCain campaign actually includes the whole quote right below their ad script, so anyone can actually see how much they are taking Obama's comments out context. It's like I don't even have to try to show how disingenuous they are anymore! Here is the quote:

"Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao. I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet. And ultimately that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall. Now, that has to be the kind of approach that we take. You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serio us threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. That doesn't mean we agree with them on everything. We might not compromise on any issues, but at least we should find out other areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that has caused us so many problems around the world." (Sen. Barack Obama, Remarks, Pendelton, OR, 5/18/08)

-- Tim Fernholz

Yesterday, I commented on the state of conservative thought, the folks at Culture 11 picked up on it, and Helen Rittelmeyer had this to say:

I don’t mean to suggest that ideas don’t matter, but I do want to drive home the point that, just as Democrats and Republicans are caught in a cycle of infrastructure envy ("The Right has all the think tanks!" "The Left has all the netroots!"), we’re also caught in a cyclical pattern of thinking that the other side has all the fresh ideas. If this mistaken line of thinking leads the Right to engage in lots of ideological soul-searching, then I’m all for it, but let’s not pretend that this "Whoever Has the Best ‘Substance’ Wins" narrative is any kind of true. Just ask the Left; they spent the last decade at this point on the sine curve, and it wasn’t "fresh ideas" that got them past it.

But Rittelmeyer's argument that ideas may not have consequences (funny to hear from a conservative) just isn't right. For my part, I didn't scoff "at the idea that Obama’s popularity has anything to do with a revitalization of liberal ideology." I scoffed at the idea that Obama is a hard left ideologue, contra Mark Levin, but he's certainly a liberal. And I do believe that a revitalization of liberal ideas -- I won't say ideology because I don't think most voters are ideologues -- has helped Obama. Ideas about income inequality, the common good, the need for liberal internationalism and diplomacy, the importance of health care -- one of Obama's strongest debate moments was when he said health care is a right -- and the need for a regulated capitalist market all significant factors in Obama's success. It will have implications after the election.

I don't disagree that infrastructure and campaigns matter to the election -- obviously Obama's charisma and political talent played a large role,. and the progressive movement has lifted him up. McCain's campaign has been abysmal. But Obama is winning because his proposals and the way he communicates them resonates with voters. They're right for the times. They may not be "fresh" in the sense that they have never been articulated before, but they are in the sense that they have not been championed effectively in the last few decades. Rittelmeyer thinks Democrats are winning because "the war tanked" -- but the war tanked because it was a bad (conservative) idea. The economy tanked, too, and the deregulation that led to that occurrence was a conservative idea, even when it was championed by Democrats.

-- Tim Fernholz

Willie Geist and Courney Hazlett this gobsmacking exchange on Morning Joe today:

GEIST: Coming back to the Obama thing. Does it strike anyone else as creepy? Obama's taking over every network? It's sort of like when you imagined the Soviet invasion, it would take over the airwaves. Something weird about it.

HAZLETT: Seriously. Exactly, exactly. I mean, it's even going to be on Telemundo - Spanish television. It's everywhere -- except for ABC. Now, I do want to be fair, ABC said that they offered their air to Obama and for whatever reason, he declined.

GEIST: Ok. It makes me a little uncomfortable.

David Schwartz, the curator of the Museum of the Moving Image and their recent Living Room Candidate exhibit, which explores the history of political advertising in presidential elections, says that Obama's buy isn't that unusual. In fact, he says that "It was a tradition...candidates used to buy time on election eve," in half hour slots in order to make their final case. This didn't end until fairly recently, Dukakis and Bush I were the last candidates to do so in 1988, and Schwartz says the change in dynamic was mostly because of the rise of cable news, which allowed candidates to get large amounts of free TV time. It's less clear that Obama's choice is a wise one, Adlai Stevenson bought eight weeks of 30 minute slots to air a series of his speeches when he faced Eisenhower, who relied on short spots. Eisenhower of course, defeated Stevenson. What makes Obama's buy unusual is that it is that it will be carried on several networks, it's airing six days before the election, and that it occurs at a time when buying TV time is considerably more expensive.

But this conversation is another example of how comparisons to totalitarian Russia have become as meaningless as allusions to the Nazis -- people basically use both as rhetorical crutches for arguments that limp along without them. This election season, such inane comparisons have multiplied like breeding rabbits, in part because the right has descended into absolute hysteria over Obama's chances of winning the election, and because you can only ride that Hitler hobby-horse so long before it starts to chafe. (Remember when the right used to complain that the left was making inappropriate comparisons between Bush and the Nazis?) Clearly, the media has started to internalize this nonsense, at least partially because people like Geist and Hazlett apparently have no idea what communism and socialism really are.

It should go without saying that Soviet leaders didn't have to "buy" time because the stations were controlled by the government, while Obama is buying time with contributions from his supporters. Obama is basically buying an ad for himself in a free society where people choose their leaders, he isn't justifying a repressive, totalitarian leadership. But Geist and Hazlett's exchange fits nicely with the McCain campaign's attack line that there is something "socialist" about Obama's plan to raise taxes on people making $250,000 a year, and the patently absurd technique of free associating mundane details with totalitarianism.

One might as well say hats are Soviet, because Stalin enjoyed wearing them. The popularity of mustaches, likewise, are proof of encroaching Sovietism. Also hastening the decline of freedom in America is wide use of the color brown, which was preferred by the Soviet military. But proof that America is about to enter an age of repressive communist rule is the fact that we refer to significant portions of the country as "red" states. Now Obama is buying advertising on major networks in advance of an election, (the Soviets loved watching TV, I am told) in accordance with a longstanding tradition of presidential candidates doing so. Can labor camps be far behind?

--A. Serwer

Not actually that spooky, we're just in the spirit of the season. Look below for free trade, military public affairs, corporate taxes, and, of course, a stimulus package.

• Globalization behooves multilateralism. In a Carnegie Endowment trade policy paper, Margaret Lay warns of the possible clash between environmental policies and trade agreements in the post-Kyoto future. For example, if the United States wishes to impose a unilateral carbon tariff on, say, China, Chinese producers will simply retaliate and take their business elsewhere. But Lay outlines how nations can act in the interest of both the environment and individual trade, using multilateral efforts to bring reluctant states into the mix. The importance of such a green-free-trade alliance cannot be stressed enough if there is to be a coherent approach to global climate change. -- SW
• Beyond Collateral Damage. The Institute for Policy Studies has released a report surveying the various military public relations policies that have aimed to mask the scale of casualties and destruction in the Iraq war. American journalists in Iraq have been censored by the military, robbed of footage of civilian deaths, required to submit stories "pre-publication review" after embedding, and have been banned from photographing caskets of American soldiers. In the meantime, a number of policies have allowed top-level officials and contractors to operate with legal immunity, use "light footprint" bombing tactics that promote looting and violence, and attack individuals and vehicles indiscriminately based on vague definitions of suspicion without disclosing any numbers on civilian casualties. To top it all off, the military has paid Iraqi journalists to paint a rosy picture of the entire catastrophe. -- ZA
• Putting U.S. Corporate Taxes in Perspective. A report released yesterday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities disabuses us of the notion that U.S. corporate tax rates are uniquely burdensome on companies here. Because the tax code offers corporations generous deductions, credits, and other tax reduction mechanisms, an average U.S. corporation pays only 13.4 percent of its profit in taxes, whereas an average corporation from one of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries pays 16.1 percent of profits in taxes. The report recommends a corporate tax reform that combines a reduced and broadened "revenue-neutral" tax rate with elimination of the more illogical and costly tax breaks. -- DH
• Hey, you got your human rights in my Columbia policy! The Washington Office on Latin America challenges the imminence of a free trade agreement with Colombia in thirty pages that dig into human rights shortcomings and the failures of Plan Colombia, the current manifestation of our Colombia policy. WOLA suggests a new policy: Put the rural poor at the forefront, and engage change agents from within Colombia. The U.S. needs to quit crushing on Uribe and militancy and instead focus more broadly on inclusive governance and labor rights, after which our other goals (free trade, free trade, and free trade) will follow. The report cites UN findings that since Plan Colombia began in 2000, cocaine production has hardly dropped. On the other hand, killings and disappearances have diminished robustly since then; today's rates are a fifth of what they were. Read the report for details on which policy elements WOLA thinks should stay, which should go, and which we'll have to wait for. -- CP
• Detailed stimulation [PDF]. The Economic Policy Institute releases a short brief on what a stimulus package would include; it's got a decent amount of detail and includes the by-now de rigeur Mark Zandi chart on bang-for-buck ratios of different types of spending. The report suggests a total of $175 billion in smart stimulus that includes state aid, infrastructure investment, and pump priming for future work on reform issues like energy independence and green jobs. Some scary facts: Two-thirds of roads are in poor condition, half of all bridges are obsolete or deficient, and sewer infrastructure problems lead to overflows that release 850 billion gallons of raw or partially treated sewage each year. -- TF

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
10/21/08
10/14/08

A phony but official looking flier found in Hampton Roads, VA, misleadingly states that Democrats should vote on Nov. 5 to "ease the load on local electorial (sic) precincts and ensure a fair electorial process." The typos are a giveaway, but the flier nonetheless sports an official looking seal:

Ted Stevens' indictment may be a huge victory for Democrats, especially if it helps tip the race for Alaska's Senate seat to Stevens' challenger Mark Begich. But some -- particularly some progressives and enviros -- have a mixed reaction about Stevens' impending doom. An initial glimpse of this came when Diane Benson, the Native Alaskan Democrat challenger for Alaska's U.S. House seat (who lost in the August primary), said in a campaign press release in July that she was "greatly saddened" about Stevens' indictments. The latest came when Colin Powell, who Adam pointed out as a closet liberal, surfaced at Stevens' trial to testify as a character witness for him, and then three days later endorsed Barack Obama for U.S. president.

Some conservationists welcomed Stevens' guilty verdicts, pointing to a painful environmental record for most of his years in the Senate. Being a Republican with close ties to big oil execs hasn't won Stevens many green friends -- the League of Conservation Voters gave Stevens a low in their recent National Environmental Scorecard, as they did to most Republican Senators. Meanwhile, when I spoke with Deborah Williams of Alaska Conservation Solutions earlier this month about Stevens' indictments, she admitted that Stevens' voting record wasn't the most consistent, but that he was coming around on environmental issues. She called him a "leader" in Congress in supporting renewable energy.

For a long time Stevens denied anthropogenic causes of global warming, but he more recently has begun removing doubt about it also.

"We've got global climate change, and it's coming about partly naturally and part of it may be, I believe, caused by the accumulation of the activities of man," he told the St. Petersburg Times.

"[Stevens] told me and others that addressing global warming is like buying insurance," Williams told me, "you can't be 100 percent certain that it is humans that cause it, but it's better to be on safe side due to the potential costs involved."

Williams also said that while his voting record this year has been mixed, his office has worked much better with environmental protection groups like ACS. As for those votes, on Sept. 23, he voted to approve the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act -- although this date also marked near the beginning of his trial, so he may have been fishing for favorability. Earlier this year, he helped pass the Consolidated Natural Resources Act. And he helped push the Food Conservation and Energy Act over Bush's veto -- a controversial act for its big farm subsidies, but it provides investments for R&D in other biofuels, and extends the Conservation Reserve and Wetlands Reserve Programs.

His support for protection of marine life and fisheries seem solid, although his son Ben's associations with the fisheries look scandalous. But where the elder Stevens comes across as genuine is in his fight against IUU vessels, pirates of sorts who loot fish from the seas beyond the regulated limits for catches and outside approved fishing areas.

Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker may have been exaggerating a bit when he stated that Stevens' political work may have saved the writer's and "a great many Alaskans" lives, but he was keen to point out the funds Stevens secured for the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which studies hazardous volcanic activity.

Not to say that Steven's Democratic opponent Mark Begich wouldn't pick up where Stevens left off if he were to win the campaign, but Begich would have to work his way up to influential positions Stevens once claimed on the appropriations and commerce, science and transportation committees. For Begich to carry out his very appropriate and much needed energy and climate change plans, he's going to need money, and the Treasury's not looking so fat these days. Whether Begich can match Stevens in that category, the jury's still out.

--Brentin Mock

Ezra points out that Kevin Drum opposes the high speed rail project on the ballot in California, which would connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. One of Kevin's arguments is that the projected travel time of 2.5 hours between the cities is overly optimistic, and that it would be worthless to spend so many billions on the rail line if the trip actually took more like 3.5 hours. This is where the East Coast's experience with better Amtrak service can inform the California debate. By train, the trip between New York City and Washington, D.C. is about 3.5 hours, while the flight is about 1 hour. Yet Amtrak is the preferred mode for most business travelers between the two cities. Who doesn't want to avoid the trouble of getting to and from the airport, checking baggage, and going through security? Not to mention that training is a darn pleasant way to travel.

Currently, taking Amtrak between L.A. and San Francisco is an all-day event; it's no wonder people prefer the 1.5 hour flight, no matter what the price mark-up. But if train travel time were reduced to between 2.5 and 3.5 hours, a great many passengers would come to prefer rail service. If we don't provide these alternatives, people will never change their behavior, and in the age of climate crisis, change is an imperative. We can't endlessly put off the expense and trouble of constructing high speed rail.

--Dana Goldstein

Steven Calabresi waxes hysterical and ludicrously implausible:

If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.

Admittedly, not all of these are equivalent. The idea that the Constitution says nothing about the size of punitive damage awards, for example, is held by such un-American Trotskyites as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and it's hilarious to see Calabresi get finished complaining that Obama's judges will write their notions of economic policy into the Constitution and then claim that his own right-wing economic views can magically be found in penumbras and emanations from the 14th Amendment.

At any rate, some of these positions would in my view be defensible, others would not, and some are just crude, unserious demagogy. ("Mass freeing of criminal defendants?" "A federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities"?) But for most of these, the idea that the median Supreme Court justice would support such judgments after an Obama administration is silly. One can say the same thing for the idea that "the left" is poised to "capture" largely Republican-dominated federal courts. And the whole piece is based on idiotic claim that to disagree with Steven Calabresi's highly contestable views is to reject constitutionalism altogether.

Anyway, how does Calabresi justify his claims that Obama would pack the Supreme Court with justices that would have to turn right to see Thurgood Marshall? By, like many Drudge-driven hacks before him, quoting Obama's (perfectly accurate) claims that the Warren Court wasn't particularly radical, while leaving out some rather key information, such as his skepticism about the courts as tools of social reform. The idea that Obama is going to appoint a bunch of judges far to the left of the current mainstream is, for better or worse, almost entirely unfounded. And I somehow doubt that this attempt to create panic about the possibility that, after winning the popular vote in 4 out of 7 elections, the Democrats might get more than 2 Supreme Court appointments is going to be very politically effective either.

--Scott Lemieux

Paul Waldman considers why al-Qaeda might try to influence this election as it did in 2004, and what effect such an action would have: surprise

On Oct. 29, 2004 -- four days before the election -- Osama bin Laden released a videotape attacking President Bush. As Ron Suskind later reported in his extraordinary book The One Percent Doctrine, CIA analysts concluded that "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection." John McLaughlin, the acting director of the CIA at the time, said at a meeting to discuss the tape, "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the president."

At the time, it was universally understood that the more voters were reminded of terrorism and external threats, the more they would gravitate toward the Republican candidate, particularly one who was so skilled at standing on top of rubble and issuing lusty promises of vengeance. What wasn't remarked on much was the possibility that -- as the CIA understood -- George W. Bush's re-election was exactly what al-Qaeda wanted. Chances are that they'd like the current Republican presidential nominee to win as well. The difference is that unlike four years ago, al-Qaeda may not have the power to affect the outcome of our election.

And, in an article from our new print issue, Robert Kuttner explores how the final days of the election have become a battle of narratives about the economy, and how conservatives are trying to blame anyone but themselves.

What do you do when your core ideology turns out to be not just a practical failure but a national catastrophe? You contrive alibis. You invent facts. The final days of the 2008 campaign can be understood as a battle of narratives. It is now clear to most Americans that the financial collapse was caused by extreme deregulation, the practical expression of laissez-faire dogma. Though some Democrats were enablers, the ideology was more purely Republican. How to temper this awkward political reality? Devise a counter-narrative. Herewith the elements:

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

—The Editors

This year, the Christian right is revisiting its 2006 attempt to ban all abortions in South Dakota, possibly triggering a lawsuit that would reach the Supreme Court. Two years ago, voters rejected a similar initiative that did not include an exception for the health or life of the pregnant woman. Now that exceptions have been written into the measure, a recent poll showed the fight too close to call, with 44 percent of South Dakotans in favor of the ban, 44 percent opposed, and 12 percent undecided.

Here are ads running on South Dakota TV. The anti-choice commercial is really something. Terrifying footage of NARAL Executive Director Nancy Keenan making a speech is accompanied by the script, “Who are these people? They are the billion dollar abortion industry, and they’re bringing their Northeastern abortion-on-demand philosophy into South Dakota.” It goes on to feature Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder of NARAL who became an anti-abortion rights activist in the 1970s and directed the film The Silent Scream. Meanwhile, the pro-choice group appeals to libertarian, anti-government sentiments (patients and doctors deserve privacy).

Previous ballot initiative ad features: - Colorado “right to work” - Colorado’s “personhood” amendment - California’s anti-gay marriage amendment

—Dana Goldstein

CQ, naturally, is on the case:

Q: Did Stevens get paid his Senate salary while sitting in the courtroom?

A: Yes, just like senators continue to draw their $169,300 salaries while campaigning for re-election or for president. Despite his legal troubles, Stevens remained a frequent sight in the halls of the Capitol while Congress was in session. He has missed just two votes since he was indicted — one on July 29, the day the indictment was handed up and the other on Sept. 26, the day after opening arguments in his trial.

Q: Did Stevens have to give up any perks of office?

A: Yes. Senate Republican Conference rules require a member indicted on felony charges to step down from the post of committee chairman or ranking Republican on all committees and subcommittees on which they serve. Long before his trial, Stevens, the Senate’s longest-serving GOP member, relinquished his role as the top Republican on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery within hours of his indictment.

Q: Any chance of getting any of those jobs back pending appeal?

A: No. Senate Republican rules would require Stevens to remain on the sidelines even if he is re-elected.

Related -- John McCain has called for Stevens to step down.

--Phoebe Connelly

Ol' DB writes today:

My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.

Noam Scheiber last March:

You can find subtle evidence of [behavioral] influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama's savings plan exploits this so-called "status quo" bias.

And, yet, it's not just the details of Obama's policies that suggest a behavioral approach. In some respects, the sensibility behind the behaviorist critique of economics is one shared by all the Obama wonks, whether they're domestic policy nerds or grizzled foreign policy hands. Despite Obama's reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren't radicals--far from it. They're pragmatists--people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, "Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground." It might as well be the motto for Obama's entire policy shop.

In his next column, Brooks will casually mention that this election will be a coming-out party for charismatic black politicians who run tough, effective political campaigns.

--Tim Fernholz

If you'll recall, the Kurds, those country-less, independent ethnic freedom fighters of northern Iraq (and several other countries) were always tacit U.S. allies. They were the main beneficiaries of the pre-OIF no-fly zone and had their reputations deployed whenever people made the case for the war. Now that we're in charge in Iraq, the Kurds have been trying to establish their autonomy as best they can (especially by trying to seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk). Anyways, they're not particularly happy with the way things have been going lately:

The Kurds want a loose federation, while [Prime Minister Nuri al] Maliki, playing on nationalist sentiments, is increasingly pushing for a strong central government.

Relations have deteriorated to the point that the Kurdish leadership has described Mr. Maliki as a new Saddam Hussein, recalling how Mr. Hussein ruthlessly crushed the Kurds in the 1980s. The borders of Iraqi Kurdistan were established as an internationally enforced security zone in 1991.

Awkward! This comes after the Iraqi Army began pushing out Kurdish units in Mosul, the other major city in Kurdistan, and replacing them with Shi'ite army units. Don't worry, though, the American general in command there has said he will not interfere in any fighting between the Kurds and the Iraqi army, although American troops apparently helped "contain" a stand-off in September between the two groups.

What's instructive here is that this conflict has little to do with security per se. Mosul has been more secure than it was last year -- a drop from forty insurgent attacks a day to nine or ten -- but there is still a potentially serious conflict based on the underlying concerns of traditional geopolitics, which is to say oil and land. No amount of troops in the region will prevent conflict over these resources (some diplomats might help the various Iraqi factions figure out who gets what without killing each other). But this is yet another example of how even improvements in the security situation that provide space for political reconciliation don't provide political reconciliation itself. It's not clear to me exactly what the best way is to solve this conflict. Beginning to withdraw American troops, though, might force both sides to spend more time worrying about insurgents and less time plotting against each other.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Barack Obama gave his "closing argument" speech today in Canton, Ohio, summarizing and contextualizing the themes of his campaign since it began 21 months ago. This does leave up in the air what Obama plans to do with his half-hour block of paid ad time on Wednesday but, as I suggested a few weeks ago, it will probably be something more special than a slickly-produced campaign retrospective.
• A 2001 recording of Obama discussing "redistribution" in the context of a purely academic discussion of the role of the federal courts has become the latest evidence of the Democrat's socialistic tendencies, blares the Drudge Report, National Review, and the McCain campaign. Of course, if you actually listen to what Obama is arguing, he's generally dismissive of the idea of using the courts to enact a policy agenda, preferring instead to use the good old fashioned -- dare I say conservative? -- option of letting legislatures hash it out. Ben Smith passes on a similar assessment from Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, who isn't exactly what I'd call a "judicial activist."
• Speaking of the courts, a Georgia court has struck down Republican Secretary of State Karen Handel's attempts to disenfranchise voters via an illegal "eligibility" gambit. Meanwhile, despite all this, libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr thinks Obama will win the state. See also Time on the 7 things that could go wrong on Election Day.
• Count me in the camp (if it exists) that does not believe Sarah Palin will cruise to the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 -- not because the conservative base will wise up -- but because she will face competition that year from this year's more seasoned also-rans. Let's also not forget that people like Chuck Hagel are going to keep pointing out her obvious lack of qualification for the job, the fact that she can't answer questions from reporters without first memorizing talking points and screening the questions, her tendency to divide rather than unite Americans and cause intraparty rifts, and her continuing problems back home. But don't take my word for it, Newsweek found she polled third behind Romney and Huckabee [the frontrunners for my money] in a theoretical 2012 match up [PDF]. You betcha!
• Bill Clinton will make his first joint campaign appearance with Barack Obama in Orlando, FL, on Wednesday.
• Ezra remarks on Republican Congressman Frank Wolf (VA-10) turning a blind eye to thuggish tactics perpetuated by his staff, and John Aravosis shares a Norm Coleman mailer, designed like a childrens' book, that discusses jokes about pornography and rape which, the document argues, make Al Franken "completely unfit for public office."
• The Obama campaign has filed an FEC complaint against John McCain for accepting personal donations exceeding the $2,300 limit. While they're at it, they might want to look into possible copyright infringement as well.
• Better safe than sorry: Joe Biden runs an ad for his Senate re-election in the event he loses his White House bid.

--Mori Dinauer

In the original version of this post I put up a video in which a McCain supporter seems to drop an n-bomb in the middle of Sarah Palin giving a speech. But when I listened to the video without looking at the screen, it wasn't at all clear to me that's what the person was saying. So the old post remains below the fold, but until the moment in the video is corroborated by an outside source I'm going to say the person yelling deserves the benefit of the doubt. Presumably there were other reporters there, and if they didn't hear it, it probably wasn't said.

--A. Serwer

A McCain-Palin supporter calls Obama a "nigger" in the middle of a speech:

I'm actually relieved they've started saying what they mean. "Nigger," for some of these people, is more honest than "socialist." But what's most amusing is the way that Palin, who clearly heard it, simply ignored the person yelling. For all the ticket's talk about moral courage, the second she's confronted with evil in one of its most basic forms, Palin, like all blowhards, has nothing to say. Maybe she was confused, maybe she was embarrassed. What's certain is that as with everything else, she was out of her depth. Evil looked her in the face, and she bowed her head and pretended it wasn't happening.

It's a reminder that whatever McCain and Palin have presented themselves as this cycle, they have been essentially bullies. McCain has broken every promise he could possibly make, whether it's to run a "respectful" campaign or to put his country first, since August both notions have become punchlines. They have been content to raise Ayers mostly in Obama's absence, flirting with using Wright without directly doing so until the last week of the election. They've called Obama a terrorist sympathizer, only to demure that this line of attack is only meant to raise questions about Obama's "judgment" rather than his character.

So this dam is finally breached. Given the thundering insistence that Obama is a "socialist" with ties to terrorists, that his candidacy is a threat to the country, that Obama will take away their freedom. What exactly did the McCain campaign expect?

--A. Serwer

Then again, I don't haunt the "corridors of Democratic power":

And no subject is more avidly considered in the corridors of Democratic power than the future role of his chief adviser, political consultant David Axelrod. Democrats who know the Chicago-based political consultant, the key architect of Obama's campaign and of his public image, say Axelrod has signaled that he'll seriously consider taking on a job in the administration. That decision would be a central choice in shaping an Obama White House, and determining the relationship between his style of governance and political strategy.

Snark aside, it is an interesting question, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it discussed anywhere else. As the article notes, there's a menu of possible jobs, from a formal member of the White House staff (Karl Rove was Bush's deputy chief of staff) to an independent consultant on retainer. That said, it's not clear how much difference where Axlerod is housed would make:

Axelrod would be expected to be a key adviser to Obama wherever he keeps his office, and his roots in Chicago are deep. "I'm proudly an outside-the-Beltway consultant," he told Politico last year. "David has never shown a desire to move to Washington, but it's hard to tell a president no," said a veteran of one White House political operation.

Axlerod hardly seems like a very threatening figure -- no matter what job he gets he won't be Karl Rove. And there's nothing wrong with presidents getting political advice; they practice politics. Still, for appearances if nothing else, it might not hurt to keep him at some distance.

What do you think?

--Sam Boyd

Well the Alaska Senate race was almost certainly decided today:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has been convicted of lying about free home renovations and other gifts he received from a wealthy oil contractor.

The Senate's longest-serving Republican, Stevens was found guilty on all seven counts of making false statements on Senate financial documents.

The verdict throws the upcoming election into disarray. Stevens is fighting off a challenge from Democrat Mark Begich and must now either drop out or continue campaigning as a convicted felon.

It also could doom already-endangered Rep. Don Young, who was making a comeback after falling behind his Democratic challenger Ethan Berkowitz, but who probably needed an acquittal for Stevens to put him over the top (he is closely tied to Stevens and both candidates' ethics problems were linked in voters' minds).

--Sam Boyd

So I read Mark Levin's post about the "recklessness and abandonment of rationality" that has led to the likelihood of an Obama victory. Levin's description of the state of the race and Obama himself is at odds with what is actually happening out in the world. Consider this statement: "Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue." This for the liberal who's platform is tax cuts for 95 percent of people, who is likely to put Republicans in high Cabinet positions, who is still mistrusted by plenty of folks who are ideologues on the left.

Nowhere in the post does he consider that maybe the message of conservatism he promotes might be, um, part of the problem. Certainly there are plenty of conservative writers, from Andrew Sullivan to the young guns (Culture 11, Reihan + Ross) who have evinced plenty of introspection about how conservatism needs to adapt to these changing times. But there are also plenty of more influential conservative writers who are taking, like Levin, the position that everyone else is crazy.

It's notable because people on the left, especially during the dark days of the early oughts, and, historically, in the eighties with the New Democrats, have shown a willingness to say, "Whoa, something isn't working here." Sometimes that took the form of saying that liberals need to be more pragmatic, more conservative, etc., and sometimes it took the form of people calling for a return to and revitalization of core progressive principles. Obama certainly has borrowed from both of these exercises in redefinition: He's pragmatic in many respects, shading toward conservative in his understanding of family and faith, but also has made forthright defenses of liberal ideas on civil rights and investment.

But I, for one, would like to see a better conservative opposition, if only because I'd rather spend my days arguing about policy than trying to convince readers that liberal political candidates aren't terrorist sympathizers. Maybe this is simply a symptom of the final days of a long and strange election, but it often feels like conservatives and liberals are talking past each other; not in the usual way, where fundamental differences in values make our various proposals incompatible, but because there are conservatives who are focusing on Obama's imaginary "utopianism" while so many liberals are focused on asking why we're in Iraq or what will be done about the economy. It's certainly a metaphor for the campaign, where Obama's bread-and-butter approach has seen a success while McCain's character-driven campaign has thus far failed to resonate.

--Tim Fernholz

CNN is reporting that 50,000 voters in Georgia have been flagged as mismatches in the state voter database, and that thousands of them may not have their votes counted this year. Kyla Berry is one of these voters:

The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter was postmarked October 9.

"It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and asked her to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late, apparently,' " Berry said.

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

It is, of course, illegal to purge voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election, so there's no reason why Berry should have been receiving a letter on October 2 telling her to prove her citizenship. Republican Secretary of State Karen Handel says this isn't "voter suppression" but that's absurd. Not only is it voter suppression, it's blatantly illegal. Moreover, Georgia has been using the Social Security Administration database to match voter information -- essentially the most flawed method they could possibly use. In 2007, the SSA admitted that of 2.6 million voter registration records submitted to the SSA, nearly half resulted in a failed match.

Handel's lip service about provisional ballots is also plainly transparent. On average, states count less than half of their provisional ballots, so between illegal purging, the use of flawed databases to match voters and insisting that eligible voters cast provisional ballots rather than real ones, Handel is doing a bang-up job of suppressing the vote.

--A. Serwer

In an article from our new issue, now available online to subscribers, Ezra Klein, in his introduction to a package of profiles of figures who will determine how effective the next president will be, argues that we overestimate the importance of the president:

Forget the president. Not totally, of course. The president matters. But not as much as you think. Not as much as you've been led to believe. The centrality of the executive is something of a convenient fiction in American politics. Convenient for the media, which can tell the story of national affairs by following a single character. Convenient for the party that holds the White House, which can outsource the messy work of constructing an agenda to one actor. Convenient for the party that does not hold the White House, which can create an agenda out of simple opposition. And convenient for voters, who can understand politics through the actions of a discrete player and offload their dissatisfaction onto the failures of a hapless individual.

And, in the first full-length piece from the package, Brad DeLong explains how the Fed has become politically untouchable and, under Ben Bernanke, will play a huge role in the success or failure of the next president:

Ben Bernanke is the closest thing to a central economic planner the United States has ever had. He bestrides our narrow economic world like a colossus. Unelected (he was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by an overwhelming majority in the Senate) and unaccountable (unless the Congress decides that it wishes to amend the Federal Reserve Act and take the blame for whatever else goes wrong with the economy), he is responsible only to his conscience -- and his open-market committee of himself, the other six governors of the Federal Reserve Board, and the 12 presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks.

Finally, Brentin Mock reports on Sarah Palin's polar bear problem:

Scientists and comedians alike have derided vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin over her denial of human responsibility for global warming. Palin has repeated in interviews and debates that the "the world's weather patterns are cyclical" and that "over history there have been cooling and warming trends" that explain climate change. She also claims that polar bear populations are stable, not endangered as scientists report.

If Palin's against-the-grain views were simple matters of scientific disagreement, then it would be convenient to ignore her. But, as governor of Alaska, her theories have dire consequences because of the world's untapped oil and gas reserves that lie below the Arctic ice carpet. Over 130 billion barrels of these fossil fuels may be available from the Arctic Circle. Tapping these reserves would fuel the kind of consumption that leads to more aggressive global warming through greenhouse gas emissions.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

—The Editors

Mr. Trend doesn't like the New York City Council's decision to permit Michael Bloomberg to run for a third term. I'm not really persuaded by the arguments against, however. A couple points:

• Term limits (especially term limits this short) seem, for the reasons Dana cites, highly unlikely to have progressive implications over the long term. Obviously, this isn't true in every individual case (imposing term limits on congressional committees in the 40s and 50s would have had progressive effects), but, in general, diminishing expertise and involuntarily retiring popular, effective leaders is not likely to enhance the cause of good progressive government. If Bloomberg has to benefit to get rid of a bad policy I can live with that, especially since it's not clear to what extent the alternatives would do a better job.
• I would give arguments that prior referenda represent some sacred Will of the People that shouldn't be amended by mere elected officials exactly the same weight I would give them when Rick Warren makes them about Prop 8: none whatsoever. This is a representative democracy; so long as the legislation is otherwise constitutionally valid I don't think rules created by referenda require any special deference beyond their rightness on the merits.

--Scott Lemieux

Jason Zengerle, stop. Just stop. Now the argument that New Hampshire will go for McCain is that ... Obama under-performed the polls during a volatile primary election. I'd note that poll Zengerle references was taken on the two days before Hillary Clinton had her famous teary-eyed moment in Portsmouth, which many observers see as the turning point of the Granite State's primary election, and that it also had a smaller sample size than either the current UNH poll or any of the other recent polls that show Obama ahead in the state.

As well, Obama hadn't been leading in the state for months but jumped ahead after his Iowa win -- a bounce that obviously turned out to be pretty soft. It was also a lesson that the Obama campaign learned, if the candidate's statements warning against complacency and citing New Hampshire are anything to go by. I'd also note that the partisan ID in the state trends Democratic, that independents prefer Obama, and that former Governor Jeanne Shaheen looks set to pull out a win over incumbent John Sununu in the Senate race. Basically, I demand that people who think McCain will win the state make any kind of argument about voter preference that does not rely on vague impressions of people being "crotchety."

--Tim "Flinty NH Voter" Fernholz

I already posted on the news that the Bush administration has asked the Justice Department to act on John Boehner’s request and look into whether or not 200,000 Ohio voters should have to reconfirm their registrations before Election Day. Daniel P. Tokaji, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of several civil-rights groups looking to prevent the local GOP from getting their hands on the mismatched voters list, says that’s unlikely.

Tokaji says that “there’s no practical way to do it eight days before the elections; it would be complete chaos to make all these voters reconfirm their eligibility,” adding that “there’s no basis in law for requiring voters to reconfirm their eligibility because the database hasn’t matched them.”

But that doesn’t mean that these voters will get their votes counted. Adam Skaggs at the Brennan Center for Justice says that, although it hasn't responded yet, “the Justice Department could intervene by going back to the same federal court that originally approved the Republican Party’s request, and could get an order saying that these 200,000 voters would have to cast provisional ballots.”

Skaggs’ colleague Michael Waldman refers to provisional ballots as “placebo votes” because so few of them get counted.

--A. Serwer

Yesterday, Ambers offered John McCain's closing argument. It's mostly pablum, but part stuck out at me: The GOP nominee plans to "manage the two wars." Not, you'll note, "win" them or "end" them. We've lost sight of it amid the financial crisis, but McCain has never had a plan to win either war short of saying, in so many words, "I'm going to let the generals do whatever they want." Check out his Iraq plan and tell me if you think John McCain will make any changes from the current policy status quo surrounding the war in Iraq. I doubt he will, and that is why he promises to manage the wars, not finish them. It's a small thing, but a telling one.

Incidentally, I also noticed this: "The Iraqi government can jump-start this process by using a portion of its budget surplus to employ Iraqis in infrastructure projects and in restoring basic services." But don't you dare invest in infrastructure in the United States -- we have too much freedom for that kind of basic economic policy.

-- Tim Fernholz

A strange thing happened in Colorado this year: Business and labor interests came together in opposition to a right-to-work ballot initiative, Amendment 47. Right-to-work, of course, exists in 22 states and effectively ends unions' ability to organize by making it difficult for them to collect dues. Corporations go crazy for right-to-work. But Colorado business leaders, including Coors Brewing patriarch Bill Coors, believe the state's existing Labor-Peace Act is enough. That law -- the only one of its kind in the nation -- requires two separate votes by workers to form a union. If you're interested in the back-story behind the unique labor politics in Colorado this season, check out my piece on the topic from a few weeks ago.

Here we have the back-and-forth TV ads on the initiative. The right-to-work group goes for a nice working dad and stay-at-home mom who tell their children that unions are scary. The anti-47 crowd vilifies corporate bigwigs, which is notable considering some of them are in the coalition opposing the initiative.

Previous ballot initiative ad features:
- Colorado's "personhood" amendment
- California's anti-gay marriage amendment

--Dana Goldstein

Alex MacGillis had a thoughtful essay in the Post this weekend on Obama's potential as the first "metropolitan" president. Not "urban," but "metro" -- as in the conception of cities and their suburbs as intimately tied to one another, and the understanding of their public policy concerns as largely the same.

Obama should find ways to address urban problems in a suburban context -- focusing not just on West Baltimore or North Philadelphia, say, but also on suburban North Las Vegas, which has more concentrated poverty than Las Vegas proper. The same goes for spending on public transit. "If he frames something like that as being about metro competitiveness, he can do a lot," [Robert] Lang said. "It should be, 'Hey, suburban guy sitting in traffic, would you like transit?' instead of 'I'm going to take your money and spend it in places you don't visit.'"

This is an optimistic way of viewing regional politics in America. If you consider the failure of congestion pricing in New York City, or the resistance of suburban communities nationwide to the racial and socioeconomic integration of schools, it's easy to see that cultural and political tensions between cities and suburbs remain deep-seated. Because of gas prices, suburbanites do want better transit, for sure. But the issues at play are more complex than that and require changes in the suburban lifestyle; changes that, so far, have been difficult to enforce or even incentivize politically. In most states we still can't regionalize school districts or equalize school funding. Most communities can't or won't pass limits on parking spaces or invest significantly in transit. Realistically, we are a long way away from most people identifying with the larger environmental and social needs of the metropolitan regions from which they hail.

--Dana Goldstein

Last week, French naval forces captured another nine pirates, this time turning them over to authorities in Puntland (a Somali region aspiring to independence) for trial. The Puntland government has thus far been hostile to pirates and has made positive noises about cooperation with international authorities, so there's reason to believe that the pirates are in serious, genuine trouble.

Last week at Patterson, a speaker mentioned that France has taken the lead in aggressive action against pirates, and also that France has been at the forefront of efforts to strengthen the military institutions of the European Union. This caused me to wonder whether the two trends are connected; have the French decided that they can use piracy as an issue to highlight the desirability of tighter EU military cooperation? Anti-pirate activity is (unlike many uses of military force) very popular, exciting, and altogether photogenic. Making sure that French commandos and naval units have a leading role in the fight against pirates certainly enhances French military prestige. It will be interesting to see whether France makes an effort to push for direct European Union (as opposed to NATO) participation in anti-pirate activities. Of course, the fact that the financial system of the EU may be on the brink of collapse could make this a moot point.

--Robert Farley

In a massive display of chutzpah, President Bush has asked the Justice Department to look into a request by the local GOP in Ohio to determine whether 200,000 Ohio voters must reconfirm their registration status before Nov. 4. The move comes in response to John Boehner's statement that "there is a significant risk if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast and counted," if the registrations are not re-evaluated. This is nonsense, because first-time voters are required to show federally approved ID at the polls before they are allowed to cast a ballot. Not only that, but the United States Supreme Court already ruled that the local GOP had no standing to bring the complaint in the first place. We already know that these mismatches are due mostly to typos rather than fraudulent applications, and the necessary safeguards against fraudulent voting are already in place.

The move shows how little has changed at the Justice Department since Michael Mukasey took over for Alberto Gonzales. The Bush administration still focuses its attention on nonexistent questions of voter fraud rather than instances of voter suppression like the New Mexico GOP's potential violation of voting rights when it harassed newly registered voters. The Republican Party's agenda in Ohio is similar to its agenda everywhere else: to mitigate Democratic advantages among newly registered voters by ensuring that as few of them are able to vote as possible.

The Bush DOJ was already tainted by the U.S. attorney scandal, in which several U.S. attorneys were fired for failing to bring charges against individuals for voter fraud due to lack of evidence. The specter of "voter fraud" is often raised to disenfranchise voters by typo, and this situation is no different. Americans can no longer expect the government to protect their right to vote; rather, they have to worry about the government doing its best to make that right as hard to exercise as possible, for nakedly partisan reasons.

--A. Serwer

Today is the sixth anniversary of Paul Wellstone's death. Ezra wrote a moving tribute last year:

When liberal was an epithet, Paul Wellstone wrote a book called The Conscience of a Liberal. When unions were in deep decline, Wellstone stood with them, and now the AFL-CIO now gives an annual award in his honor. After the Clinton health plan was crushed and Democrats retreated from health reform, Wellstone pushed for single-payer. While Clinton was chasing dollars to outspend and overwhelm Bob Dole, Wellstone was calling for full public financing. When progressives were marginalized and cowed by the right's cynical use of 9/11, Wellstone stood on the floor of the Senate, deep within the chambers of power, at the epicenter of cowardice and "responsible" hawkery, and roared on behalf of our ideals. That they were politically inconvenient never deterred him. "If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for," he said, "at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."

The fight is not so lonely anymore. Democrats control both houses of Congress. The country now sees George W. Bush much as Wellstone described him. New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman just wrote a book called Conscience of a Liberal, as clear a signal as any of the word's restoration. Economic inequality, wage stagnation, and the health care crisis dominate the Democrats' domestic agenda, just as Wellstone always said they should. It's easier to be a liberal today, to be a progressive, to be proud. But there was a time when it wasn't. When liberalism in defense of peace was mocked, and moderation in service of imperialism was praised. In those days, it was hard to be a liberal. It must have been hard to be Paul Wellstone. He never showed it, though. He liked to quote Marcia Timmel. "I'm so small and the darkness is so great," she said. "We must light a candle," Wellstone would reply. He was ours. Would that he was here to enjoy the dawn.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

• An increasingly desperate McCain campaign staff has started fighting amongst themselves and spinning outlandish victory scenarios. Steve Schmidt: "The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000. We have ground to make up, but we believe we can make it up." The Gore analogy sounds fishy on the surface and here's some evidence it is in case you're inclined to give Schmidt the benefit of the doubt. Also, the McCain temper must run in the family and Randy Scheunemann lets off some steam on Marc Ambinder.
• The New York Times editorial board has endorsed Barack Obama for president, their thirteenth consecutive Democratic endorsement. Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan endorsed Obama yesterday, as did the granddaughter of Barry Goldwater.
• The presidential campaigns are getting into some of their heaviest advertising of the season, but Barack Obama still dwarfs John McCain on this front, spending nearly $100 million in the first two weeks of October alone. Meanwhile, Hill PAC is back in business and helping out downticket Democrats, although it isn't clear what the status of Sen. Clinton's outstanding debts from the primaries is.
• The engaging and charismatic Fred Thompson has cut an ad for John McCain, warning the country that we need solid leadership in a dangerous world. Over at The Corner, K-Lo describes it: "Thompson works his magic to get out the vote." Funny, I thought narcolepsy was a medical, not magical, condition. Lopez also likes this substance-free spot from Laura Ingraham: "SmartPeople4McCain&Palin" (originally edited to read "Intellectuals4McCain&Palin" -- guess they needed to dumb it down a bit). "A movement begins," Lopez writes.
  
• In other wingnut news, Jon Swift rounds up the very best of the right-wing blogosphere's Obama conspiracy theories, Fox News' James Pinkerton asks, "Could Lucifer play a role in this presidential election?" and Thomas Sowell warns that electing Barack Obama and the Democrats will mark "the point of no return" from which the United States will degenerate into oblivion.
• The New York Times Caucus blog comments on the other great story coursing through the conservative blogosphere's veins, that the security settings on Barack Obama's donations website are set irresponsibly low, allowing anyone to donate under any fake name and address they wish. The Obama campaign contends that they do audits after the transaction has been completed, and if fraud is found, the money is refunded. But the issue is whether this is actually evidence of a policy of collecting illegal donations to pad the campaign's coffers. I think not -- the campaign would have to be out there encouraging fake donations and advertising the fact that it is easy to do so. To the contrary, the lax security settings appear to be indicative of a well-intentioned but poorly executed attempt to make it as easy as possible to make a donation. Add all these deliberate or accidental fake contributions up, subtract the refunds, and I'll bet you find a drop in the bucket of an otherwise ethical and sophisticated fundraising machine.
• Everyone's favorite modern McCarthyist, Michele Bachmann, is showing signs of weakness in two post-"anti-American" polls in Minnesota.
• Dana has the right take on this business of a McCain campaign volunteer mutilating herself and filing a false police report to make the crime look racially- and politically-based.
• The Obama campaign has a nifty interactive map that lets you track instances of McCain robocalls in your state.

--Mori Dinauer

The American Family Association's news service -- which frequently promotes the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim smears -- is now worried that Mattel's talking baby doll, the Little Mommy Cuddle 'n Coo, is saying "Islam is the light." The toy manufacturer says (quite reasonably, don't you think?) that the doll only coos giggles, babbles, and says "mama." But I suppose if you fear terrorists lurk in unexpected places, you might consider this a prime suspect.

--Sarah Posner

This post has been corrected.

Via HuffPo, Tom Ridge, the McCain-Palin campaign's national co-chair, is narrating robocalls that warn, in part, that "If the Democrats win complete control of government they will want to give traditional civil rights to terrorists and talk unconditionally to dictators and state sponsors of terror." That's the same Tom Ridge who presided over the Department of Homeland Security turning into a boondoggle for his lobbyist friends and their clients. Because he cares about keeping you safe from terrorists.

Ridge's claim is straight out the playbook of the National Republican Trust PAC, which has been fundraising through e-mail blasts to Newsmax, Townhall and other conservative outlets still hyping fact-free tales of Obama's Muslim ties and terrorist sympathies. Just yesterday, the National Republican Trust PAC was touting its new ad about "Obama's dirty little secret." Following on the heels of the PAC's first ad, which charged that Obama wanted to give drivers' licenses to terrorists, the new "dirty little secret" is "his radical plan to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits and Medicaid, full healthcare coverage."

How many ways can we count the scariness? A black Muslim socialist turning terrorists into welfare queens!

This isn't Ridge's only public foray into scaring Americans about secret terrorist plots. Along with McCain surrogates Rudy Giuliani and Joe Lieberman, Ridge appears in the new "documentary" The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision for America, which was produced by the same outfit that produced the controversial DVD Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. Obsession, which has been roundly condemned by Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and media watchdog groups, has been distributed to voters in battleground states through newspaper inserts, to evangelicals through Christian Zionist organizations, and to Jews through mailings from the Republican Jewish Coalition and other groups. Since its release in 2005, the "Obsession" DVD has been promoted in conservative blogs and media outlets, and the promoters claim to have distributed 28 million copies through an aggressive campaign launched last month.

The Third Jihad maintains that a fifth column of Muslims aim to institute sharia law in the United States. The DVD hasn't been released yet, but excerpts are available at the film's web site. One of the first times I heard about it was at the Values Voters Summit, when Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy recommended it to a roomful of evangelical activists.

Last week, Gaffney took to the pages of Israelinsider.com, which is owned by Reuven Koret and frequently reprints articles from the American Thinker site, which has been singlehandedly responsible for some of the worst smears against Obama, including reporter Ed Lasky's that Obama is Muslim and Koret's own that Obama does not have a U.S. birth certificate. Gaffney wrote in a piece entitled "The Jihadist Candidate" that the Obama campaign had a "dalliance with Islamists - those who embrace Islam's repressive theo-political-legal code known as Shariah and who are working for its triumph in the West in general and the United States in particular. The episode is but the latest indication that the Democratic candidate hopes to win the White House by relying, in part, on the Jihadist vote."

It doesn't take a lot of dot-connection to see a campaign to terrify people that a religious group representing less than one percent of the U.S. population is about to take over the country with its own religious laws, all the while claiming that the man who may be our next president is secretly in league with this supposed conspiracy.

The Third Jihad DVD is hitting the streets on Oct 29 -- and if its producers promote it like they promoted Obsession, they will keep this fifth column conspiracy theory in circulation for years.

--Sarah Posner

Correction: The American Thinkner is not owned by Reuven Koret, as this post originally stated.

Update: The American Thinker protests this post on two fronts: first, that I claimed that The American Thinker was engaged in a fifth column conspiracy. I did not assert that The American Thinker is part of any fifth column conspiracy; rather, I was discussing a film that suggests there is a fifth column of Muslims which aims to institute sharia law in the United States. In addition to discussing the film, I highlighted other allegations and innuendo that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer, a "pal" of terrorists, or otherwise "anti-American."

Second, The American Thinker further protests that Lasky has never written that Obama is a Muslim. I stand corrected on that; he's never written that Obama is Muslim, but has his advisors of being anti-Israel, has written that his Muslim outreach staff meets with terrorist supporters, and that he has "a range of foreign policy advisers who have been criticized for views that all too often seem accommodating to terrorists and regimes that support terror."

At TPM, Zachary Roth has confirmation from several other legal experts that the incidents in New Mexico, where several voters were visited by a Republican hired private investigator demanding personal information, may have violated the criminal section of the Voting Rights Act.

Jon Greenbaum of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights agreed, and added that the activities detailed in TPMmuckraker's report could violate both criminal and civil voting rights statutes. Greenbaum pointed to a civil provision of the Voting Rights Act which says that it violates the law to intimidate, threaten or coerce someone from voting or not voting.

Greenbaum too said he planned to pass on to the Department of Justice the claims made in our report.

Rick Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a noted expert on election law, also said that the behavior potentially violated the Voting Rights Act or other federal civil-rights statutes.

In the past, the Bush Justice Department has been slower to act in cases of voter intimidation and suppression than in cases of voter fraud. We'll see how it goes this time.

--A. Serwer

Editors' note: Zeeshan Aleem is a Fall 2008 Prospect editorial intern.

The mass media, these days, doesn’t seem particularly fond of public protests. While the election has demonstrated its penchant for making the most mundane moments iconic, elevating arugula and lapel pins to the status of major talking points, there has been little coverage of public protests, here and abroad.

While a significant portion of the American population knows the price of John Edwards’ haircut, the number of houses John McCain owns, and the amount of people who cheered for Obama in Berlin, how many people know that, at the RNC this year, roughly 800 people were arrested despite the fact that the demonstrations were largely peaceful? How many people know that 40 journalists were arrested and some were assaulted, had their gear dismantled, and their press passes taken away? How many know that when Iraq Veterans Against the War and a couple hundred supporters were peacefully protesting the occupation of Iraq outside the final debate at Hofstra University, a group of cops on horses accosted them, or that one of the veterans was trampled on so badly his cheekbone was fractured.

How many people know that an estimated 50,000 people marched nonviolently in Baghdad against the Status of Forces Agreement this weekend, and may have played a major role in pressuring the Iraqi cabinet to drop support for US occupation under the terms of the agreement?

Organizing in public space in these times is easily dismissed, perhaps seen as shrill and composed of ideologues who reside on the peripheries of mainstream opinion. But public protest is a literal and powerful example of ordinary people expressing their views -- much more so than stunts like the McCain campaign's embrace of Joe the you-know-what. Furthermore, the protests I’ve just described are not pushing radical ideas. The war is massively unpopular in the US and Iraq, and systematically ignored by popular media outlets.

The brutality that protesters have faced in the US recently is shocking, but the fact that it has been ignored is dangerous for democracy.

--Zeeshan Aleem

Another day, another campaign conference call. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, along with top field aides Jen O'Malley and Jon Carson tell the press corps what's up. This mainly consisted of emphasizing that they expect to polls to tighten in the next 11 days, a tone struck no doubt to dampen any emerging McCain comeback narratives. Plouffe also offered a tiered breakdown of battleground states, with a group of likely pickups, which includes Virginia, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado; then a second group consisting of Nevada, Florida, Ohio, all Bush states that the campaign thinks are leaning their way; a third tier of Indiana and North Carolina where early organization efforts may pay off, and then what I am terming a "landslide tier" of Georgia, North Dakota and West Virginia (I'd add Montana) where we've seen the occasional Obama lead or tie. If these states go, it's going to be a blow-out. But Obama doesn't need to win all of these states to win, giving him a lot of flexibility for getting to the magic number in the electoral college.

Two other notes: Plouffe doesn't think McCain will win Pennsylvania, where the senator's campaign seems to be going all in, and he said he's fine with the Republican's decision to close on a tax argument. Any other time I'd think it was spin, but as we've seen, Obama is winning on taxes:

In the latest Washington Post-ABC tracking poll, Obama maintains a 51 to 43 percent lead over McCain on handling taxes. Obama's edge on this question in the Post poll is identical to the one President Bush held over John F. Kerry at this stage four years ago.

Well, ain't that something.

--Tim Fernholz

*I have wanted to use this headline all cycle, and I'm running out of time.

I'm not surprised that Ashely Todd fabricated her entire story of being mugged, assaulted, and branded with a "B" while campaigning for John McCain in Pittsburgh yesterday. When I lived in Paris in 2004, a woman was assaulted by Arab youths on the Metro. Her clothes were torn. She was beaten. And most horrifically, swastikas were drawn on her skin in red marker. The French Jewish community, still reeling from the desecration of Jewish gravestones earlier that year, reacted with outrage. Israeli politicians urged French Jews to make Aaliyah (move to Israel). Members of my family emailed and called from the States to ask if I felt safe in Paris as a Jew.

The thing was, that story was entirely made up, too. And the woman at the center of the drama, 23-year old Marie-Leonie Leblanc, wasn't even Jewish.

Individuals who invent stories of victimization are often mentally ill, and deserve some modicum of compassion. But there's no question that in both of these cases, the lies were manufactured to whip up racial hatred. Equally bad, people who fabricate tales of violence do a real disservice to women and men who are actually victims of violent crimes. Our culture is already filled with insinuations that women in particular make-up or "exaggerate" accusations of assault, sexual harassment, and rape.

All in all, this little episode is an example of one individual crafting a narrative intended to play off an image of Barack Obama and his supporters (as radical, terroristic, and racially-motivated) that is being pushed by the McCain campaign. Sad and sordid.

UPDATE: It's not just women who fabricate stories like these. Here are two cases of male college students involved in similar frauds.

--Dana Goldstein

The well-circulated myth that Rick Warren, the best-selling author and megachurch pastor who hosted the unmistakably pro-McCain presidential forum at his Saddleback Church back in August, is a "new" kind of evangelical abandoning the culture wars has been further debunked by his endorsement of Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that would amend the state's constitution to ban gay marriage.

In a video released on his web site yesterday, Warren rehashed the religious right canard that the legalization of gay marriage by the California Supreme Court is somehow illegitimate because it "threw out the will of the people." The Court, or "four guys," as Warren called the judges, "voted to change the definition of Chri -- of marriage that has been going for 5,000 years." Little slip of the tongue, there, Pastor Rick?

After emphasizing his support for Proposition 8, Warren went on to justify his position by claiming that even Barack Obama agrees with him:

This is one thing that politicians all tend to agree on. Both Barack Obama and John McCain -- I flat out asked both of them -- what is your definition of marriage, and they both said the same thing. It is the universal, historic definition of marriage, one man and one woman, for life. And every culture for 5,000 years and every religion for 5,000 years has said the definition of marriage is between one man and a woman.

Never mind that Obama has said he is nonetheless opposed to Prop. 8. Perhaps he needs to remind Pastor Rick of that.

Warren -- the anti-culture warrior, remember? -- went on to promote the religious right's insidious, fact-free complaint that a minority of Americans aim to undermine God's will, and even had the gall to claim opposition to gay marriage was a humanitarian issue for Christians:

Here’s an interesting thing: there are about 2% of Americans are homosexual, gay, lesbian people. We should not let 2% of the population determine -- to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue, it is a humanitarian and human issue, that God created marriage for the purpose of family, love and procreation. I urge you to support Proposition 8 and to pass that on.

Brought to you by the evangelical movement with the "broader agenda."

--Sarah Posner

Q: What is our nation's definition of domestic terrorism?

Answer, according to the PATRIOT ACT: "The term `domestic terrorism' means activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended--(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.'"

Isn't it interesting, then, that Sarah Palin, in an interview with Brian Williams , contends that Bill Ayers is a terrorist, but abortion clinic arsonists and bombers are just "unacceptable"? Palin says, "I don’t know if you’re gonna use the word 'terrorist' there."

Hat tip: Meteor Blades.

--Dana Goldstein

I've spent the morning on the phone with Guadeloupe Bojorquez, a paralegal in New Mexico who says that her mother recieved a visit from a private detective hired by Pat Rogers, a lawyer connected to the local Republican Party. As Zachary Roth at TPM noted, Rogers was among a group of local Republicans who claimed that they had found incontrovertible proof that 28 voters had voted fraudulently in a June Primary.

Bojorquez' mother, Dora Escobedo, was on that list. But the Republicans backed off somewhat after ACORN contacted several of the voters to prove that they did, in fact, exist. Bojorquez says that her mother was spooked by a letter from ACORN that she received on Monday letting her know that local Republicans had hired a private investigator to determine the eligibility of voters on the list, because she didn't understand what she had done wrong.

On Wednesday, a man named Al Romero showed up at Escobedo's house, demanding to see, among other things, proof of voter registration and citizenship. Escobedo, who is Mexican-American, became a citizen last Spring. "He showed up with a copy of her voter registration card he was pointing to the paper and telling her he was an investigator, and told her to let him in. He said he just wanted to make sure he was a legitimate voter," says Bojorquez. Escobedo did not let him in, but Romero remained at the door.

Escobedo called her daughter, and later passed the phone to Romero, who remained outside. When Bojorquez asked who Romero worked for, he demurred at first. "He told me his name, and he told me that he was a private investigator, I asked him who he was working for but he would just change the conversation to something else about the voter," Bojorquez says.

Eventually Romero said he was working for Pat Rogers, the attorney who was among the Republicans who claimed they had proof of voter fraud. The New Mexico Independent further reports that Romero appears to be a licensed private investigator.

Bojorquez told me that she reported the incident to the county clerk's office. When I called Wendy Weiser at The Brennan Center for Justice, she suggested that Romero's actions might be a violation of the Voting Rights Act. “I do believe this, if it's true, could violate the anti-intimidation provisions in the Voting Rights Act,” Weiser says.

Bojorquez says her mother was really shaken up by the incident.

“About an hour later I left work and went over to her house and she was still crying. She couldn’t understand why she worked so hard to become a citizen to be able to vote, and then she was going through all of this.”

--A. Serwer

My old professor John Dinges, who has done extensive reporting on Chile and South America, reports that John McCain seemed quite comfortable meeting with a dictator without preconditions when that dictator was General Augusto Pinochet. In fact, when the two met in 1985, the meeting was apparently quite friendly:

The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere. 

According to a declassified U.S. Embassy cable about the meeting secured by The Huffington Post, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism." McCain, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition, as far as could be determined from a thorough check of U.S. and Chilean newspaper records and interviews with top opposition leaders.

Pinochet was responsible for the kind of violence and repression that under other circumstances would have neoconservatives clamoring for regime change. That is, if Pinochet had been a communist rather than a fan of Milton Friedman.

However, the circumstances were that the CIA assisted Pinochet and other right-wing dictators in many of these abuses, during Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression designed to prevent leftists from gaining political power in Latin America.

McCain claims that brutal dictators aren't to be negotiated with, and that the minimal relationship between Ayers and Obama says something sinister about Obama's beliefs. But on the other hand, McCain thinks just fine to meet, and even be "friendly"  and "warm" with people who murder, torture, and set off bombs on U.S. soil, as long as he's the one doing it.  Without preconditions even. If McCain were being held to his own standard, he would have to admit to being at the very least, "dangerously naive," and he would have to consider what his association with Pinochet says about his judgment.

--A. Serwer

Harold Meyerson reports on North Carolina's surprisingly close races for Senate and Governor, and what they mean for politics in the South:

Barack Obama is running no worse than even with John McCain in North Carolina, while state senator Kay Hagan -- an obscure public figure in state as well as out -- has opened a small but persistent lead over incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole. In the race to succeed outgoing Democratic Governor Mike Easley, Democratic Lt. Governor Bev Perdue, weighed down by her links to an increasingly unpopular Easley, has been trailing Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, a moderate Republican, though in recent polls she seems to have closed that gap. As well, veteran GOP Congressman Robin Hayes, heir to the Cannon Mills fortune, has fallen behind textile worker-turned-schoolteacher Larry Kissell in a hotly contested House race.

Gershom Gorenberg writes that a President Obama might be better for Israel's security than a President McCain:

As a result of the first Gulf War in the 1990s, "Iraq wasn't a serious threat to Israel," explains researcher Shlomo Brom of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, formerly head of strategic planning in the Israeli Army's general staff. On the other hand, Brom says, the second Gulf War has deeply damaged America's stature in the Middle East, and "Israel, which is seen as being under American protection, is weakened as a result." Moreover, by eliminating Iraq as a counterbalance, the war freed Iran from containment. From Israel's perspective, the regional balance of forces has become much worse. Was this predictable? Yes, actually. Before the invasion in 2003, Israeli officials and experts warned Iran was a more significant threat than Iraq.

And in an article from our last print issue, Matthew Yglesias reviews Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew:

To Frank, however, Washington is the yin to Kansas' yang, and if heartland voters ignore their interests in favor of voting on "values," conservatives inside the Beltway have no commitment to values except greed. Nonetheless, his book's most entertaining and insightful passages -- extended explorations of the conservative mainstream's lurid fascination with some of the most violent and depraved elements of the international scene -- seem to undercut this thesis. Frank tells the tale of the International Freedom Foundation at some length. This now-obscure outfit was an Abramoff-founded front for apartheid South Africa that boosted free-market principles at home and around the world and touted support for the white supremacist regime as integral to this mission.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

—The Editors

The "personhood" amendment on the ballot in Colorado is so radical that it has split the anti-choice movement in two. If passed, all fertilized eggs would be recognized as full human beings with constitutional rights. This would limit women's right to abortion, even in cases of rape, medical necessity, or an un-viable pregnancy. It would also limit access to emergency contraception. The tag-line for the "No on 48" campaign is "48 simply goes too far," which smartly appeals even to those who consider themselves anti-abortion in most cases. A recent poll found that 50 percent of Coloradans oppose the amendment, 39 percent support it, and 11 percent are undecided. Here are two ads running on Colorado TV.

And here's a video the Feminist Majority Foundation made in opposition to 48, featuring a bunch of TV stars. It's clearly supposed to be "Yes We Can"-like, but I'm not so sure if it succeeds:

--Dana Goldstein

Adam Nagourney gamely presents the McCain plan to win, and I’m not too impressed. The game isn’t over yet, despite what some pundits will say, but the Republican nominee’s plan to bet it all on Pennsylvania and hope something good happens in Ohio and Florida is a long-shot. But what struck me was Nagourney’s discussion of the campaign message, which consists of harping on Obama’s spread the wealth remark and Biden’s acknowledgment that a foreign policy crisis will arise early in an Obama presidency. (Incidentally, I think the same idea is applicable to McCain too; our foreign enemies will gladly test a 72-year old whose gut foreign policy instincts tend towards overreaction).

But here’s the thing about this message: It’s two attacks. The McCain campaign isn’t bringing anything to the table, and it’s not offering a plan. Voters already believe that McCain is attacking more than explaining, and Obama continues to win on the tax issue. This end-result of this campaign seems to have little to do with McCain’s message and everything to do with the events of the coming ten days.

— Tim Fernholz

In her first major policy address today, we're told that Governor Palin will call for "full funding" of special education. Special needs children are "not a problem, they're a priority," she told Jill Zuckman of The Chicago Tribune, and will presumably say today.

"Full funding" of special education has a specific meaning. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) sets a target of 40 percent for the federal share of funding for children with special needs, to ease the burden on states and local governments. The reality has been more like 17 percent. For years, there has been a struggle in Congress to get closer to the promised "full funding," with significant progress made in the late Clinton and early Bush year as the federal share crossed the 10 percent and then the 15 percent threshold, though it still fell far short of "full funding," which would cost an additional $25 billion a year.

Few are opposed on the merits to full funding of IDEA. The obstacle has always been the budget, and the fact that such domestic spending is crowded out by tax cuts, defense spending and then concern about the deficit. Special needs children may be a "priority," but they have fallen behind these others.

And in the McCain-Palin agenda, they still do. McCain has proposed a "spending freeze," with exceptions for entitlements, defense and veterans programs. That leaves the category known as domestic discretionary spending, which includes programs like IDEA. In the current budget, domestic discretionary spending totals $392 billion. So fully funding IDEA, while implementing a spending freeze on that category would require cutting every other domestic program by an average of 6.4 percent. That would include Pell Grants, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, WIC, clean-energy research, Section 8 housing -- dozens and dozens of programs. I hope someone today will ask Governor Palin whether she's proposing to cut all those programs, and why.

This is the apotheosis of what I once called (long before the former Miss Wasilla joined the ticket), "Miss America Conservatism," in which conservatives express disdain for all of government except for their single "platform" issue on which they lavish money and attention (as Palin says, "it's not all about money") to show their human side. Yes, governor, it is all about money, and when your priorities are tax cuts, war and freezing spending, special needs children are not going to be a priority.

--Mark Schmitt

One of the latest impacts of our financial crisis is that banks are calling in their loans to big transportation systems. D.C.'s struggling metro system owes $400 million, and 29 other transportation agencies across the country owe billions together. Just another way that the damage to our global financial infrastructure affects you, the hard-working citizen. While the Federal government and the local agencies are working on a way out of the problem -- or see the systems face fare hikes or cut services -- I'd note that this is a good time to think about how the stimulus package can invest in transportation infrastructure, which will expand transit systems' reach to more passengers, make them more efficient and, of course, stimulate the economy. These systems are already pretty vital to commuters, and have seen a surge in demand thanks to gas prices.

--Tim Fernholz

• Twelve days out and McCain's electoral strategy appears to be non-existent. Yesterday, it seemed like he was going to focus on Pennsylvania but today we learn that the campaign is spending less on advertising in Pennsylvania, along with Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Colorado. 
• In other PA news, Rep. Jack Murtha's comments that the district he represents is essentially Racist County, USA, isn't going over too well with his constituents, and retired Lt. Col. William Russell is closing the gap in PA-12. Meanwhile, Karl Rove channels his inner Obama, telling Hannity and Colmes that Murtha's district is "a conservative part of the state, and then if you take the far southwestern corner over there near Pittsburgh and the suburbs, that’s coal country, and that’s the kind of people who really do cling to their guns and their faith, and took a lot of -- you know that was part of the state where Obama might be expected to do well."
• CQ Politics has a piece that demonstrates that Michele Bachmann is hardly alone in her "anti-Americans in our midst" rhetoric: "Amid a backlash against Republicans who have challenged their colleagues’ loyalty to America or Americans on the campaign trail, a review of the Congressional Record reveals that similar rhetoric has been in use in the House chamber, as well. In particular, the term “anti-American” has been hurled freely in floor debates by a pair of junior GOP stalwarts, Reps. Virginia Foxx and Ted Poe. Poe stops short of calling colleagues anti-American, reserving that for institutions and individuals outside of Congress, but Foxx has angered Democrats by aiming the epithet at them."
• Chuck Todd looks at early voting numbers and concludes Democrats are doubling the GOP turnout day after day and that "the ground game -- it is just absent."
  
• Emily Heffter of The Seattle Times pens a story claiming falsely that Democratic candidate Darcy Burner lied about having a degree in economics from Harvard (Fair Harvard doesn't have minors and awards degrees in an old timey way). Matt Stoller provides the necessary correction -- as do dozens others in the original story's comment thread.
• Marc Ambinder takes a closer look at the AP/GFK-Roper poll from yesterday that showed a narrow, 2-point Obama lead and learns that the percentage of self-described evangelicals in the sample was 44 percent -- almost double the average other pollsters use and 21 points higher than the 2004 exit poll found. Heckuva job.
• You'd think the wingnuts would be all over Obama's remarks that he'd be open to negotiations with the Taliban, but then they'd have to reconcile this with the fact that their hero Gen. David Petraeus holds the same view, and that would violate the solemn winger oath to never hold contradictory positions in order to score cheap political points.
• McCain issues a challenge: "I love it when they say, 'Oh McCain has changed.' And I say, 'What have I changed on?' They can’t name a single issue or they’ll name an issue and its false. I’m the same guy." The helpful folks over at Think Progress have a list of at least 44 instances where McCain has flip-flopped since running for president in 2000.
• Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro have a list of "the punditocracy's seven biggest blunders" in the 2008 election. Ah, memories. My favorite is number 7: "The Hillary Holdouts Will Never Come Back."

--Mori Dinauer

In a 29-22 vote, the New York City Council has just approved Mike Bloomberg's bill to amend the city charter and overturn two public referenda in favor of a two-term limit, allowing him to run again. Shouts of "The city’s for sale!" and “Shame on you!” engulfed the council room as the results of the vote were called out. The Times muses, "[T]he intense acrimony surrounding the decision left a sharply divided Council and could ultimately damage the mayor’s popularity." I disagree. My prediction is that by November 2009, this will have mostly blown over and Bloomberg will sail to victory, approval ratings much in tact. New Yorkers love him.

And if you haven't already, check out my column on the progressive case against term limits.

--Dana Goldstein

According to Gallup, and despite the fevered prognostications of a million bobbleheads, it looks like Jews still intend to "vote like Puerto Ricans" (as the old saying goes) this year:

The analysis:

The current proportion of U.S. Jews backing Obama is identical to the level of support the Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards received in the 2004 presidential election (74%). It is only slightly lower than what Al Gore and Joe Lieberman received in 2000 (80%) -- when the first Jewish American appeared on the presidential ticket of a major party.

--A. Serwer

FDIC Chair Sheila Bair continues to advocate for a plan to help prevent foreclosure -- see this for more on why this is a good idea. The short version is that it will help improve the assets that are at the bottom of the financial crisis, and prevent a lot of the negative economic externalities that go along with foreclosure. The story I link to above makes clear that the voluntary measures aren’t working and that a new approach is needed.

Options include Bair’s, which is offering to have the government share in the losses on any renegotiated loans, having the Treasury department buy mortgages directly at auction, and buying Mortgage Backed Securities and pressuring lenders underwriting those securities to renegotiate the terms. In practice, most likely all three options will be tried. All of them involve some loss of taxpayer money to either the lenders or the defaulting borrowers, which is problematic. But it’s hard to see another way, short of eminent domain claims, to put a stop to foreclosures. And while it’s debatable whether or not financial services firms are too big to fail or not, 4.3 million homeowners are set to foreclose in the next two years, and the consequences of that are too big to ignore.

--Tim Fernholz

John McCain identifies areas of America that are Fake America:

Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there. I know the town. I know-- I know what a lot of these elitists are. The ones that she never went to a cocktail party with in Georgetown. I'll be very frank with you. Who think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.

Meanwhile, I suggest a new campaign slogan: Real Country First.

UPDATE: The Daily Show said it first and better.

--A. Serwer

One of the biggest questions about a President Obama's first 100 days in office has always been what signature issue he wants to tackle first. The educated guess has long been the environment -- Obama has just never seemed all that obsessed with progressive health care policy. And in a interesting new interview with Time's Joe Klein, the candidate confirms that's the case:

For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that's going to be my number one priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to just stabilize the immediate economic situation.

--Dana Goldstein

Stuff that you couldn't make up:

The successor of the Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider was dismissed yesterday after he revealed a “special” relationship “far beyond” friendship with his former mentor.

In emotional interviews with the national broadcaster and a tabloid newspaper Stefan Petzner spoke openly about his affair with Haider, who died at the age of 58 in a high-speed car crash after heavy drinking session at a gay club this month. Haider’s party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, captured 11 per cent of the vote in national elections last month .

“He was the man of my life. Our relationship went far beyond friendship,” Mr Petzner, 27, said after only a week in the job, adding that Haider’s wife, Claudia, 52, “did not object” to their relationship.

--Robert Farley

Campbell Brown looks at the Palin clothing controversy and sees a double-standard:

"My Issue?" Brown said. "There is an incredible double standard here, and we are ignoring a very simple reality: women are judged based on their appearance far far more than men. That is a statement of fact. There has been plenty written about Sarah Palin's jackets, her hair, her looks.

Sound familiar?" she asked. "There was plenty of talk and plenty written about Hillary Clinton's looks, hair, pantsuits. Compare that to the attention given to Barack Obama's $1,500 suits or John McCain's $520 Ferragamo shoes. There is no comparison."

Steve Benen, however, doesn't think it's about gender at all.

For goodness sakes. John Edwards, a man, spent $400 on a haircut, and the political world was obsessed with the story for quite a while. It had nothing to do with gender, and everything to do Edwards' image as someone working families can relate to.

I actually agree with Campbell. Edward's haircut scandal had something to do with his attempt to portray himself as an ally of the working class, but it mostly had to do with the perception that spending large amounts of money on one's appearance is something that women do. Republicans and the media spent months emasculating Edwards, referring to him as "The Breck Girl." Maureen Dowd devoted column after column to doing what she does best, which is characterizing male Democrats as girly men. Rush Limbaugh broadcast a parody of Edwards singing "I feel pretty." To the extent that we continue to see money spent on appearance as a "feminine" trait, there's no way to understand the uproar of Palin's wardrobe outside the context of gender.

This is not to say that gender is the only reason Palin's purchases have been noted -- they also played into an emerging narrative about her character. Like Edwards' haircuts, Palin's clothing expenditures cement an emerging narrative partially based on reality. Edwards' credibility and sincerity on economic issues was harmed by using a poverty group to fund his campaign, but the haircut story was the one that was genuinely damaging.  Likewise, Palin's fiscal conservative credentials are undermined by her fiscal irresponsibility, her honesty by her incessant lying about her qualifications. Her characterization of herself as "Jane Sixpack" is just silly -- no governor of any state in any party could ever credibly make that claim. And so, many have begun to see her as insincere or phony, and this clothing fiasco fits that narrative.

Obama and McCain have been spared discussions of expenditures on their appearance because those concerns simply don't fit the established media narrative about their respective characters.

--A. Serwer

Dana Goldstein reports on New York Mayor Michael Bloomerg's quest for a third term, and how it may signal a shift away from term limits across the country:

So given his 70 percent approval rating and credible claim to a progressive legacy, should liberals and good-government types throw caution to the wind and embrace Bloomberg's power grab? After all, the drive to enact term limits during the 1990s was funded by private interests and part of a nationwide conservative attack on the concept of making a career out of elected public service. In hindsight, many states and municipalities that embraced term limits have come to regret it, realizing that governing, like any other job, is done best by those with expertise and a long view.

And Noy Thrupkaew writes about a new documentary exploring what motivates art for the viewer:

Man on Wire is extraordinary in many ways -- perhaps most notably in its refusal to offer explanations. It treats both its artistic subject and its audience with a kind of respectful reticence, and gives us the hermeneutical responsibility, the gift, to work through the possible significance of Petit’s act on our own. In so doing, the film sidesteps the pitfalls that often plague movies about artists -- the psychological reductionism used to "explain" their work, the "and-then" medley of greatest hits from the subjects' art and life, all the labels that wind up disengaging us from the shock of great art.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

—The Editors

Check 'em out, they're a fun play off those Mac v. PC ads. And we'll post more interesting ballot initiative ads as we see them. If you have any good links from ballot campaigns in your state, send them my way at dgoldstein [at] prospect.org.

--Dana Goldstein

Ezra mentions the various progressive outcomes possible from California ballot initiatives this year, including maintaining the legality of gay marriage and ensuring humane treatment of livestock. But the truly awesome and under-the-radar California ballot initiative is the attempt to build a $20 billion, high-speed, electric rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which would also meander through the state's suburban communities.

How cool would this be? A two-and-a-half hour, scenic ride between the two cities' downtowns would cost just $55 each way. Riding from New York City to Washington, D.C. can cost as much as $129 for a basic, one-way ticket! A summer poll showed the initiative gaining the support of 56 percent of voters. Some experts believe the economic crisis will make voters more cautious about approving large spending projects. But the high price of gasoline and concerns about global warming -- not to mention the sheer convenience this rail line would provide --- should keep the debate going. This is one to watch on election night, as the California project would be the United States' first experiment in high-speed rail, which is commonplace in Europe and Asia.

--Dana Goldstein

It's well known that the last ten years or so have seen significant improvement in the US-India relationship, one manifestation of which has been a sweetheart nuclear deal. While India has been courting the United States, however, it has continued to play well with Russia. The India-Russia relationship has resulted, among other things, in India purchasing an aircraft carrier and leasing a nuclear submarine. David Axe has a story at Eurasiacritic about another Indo-Russian project, the PAK-FA fighter aircraft:

Rather than join the F-35 program, New Delhi last year inked a deal with Russia to co-develop PAK-FA. Russian firm Sukhoi is the lead design agency, with India providing heavy financial support and design advice. The agreement is part of a larger military-technical relationship involving 200 programs with a combined value of some $20 billion through 2010.

--Robert Farley

The Post reports that we can expect many more lost jobs in the coming months. There are fewer new jobs available and many companies are announcing either lay-offs or hiring freezes, even as unemployment claims reach a seven-year high. Another indicator, underemployment, gives us the full picture of the problem. Check out this EPI graphic for a full picture:

The involuntary part-time category is particularly dispiriting: these are people who want to work full time to support themselves and their families but can find an opportunity. A big part of the responsible American dream is saying, if you want to work for prosperity, you can. These people can't even find an opportunity to work! EPI uses the data to make an argument for new, job creating stimulus, and it's a good argument, but one that will unfortunately have to wait for a lame-duck session or January 2009. (The good news is that Fed Chair Ben Bernanke supports a stimulus, so perhaps the Bush administration can be pushed to embrace the idea.)

Another sad personal indicator is that people in my age cohort (recent college graduates) are being laid off; I've recently heard from two friends a year or two older than I am who have just lost their first post-graduate jobs in layoffs. First in, first out, I suppose.

-- Tim Fernholz

Opponents of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's attempt to amend the city's charter to allow him (and other elected officials) to run for a third term are just three votes away from defeating the measure, which the city council will vote on today. That means the situation has tightened up quite a bit since I wrote my column on Bloomberg, progressives, and term limits, which is featured on the main site today. But you should still read it for the lay of land.

In short, New York City reformers have fought long and hard to wrest the political process away from the machine and make it more open to newcomers. Bloomberg is attempting to scuttle those attempts. But there is also powerful evidence nationwide that term limits aren't all they claim to be in terms of getting women and minorities into office. They also drain legislative bodies of expertise and discourage making a lifelong career out of elected public service. Lots to consider.

We'll be back with more after the vote takes place.

--Dana Goldstein

As Ezra noted, the Kentucky Senate race between Mitch McConnell and Bruce Lunsford has closed considerably. Tomorrow, Bill Clinton will appear with Lunsford at two events in southern Kentucky. Kentucky went for Bush by 20 in 2004 and by 15 in 2000, and will go strong for McCain this year, but Clinton won it in both 1992 and 1996. Clinton's visit could provide Lunsford with a serious bump.

A Lunsford victory would owe a lot to the development of the Kentucky blogosphere, part of which was profiled by Bob Moser in The Nation last year. A strong anti-McConnell push emerged around blogs such as Ditch Mitch, Bluegrass Roots, and Barefoot and Progressive. It's fair to say that getting from point A (angry bloggers against McConnell) to point B (McConnell in danger of losing) has not been a smooth process; a bitter primary battle ensued, Chuck Schumer intervened, angry words were blogged, etc. If Lunsford does manage to win, the bluegrass netroots will certainly be part of the story.

--Robert Farley, Academic Mountebank and Moral Abomination

Coulda fooled me. Yesterday, Ambinder noted that, though McCain is accusing Obama of pursuing socialist policies, Sarah Palin, as governor of Alaska, really spread the wealth around when she instituted a wind-fall profits tax on oil companies and gave every citizen of the state a check for $1200. Palin, Ambinder muses, actually achieved a socialist goal.

But Jonah Goldberg, who has shown his difficulties distinguishing between ideologies in the past, retorts that:

In Alaska, the people own the oil as opposed to in Ohio where the people don’t own Joe the Plumber. That’s the system that Sarah Palin inherited…. But as a philosophical matter comparing Barck Obama’s argument that we should soak successful small businessmen to spread the wealth is really not comparable to the steward of a resource owned by the citizens of Alaska in effect renegotiating the deal to more favorable terms for the owners.

Leaving aside the fact that Obama’s tax plan isn’t going soak small businessmen since their taxes, like Joe the Plumber’s, likely wouldn’t go up under his plan, I’m really interested in Goldberg’s idea that the government is the steward of natural resources owned by its citizens. Now, the U.S. government has taken different approaches to this issue, depending on the type of resource, but generally it lets a lot of natural resources (oil in the ground, for instance) be treated as private property -- unlike, say, Russia and Gazprom or the Saudis with their oil concessions. But since Goldberg doesn’t actually condemn nationalizing resources, I assume he would be fine with the U.S. government declaring that our oil/coal/natural gas reserves are owned by the citizens of this country, and that we ought to take a hefty percentage of their enormous profits to pay for the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or a foreclosure prevention program.

But I assume Goldberg wouldn’t actually want to nationalize our natural resources, since he’s no socialist … right? But here’s his argument: Sarah Palin isn’t a socialist because she … inherited a socialist-style system where the government owns natural resources and then increased the rents on it, making it more pervasive. Whereas Obama is a socialist because he has inherited a progressive tax system that has underwritten our capitalist economy since 1913 and wants to adjust the rates to prevent growing income inequality, among other goals, mainly through tax cuts. Hmmm. I don’t even need to get into McCain’s vote for the bailout bill, his $5000 refundable tax credits, or his plan to buy your house for you in order to suggest that the GOP campaign shouldn’t be calling anyone socialist. It’s not like they’re running Milton Friedman up there.

Incidentally, for Goldberg’s sake, so this won’t be a mere low-rent hypocrisy complaint, I’ll cheerfully condemn most forms of socialism and note that though market interventions are necessary regularly on a small scale and during a crisis on a large one, I’ve never been impressed with Alaska’s natural resource management strategies.

--Tim Fernholz

I think Michael Demmons at Balloon Juice asks a fair question about Obama's silence on Prop 8: If Obama won't stand up now, why is there any reason to believe he would be any more receptive to marriage equality if he gets in office or that he would stick his neck out on any other issue?

Of course, Obama has long maintained an opposition to gay marriage, based on his religious beliefs, even as he supports civil unions. He came out against Prop 8 a long time ago, but he has remained pretty silent since. So supporters of marriage rights could reasonably ask whether it's worth voting for someone who isn't showing much courage on an issue of importance to them. The purpose of electing a progressive as president isn't just to have a progressive as president, but rather to have someone who is open to progressive policy goals.

Obama's own tortured logic on gay marriage doesn't exactly make for a compelling counter argument: "I'm against gay marriage, but you should vote against this ballot measure that says gay people can't get married." But that doesn't mean he should remain silent. I also remain perplexed as to why anyone would care enough to prevent consenting adults who want to marry each other from doing so. 

--A. Serwer

• With time running out on the clock, John McCain appears to be giving up on potential swing states like Colorado, Wisconsin and New Hampshire and instead putting all his electoral eggs in one basket -- Pennsylvania. What's curious about this strategy, as many others have pointed out, is that not only is McCain unlikely to actually win in PA, but also, even if he did, it still wouldn't guarantee him the election. Frankly, I never considered Pennsylvania to be competitive, mostly for reasons I discussed back in April: "[in 2004] Kerry won 12 counties to Bush's 56, although arguably what pushed him over the line was his huge margin over Bush in Philadelphia county. There, Kerry picked up 542,205 votes to Bush's 130,099 -- a difference of 412,106 -- which was more than Kerry's margin over Bush in every other county he won combined."
• McCain received the all-important Al Qaeda endorsement today, but unlike four years ago, this one doesn't appear destined to have much of an impact.
• Defending Sarah Palin on the Don Imus show, McCain made the remarkable assertion that "I think she is the most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president." Meanwhile, over at The Corner, Ed Whalen asks, flabbergasted, "how is it that anyone can believe that Joe Biden, whose national-security "expertise" consists of being wrong on virtually every important question over the past few decades is more qualified to be Vice President than Sarah Palin is?" and links to a WSJ article that discusses how Biden "was wrong on the Cold War" which ended, you know, 17 years ago. Relevant!
• Campaigning in Nevada, Sarah Palin criticized Barack Obama as a "faux-feminist" in an effort to drum up some female votes for McCain. Meanwhile, Rick Davis and radio host Bill Bennett agreed that Palin drives feminsts "crazy" because she's "attractive, competent and very happy." Shorter McCain campaign: feminists are ugly, incompetent and unhappy. Glad we got that cleared up.
• When she's not busy helping the RNC become $150,000 lighter, Palin spends the rest of her time contributing directly to the McCain campaign by becoming the number one concern voters have about his campaign. 34 percent of respondents cited "Palin not qualified" compared to 23 percent who said that McCain would continue Bush policies. Ah, the wonders of making short-term tactical wins the centerpiece of your campaign.
  
• Last Palin item: the VP hopeful tells CNN's Drew Griffin that "I’m not going to call him [Obama] a socialist but as Joe the plumber has suggested, in fact, he came right out and said it, it sounds like socialism to him and he speaks for so many Americans who are quite concerned now after hearing finally what Barack Obama’s true intentions are with his tax and economic plan." Hey, why bother answering the question when you can just cite an unwilling campaign surrogate instead?
• Michele Bachmann decides to dig herself into a deeper hole, first telling a local paper that Chris Matthews "laid a trap" for her, and then this morning going on Mike Gallagher’s radio show to ask "what are Barack Obama’s policies? Are they for America or will they be against traditional American ideals and values?"

--Mori Dinauer

A document provided to Washington Whispers from a House GOP official shows that they could lose a net 34 seats. That means the Democrats would have a 270-165 advantage in the 111th Congress. In the Senate, Republicans expect to lose also but to keep up to 44 seats, ensuring their ability to stage a filibuster.

The document provided to Whispers is no gag: It comes from one of the key House GOP vote counters. The source called it a "death list." The tally shows several different ratings of 66 House Republicans in difficult races or open seats held by retiring Republicans. "Rating 1" finds 10 Republicans "likely gone." Those districts are New York 13, Alaska, Arizona 1, Virginia 11, New York 25, Illinois 11, Florida 24, Michigan 7, Nevada 3, and North Carolina 8. Under "Rating 2," nine Republican seats are listed as "leaning Democratic." Under "Rating 3," some 22 GOP seats are listed as "true toss-up."

Ezra does an able job of exploring some of the problems with conflating the local food movement with environmental goals. Basically, focusing on how far food travels is a lousy way to cut carbon and not particularly relevant to improving the healthfulness.

Interest in local, fresh food started among people who were mainly interested in quality. But somewhere along the way, eating food that was produced near you  became an end in and of itself, a solution in search of a problem. It ended up that way in part because local is a powerful heuristic -- a rule of thumb that steers you right more often enough when making decisions in our current food marketplace. And as Ezra writes in another post, our current food system massively subsidizes all kinds of unhealthy and environmentally destructive things. But, since local and regional food systems seem like a fairly appealing idea, they soon started to get touted as the goal, not the solution to some other set of problems. Thus, Michael Pollan's recent New York Times manifesto has plenty of good suggestions for removing perverse incentives in our food policy (we'd be much better in his ideal world than our current one), but it also seems to take for granted that there's a need for "reconnecting the American people with the American land" or for "stewardship of the land ... self-reliance and ... making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community." All of those things seem dandy to me, but I just don't seem them necessary as public policy goals. 

And once you've fixed on one solution, and started advocating it, the solution itself stars to seem inherently good rather than just a good way to fix policy problems. This is by no means unique to food; it's a common problem in policy making. Once you settle on one policy fix it's simple human nature to see it as a great solution to all kinds of problem -- when you have a chef's knife, everything looks like it needs to be diced. And that leads to deeply silly arguments like this from Pollan's manifesto:

For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

Countries that don't produce their own oil have foreign policy problems because oil is produced by a very small number of countries. Most countries in the world have the capacity to produce significant amounts of food. Moreover, oil production is tightly controlled by the state in these countries and so can be varied as an instrument of policy. We feel to keep supporting the government of Saudi Arabia because oil prices could skyrocket if the country wanted them too -- it's hard to see any country exerting that kind of control over the food supply. I suppose countries that don't like us could stop shipping us food, but they could just as easily deny us medicines, finished goods, or any one of the many things that make modern society workable. Interconnectedness is an inherent part of our modern economy and there's simply nothing we can do about it. Importing food makes the nation vulnerable to changes in price, but local production makes people much more vulnerable to climate. Self-sufficiency as a nation is not only unachievable -- it's not even desirable.

The McCain campaign has a new robocall starring Rudy Giuliani that basically asserts Barack Obama is against the idea of putting anyone in prison:

Hi, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm calling for John McCain and the Republican National Committee because you need to know that Barack Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers.

It's true, I read Obama's words myself. And recently, Congressional liberals introduced a bill to eliminate mandatory prison sentences for violent criminals -- trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free. With priorities like these, we just can't trust the inexperience and judgment of Barack Obama and his liberal allies.

This isn't even remotely true, and it would take a herculean suspension of disbelief to think it was. Which is precisely the problem: it's so outlandish I can't imagine anyone actually believing it.

For the record, Obama was in support of giving judges discretion in issuing mandatory minimum sentences. This puts him in line with a 7-2 decision by the United States Supreme Court, hardly a bastion of leftist radicalism. Scalia and Roberts, two of McCain's favorite jurists, voted with the majority, with only Alito and Thomas dissenting. The decision was described as a return to judges' "traditional role in criminal sentencing."

--A. Serwer

Doing some research for a story on presidential transitions, I came across this 2000 Washington Post story by Tom Ricks:

The basic problem in filling the top slot at the Pentagon in the new Bush administration is that the president-elect's defense policy already is fairly well determined, and so are most of the new administration's other top national security appointees, people involved in the process said.

When former senator Dan Coats (R-Ind.), considered the front-runner for the defense post, met last week with Bush and Vice President-elect Cheney, he asked Bush whether he would be subordinate in policymaking to Colin L. Powell, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who will be secretary of state, according to a source familiar with that half-hour-long discussion.

The president-elect responded that "the defense secretary would have an equal place at the table," this source said.

... So what does that leave the new defense secretary to do? At best, Bush advisers and other defense experts say, he would act as a kind of chairman of the Pentagon, the "Mr. Outside" who lobbies Congress and the public on defense issues. At worst, they add, he would become a figurehead--a concern that Coats expressed at his meeting with Bush at the Madison Hotel last week, the sources said.

Of course, what we saw in the ensuing eight years was an extremely powerful Secretary of Defense who stepped on the State Department's toes by taking major control of foreign policy initiatives and bypassed traditional intelligence community authority by expanding DoD intelligence gathering. And Powell was increasingly a lone voice of skepticism whose influence declined steadily. Just goes to show how much events can change a presidency, and how careful a president needs to be when selecting top administration officials.

-- Tim Fernholz