In article from our last print issue, Harold Meyerson explores how populism and environmentalism are working together:

The dominant ideology among this year's Democratic candidates for seriously contested Senate and House seats might be called neo-Bryanism. Where once William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic nominee for president, thundered on behalf of beleaguered late-19th-century farmers against "the cross of gold" (Wall Street's tight-money policy), today's down-ticket Democrats are running against oil companies and Wall Street's commodity speculators. And as Bryan touted free silver as the fix for farmers' credit woes, today's Democrats are pushing alternative energy as a solution for spiraling gas prices and heating bills, as well as a jobs-generator--a 21st-century public-private Works Progress Administration--for a troubled economy.

And Paul Waldman writes that smears about Obama will only worsen if he wins the election:

But as we finally approach the end of this campaign, one has to wonder whether Obama knows quite what he's in for. Not what will happen over the next three weeks but what he'll face if he actually wins. Because for all his talk of bringing Americans together, a President Obama could face an opposition so consumed with disgust and anger and outright hate that it would make the 1990s look like a tea party.

That, of course, was what was supposed to happen if Hillary Clinton were the nominee. In fact, one of the arguments Obama supporters made early in the primary process was that if Clinton prevailed, the vast right-wing conspiracy would kick into high gear, besieging the woman they had hated so much for so long with an assault of unimagined viciousness. But now there is little doubt that that machinery of obsessive hostility was easily retrofitted for a new target.

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—The Editors

Marc Ambinder asks the question: Is it the same to call McCain a liar as it is to call Obama a terrorist or an Arab?

Of course not. You can make a reasonable argument that John McCain is a liar, in that he's said things that are false. You can't make a reasonable argument that Obama is a terrorist, an Arab, or treasonous, for that matter. You could make the argument that Obama is a liar* -- I'd disagree with you -- but certainly he's said things that aren't true in the past. The other thing that Ambers doesn't mention is that people at the McCain-Palin events are also making violent threats that result in Secret Service investigations. That issue, certainly, is where there is a difference in standards. I haven't heard of anyone demanding someone's death at an Obama rally.

--Tim Fernholz

*This debate about who is a "liar" really tickles me because technically it's an extremely low bar: One lie told, and you are a liar. Thus, basically every politician is a liar. But of course we're very uncomfortable using such a standard, and so it's really that pattern of pernicious, uncorrected, repeated lies that allow for labeling.

• We're awaiting word today on what district has won this year's Broad Prize for Urban Education, the holy grail of edu-reform. Last year's winner was New York City. This year's finalists are Miami-Dade County, Florida; Broward County, Florida; Brownsville, Texas; Aldine, Texas; and Long Beach, California. At the great new Gotham Schools blog, Philissa Cramer writes that Miami-Dade, though they've been nominated three times, isn't a front runner; Superintendent Rudy Crew has been bought out of his contract, accused of mismanaging the budget and failing to reach out to the community. And by the way, casting doubts on the Broad Foundation's success at choosing truly stellar districts, Miami's test scores did outpace the rest of Florida's last year, but Florida test scores are horrible. Over half of schools in the state missed their targets for reading and math proficiency.

• But what does testing really mean, right? Check out this New York Times piece on how NCLB proficiency standards are sort of like the sub-prime loans of the education world: State education departments promised steeper and faster gains than they could actually deliver. And now they're defaulting.

• Lastly, our friend Kevin Carey writes today at Inside Higher Ed about the under-the-radar struggles of our urban public universities and community colleges, in particular the University of the District of the Columbia. At UDC, the six-year graduation rate is just 19 percent, and the most common math courses are at the ninth or tenth grade level. Kevin calls the situation "catastrophic." Indeed. I think part of the solution must be more practical, vocational education for many of the students who end up at such colleges, who've already been failed by the K-12 system and whose immediate concern is building an economically viable future.

--Dana Goldstein

Update: The winner of the Broad Prize is Brownsville.

There is an interesting piece in the Post today about Obama's efforts to reach out to the House Blue Dog caucus in context of the bailout bill and his transition plans. The growing caucus will be a pivotal group for legislative negotiation in the next Congress, and the Obama camp has been responding by engaging the group and their brand of fiscal moderation (or conservatism, depending on who you ask).

On one level, this is a good thing: Obama is dead set on not repeating the mistakes of the Clinton administration and trying to railroad his agenda through Congress early in his first term (c.f. healthcare reform) without getting members involved in the process. It seems like the Blue Dogs are responding well to his overtures. On the other hand, though, the Blue Dogs' fiscal policies are not appropriate for the recession the United States currently faces, which calls for deficit spending, which is why this quote worries me somewhat:

Jason Furman, Obama's economic policy adviser, has held his own extensive talks with Blue Dog Democrats and said Obama would seek to establish "a government unified around the concept of fiscal discipline and centered around the pay-go rule. Insisting on paying for things will lead to better economic policy."

Well, sure, but many BDs weren't pleased that the bailout bill had to violate pay-go rules, and it's likely that other economic stimulus measures will need to do the same. I'd hate to see Obama chained to that kind of promise as he goes about setting his agenda next year. Luckily, even the centrists in the Obama camp (folks like Larry Summers, for instance) seem to understand that counter-cyclical spending comes first, deficit reduction second. Hopefully the Blue Dogs will understand, as well -- and there are some indicators that their brand of populism will allow them to rationalize the lapse in fiscal discipline.

For some further reading, take a look at this post that includes economist Rob Shapiro explaining the stimulus, fiscal discipline one-two punch that seems to be developing as a consensus view among left-leaning economists, and my article on what our next Congress will look like. Simon Rosenberg money quote:

"The New Dems and the Blue Dogs are going to gain a disproportionate number of members in 2008," says Simon Rosenberg, head of the progressive group NDN. "If Obama gets elected, can Pay-Go survive? The things that worked for us in the early '90s are not going to work for us today. [There will be] a battle between a politics of investment versus a politics of austerity."

--Tim Fernholz

Yglesias says most of what needs to be said about the winger hysteria about the fact that large-scale voter vote drives inevitably lead to some errors. The rhetoric notwithstanding, registration "fraud" is very different from vote fraud, and in fact the former is extremely unlikely to lead to non-negligible amounts of the latter. Even if somehow the fake names get through and are registered to vote it doesn't actually matter in terms of the integrity of elections since "Mickey Mouse" and "Amanda Huggenkiss" and "Al Koholic" can't actually show up to vote because they don't exist. Until Glenn Reynolds et al. can actually find an example of "Foghorn Leghorn" actually being permitted to vote, this is a trivial issue that certainly doesn't constitute "vote fraud."

As Matt says if for some reason it was critically important for virtually every single name collected in mass voter registration drives to be accurate, there's an obvious solution in effect in many other liberal democracies: have professionals trained by the government be responsible for ensuring that citizens are registered. Of course, we're not going to hear about that remedy from people frothing at the mouth about ACORN because the point isn't to make registration a perfect process, but rather to use inevitable errors as a pretext to suppress legitimate voters. Since the Supreme Court has declared that you can do this even if there's literally no evidence that anyone in the state has fraudulently voted based on an erroneous registration, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

--Scott Lemieux

Pretty deeply, which is why the state and city's politics are so tense right now, with Mike Bloomberg seeking a third term and Gov. David Paterson under pressure to prove his financial bona fides. For more on Paterson, one of the more fascinating people in American politics, check out last week's excellent New York cover profile. Though hopes were high that Paterson would govern as a reformist liberal (something like a more congenial Eliot Spitzer), Paterson has become a budget and tax cutter. Some of his advisers, including Columbia University Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, are wondering whether Paterson grasps the basics of Keynsian economic policy: When in a recession, it is crucial to increase social spending to stimulate the economy and create jobs. In a letter to the governor, Stiglitz wrote, "Economic theory and evidence gives a clear and unambiguous answer: it is economically preferable to raise taxes on those with high incomes than to cut state expenditures." But Paterson is sticking to his pledge not to raise tax rates.

That could develop into a major problem, considering the belt tightening New York will experience as a result of the turmoil on Wall Street. The number of lost jobs could exceed 120,000, and lost Wall Street bonuses alone will account for over $20 billion in lost tax revenues for the state.

--Dana Goldstein

Bill Kristol wants some of the young bucks to get out of the game before they hurt themselves:

Is John McCain the best messenger for his campaign? Why isn’t he on this show? Why do we have Tucker Bounds and a bunch of nice young kids who are spokesmen out there spinning implausibly on behalf of the McCain campaign? McCain is better than his campaign.

--A. Serwer

I've written time and time again about the Right's inability to distinguish between registration fraud and voter fraud, and the media's gleefully panicked reporting on the subject. Yesterday the McCain campaign sent out an email suggesting that it was within ACORN's ability to "steal" the election through voter registration fraud, which would actually be impossible.

"But, the Obama-Biden Democrats would rather sweep these facts under the rug and use their mainstream media allies to bury this story. But we can't let that happen. We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election."

That's right, if John McCain loses, it's only because "leftist groups" won the election through registration fraud, which is kind of like trying to become the CEO of an airline company by filling out quality control surveys.

Of course, McCain didn't always feel this way. It wasn't so long ago he thought groups like ACORN "made America special." Don't take my word for it:

It would be interesting to get the full transcript of McCain's remarks that day, since obviously the video is cut. I somehow doubt that McCain was there to lecture ACORN on not stealing elections, though.

Do you think the campaign thinks things through before they pick their bogeymen?

--A. Serwer

Yesterday, Chris Hitchens endorsed Obama because of his superior character and temperament. But he also adds, "on 'the issues' in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees." If Hitchens really believes this is true, it may be time to hang up the old pen. It doesn't take too much work to take a look at any of the favored analytical categories -- record, rhetoric, policy proposals, advisers -- and determine some fundamental (and even superficial) differences between the contesting Senators.

My sneaking suspicion: Hitchens would like to avoid mentioning one of the biggest issue contrasts, the Iraq War, because he has placed himself so firmly on McCain's side. Lining up alongside the "surrender faction" is difficult, no doubt, but it may make the learned Hitchens feel better if he realizes that, in pulling out of Iraq, we aren't surrendering to anyone.

--Tim Fernholz

Jon Chait has already had a say on this post by Dan Balz, which encourages reporters to focus all of their abilities on asking stupid questions of Barack Obama, but it deserves widespread recognition for being almost as out-of-left field as Dean Reynolds' complaint.

It's silly on a lot of levels, the first and most obvious being that Balz is a Washington Post reporter and should probably just go ask these questions if they concern him so. Then there's the idea that one candidate needs more scrutiny than another -- where was this column when McCain was ahead in September? I didn't see any call for scrutiny then. Also, has anyone stopped asking the Obama campaign questions? Of Balz's list of questions, I could think off-hand of a few times Obama has answered most of them in some way. Finally, there's the fiscal failure fallacy, which Chait touches on. It makes me wish that all reporters could be hand-delivered a letter that says: There isn't any consensus that the recession means we should stop spending programs, in fact, many economists say the opposite.

I think perhaps this whole piece was written by Balz as a complicated joke. He just wants a junior correspondent to ask Obama, "Will you be cautious or bold if elected president?" and get laughed out of the media availability.

My favorite question, though, is this one: "Will he do anything before the election to signal what he thinks?"

Well, yesterday Obama announced four new economic proposals. John McCain gave a speech where he said fight eighteen times and didn't talk about new policies, or even give details on old ones. Which one do you think does a better job of signaling what will happen if each candidate wins, readers? (For bonus points, guess which speech Balz references approvingly in his post.)

-- Tim Fernholz

• John McCain appears determined to take his presidential campaign in a different direction this week, starting with a tough speech in Arlington, VA. Unfortunately this was accompanied by a decision to drop a major overhaul of his economic plan -- and I hear the economy is sorta a big deal these days. Meanwhile, Barack Obama spent Columbus Day in Toledo, Ohio (why not Columbus?) detailing his plan for economic recovery, including creating new jobs, penalty-free access to retirement savings, a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, and money for local and state governments. As Tim notes, this last item is key to stopping local economic problems from spiraling out of control.
• Speaking to supporters in Virginia Beach, Sarah Palin declared that John McCain would confront the abuses of power in Washington, which might have been embarrassing for her if her own abuses of power hadn't occurred in Alaska. Meanwhile, Steve Benen notes that the McCain-Palin ticket is the first in American history to feature two politicians charged with ethics violations prior to the election. Maverick!
• I'm open to theories about why this is, but an exceptional number of really, really, really bad editorials have appeared in the past few days. First Peter Beinart asked, in all seriousness, whether Obama is "American enough" in Time magazine. Then Rasmussen felt compelled to run Michael Barone's screed, "The Coming Obama Thugocracy." Not wanting to be outdone, The Washington Post let Andrew Klavan share with us "5 Myths About Those Tinseltown Liberals." Finally, Brian Anderson wrote in Investor's Business Daily about "The Coming Counterrevolution To Hush The Alternative Media." Makes me pine for the days of Vince Foster murder conspiracies.
• The New York Times still had a great weekend profile of Andy Martin, the world-class wingnut responsible for the email smears projected at Barack Obama. Money quote: "He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of 'moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.'"
• Joe Biden, forgotten VP candidate, gets a lengthy treatment by The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza.
• The Wall Street Journal surmises that the Obama campaign's time spent out on the trail, which dwarfs that of his Republican rival, might have something to do with the Democrat's strong poll numbers. Also, The New York Times looks at the Obama ground game in Virginia.
• And finally, in Indiana's 9th district, there has been a ongoing battle between Democrat Baron Hill and Republican Mike Sodrel. Their first debate of this election year, scheduled for October 21, is unusual because the local Republican party has asked that the candidates be hooked up to lie detectors.
  

--Mori Dinauer

A newly formed political action committee, the National Republican Trust PAC, is buying up e-mail blasts to the readers of conservative outlets like Newsmax and Townhall to raise money for what it calls a "shock and awe" advertising blitz against Barack Obama in key states in the last weeks of the campaign. One of the e-mails uses the screamer headline, "Obama's Plan: Mohammed Atta Gets His Drivers License," while another says Republicans should "employ Hillary Clinton's strategy" to "expose Obama for the dangerous radical he is."

The PAC was founded by Scott Wheeler, a former correspondent for the Moonie-owned Insight magazine, and Peter Leitner, a former Pentagon adviser and president of the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center, which trains law enforcement personnel on counterterrorism.

Wheeler has a history working for anti-Democratic, scandal-mongering conservative publications. Before working for Insight, Wheeler was a correspondent for the "American Investigator," a syndicated monthly television program that conservative activists hailed for fueling the fires of the numerous Republican investigations of the Clinton administration in the 1990s. When Al Gore was running for president in 2000, Wheeler produced the documentary "Trading with the Enemy: How the Clinton Administration Armed China." Using Leitner as a source, that documentary charged that Gore illegally pressured the Pentagon into selling military equipment to China. In late September 2000, other conservative outlets touted the documentary as "Another Scandal for Al Gore."

During the 2004 campaign, writing for the big boys of conservative smear journalism like Cybercast New Service and Newsmax, Wheeler tried to discredit John Kerry as he had Gore, and now, Obama. In early October 2004, he published a story that claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. "The presidential campaign is currently dominated by debate over whether Saddam procured weapons of mass destruction and whether his government sponsored terrorism aimed at Americans before the U.S. invaded Iraq last year," the article noted. "Democrat nominee Sen. John Kerry has repeatedly rejected that possibility and criticized President Bush for needlessly invading Iraq. . . . But the documents obtained by CNSNews.com shed new light on the controversy."

In one of his National Republican Trust fundraising pleas, Wheeler ties Obama to terrorists -- and barely takes a breath before he reminds you to "never forget that Obama is a Harvard educated elitist," too.

--Sarah Posner

Today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic House leaders held an economic forum that featured ten experts -- including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, EPI's Jared Bernstein, former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt, and our own Bob Kuttner -- to plan an economic recovery package. By all accounts the experts tended to be remarkably unified in their opinions.

The good news is that Democrats seem intent on a package that gets the most "bang for its buck," an oft-repeated phrase, which means they'll look at indicators like these. They also seem intent on crafting their own bill, with Pelosi remarking that the last stimulus package, which relied heavily on a tax rebate, was a Republican bill passed with Democratic votes, and this time will be different. The bad news is that it's unclear when this bill will pass. Democrats plan a variety of hearings up through the election dealing with how to craft this bill and emphasizing public transparency, but it seems the result of the elections will determine if they pass a bill in a lame-duck session or in January. Pelosi said she and her leadership team were in contact with the Obama campaign on these issues, and it suggests that this afternoon's economic policy roll out by Obama (more on that later) wasn't entirely coincidental.

Also in attendance was Iowa Governor Chet Culver, the Democratic Governor's Association's federal liaison, who stressed the importance of federal assistance for state governments, an overwhelming majority of which are seeing fiscal shortfalls as a result of the economy's ills. Making sure that state governments continue to act to alleviate the recession -- as opposed to contributing to it by cutting needed programs, laying off workers, or raising taxes -- is critical.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank hung around afterward to talk to the press. He was pushing a book by Mark Zandi called "Financial Shock" that games out how the sub-prime mortgage crisis led to the financial crisis and is contributing to the recession. He said he was planning on pushing regulatory reform, specifically of financial derivatives and leverage, in January of next year. I had a chance to ask him what he thought of Neel Kashkari, the mildly controversial head of the bailout program, and he said he was "surprised by it. [Treasury Secretary] Paulson has a good understanding of the politics of the market. I don't think he has as a good understanding of the politics of democracy," saying that there were legitimate concerns about conflict-of-interest questions and noting tomorrow's hearing on the subject.

-- Tim Fernholz

Bonus Holiday Jokery: Pelosi, a proud Italian-American, recognized Columbus Day and remarked of Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, "Steny is smiling because he's a Viking and he has a different view on the discovering of America."

Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, is dropping out of high school to get a job. A few short months ago, the right believed that this kind of behavior was singularly responsible for economic problems in the black community, and possibly the result of Jesus being thrust out of public life. Now it's just proof that the Palins are the only normal family in America.

For those who would argue that this is a unique circumstance because Johnston and Palin won't be dependent on the government, I'd just like to point out that the entire state of Alaska is on welfare.

--A. Serwer

Adam Serwer explains that accusations of radical leftism have often been used against black leaders:

It's no wonder that the tone at McCain rallies remind Lewis of the bad old days. In recent months, conservatives have sounded increasingly retro with their attempts to paint Obama as a socialist or communist. In some ways, this accusation is typical far-right boilerplate. Obama certainly isn't the first Democrat running for president to be accused of communist sympathies. And as usual, the accusations are rarely linked to policy specifics. But the difference with Obama is that, in the eyes of the right, it's not just his political affiliation that implicates him as a socialist. It's his ethnic background.

And Courtney Martin examines how we should view The View:

So where can an undecided voter find relatively astute, but not wonky, fresh debate about the candidates from all different perspectives?

I never thought I'd say this, but the answer is The View. That's right. Barbara Walters' coffee klatch happens to have become one of the most radical spaces for political debate this side of the mainstream divide. From the moment the primaries heated up, Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shephard, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and Barbara Walters have been analyzing much more than the potential first ladies' outfits. They've been picking apart the candidates' histories, positions, and campaign strategies. The conversation, in fact, has been so intense that last week Shephard prefaced her comment about the ongoing hot topic of Obama's relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers with, "This is so draining."

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

—The Editors

This post has been edited for clarity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a Time column on what will happen if Obama loses the election:

So, yes, an Obama defeat would be greeted with a loud sucking of the teeth and a deepening of self-doubt. A loss would be hugely disappointing, and to put it crudely, it would also be more of the same. But it is also true that the biggest change has already taken place. The Obama campaign has been the anti--O.J. trial, a 24-hour ongoing drama about a black man cast not as a problem but, potentially, as the solution.

In some ways, I think this is the easier question to answer. The more interesting question is how black people will react if Obama wins.

I ask this question because a certain kind of black political identity has always had an oppositional streak, a healthy suspicion of American imperialism and a third-world consciousness. Mohammed Ali famously said that "I ain't got no quarrel with those Viet Cong, anyway. They never called me nigger." The flip-side of that is no black man ever gave the order for the United States to invade or bomb another country. If Obama wins, that will likely no longer be true.

This weekend I went to a show where they were selling t-shirts with Obama's face next to Martin Luther King Jr.'s. You can find these in every hood in America. One of the many varieties declares, "war is not the answer."

This is delusional. A President Obama will almost certainly take the kind of military action that black folks have long remained skeptical of. For the first time, it would be a black man giving that order. Black folks, by virtue of their unanimous support for Obama, and by having claimed him, will be responsible for those actions in a way we never have been before.

How will we react to that?

--A. Serwer

The right, seeking someone to blame for Obama's surge in the polls, has seized on ACORN and, more generally, a supposed rash of voter fraud among poor minority voters. While the attention being lavished on it by FOX News and company is new, the technique is not. Back in April, Art Levine explored the history and silliness of the campaign for TAP:

Sharrard's cautionary tone was a response to the Republican Party's ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics -- including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws and policies, and flimsy prosecutions -- Republican operatives, election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as ACORN. Which should come as no surprise: In building support for initiatives raising the minimum wage and kindred ballot measures, ACORN has registered, in partnership with Project Vote, 1.6 million largely Democratic-leaning voters since 2004. All told, non-profit groups registered over three million new voters in 2004, about the same time that Republican and Justice Department efforts to publicize ?voter fraud? and limit voting access became more widespread. And attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before each Election Day.

--The Editors

I read over the text of John McCain's speech this morning, and was struck by how much it resembled the kind of speech Obama has given in the past to try and change the dynamics of the campaign season. It doesn't offer any new proposals, it simply tries to recast the narrative of the race. Ironic because McCain has always attacked this "mere words" approach. McCain doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of policy, just the usual cut taxes and we'll be fine statement we've come to expect. Notably, there is a lot of patriotism and no attacks Obama's character, just the requisite distorted attacks on his policies. It seems my last question here has been answered: Let McCain be McCain again!

The next President won't have time to get used to the office. He won't have the luxury of studying up on the issues before he acts. He will have to act immediately. ... We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for our luck to change. The hour is late; our troubles are getting worse; our enemies watch. We have to act immediately. We have to change direction now. We have to fight.

Cool! How?

I'm not going to spend $700 billion dollars of your money just bailing out the Wall Street bankers and brokers who got us into this mess. I'm going to make sure we take care of the people who were devastated by the excesses of Wall Street and Washington. I'm going to spend a lot of that money to bring relief to you, and I'm not going to wait sixty days to start doing it.

But ...

I will freeze government spending on all but the most important programs like defense, veterans care, Social Security and health care until we scrub every single government program and get rid of the ones that aren't working for the American people. And I will veto every single pork barrel bill Congresses passes.

Ah. So I'm going to give you a lot of money ... and then freeze everything else! And indeed, as has been noted, McCain's plan is in fact more of a giveaway to lenders than Paulson's approach -- now based on recapitalizing banks -- which has the potential to actually make money. Under McCain's plan the government will certainly take a loss. And of course freezing government spending (except on four of the most expensive things it does) will have little affect on the deficit but will disproportionately hurt the low-income people who depend on federal funding for, say, school funding, heating oil in the winter, food stamps, etc. But it certainly sounds very decisive when you say it.

And indeed, sounding decisive without doing much deciding is the theme of this speech. He says fight 19 times, plan eight times. But he doesn't provide much in the way of specifics about these plans he'll be fighting for; indeed, it reminded me of the moment during the debate when McCain said he knew how to get Osama bin Laden -- really? Will you let the President know?

The whole thing is after the jump for your reading pleasure.

-- Tim Fernholz

MORE...

Jake Tapper tells us about a Republican House candidate who argues that his voter base is ... Obama's too! In Nebraska to boot. Sure, it's a telling phenomenon, but it's also a great chance to read this piece I wrote about down-ballot GOP candidates campaigning with Obama imagery. Don't miss that chance!

-- Tim Fernholz

John McCain likes to act like a tough guy. It's one of the reasons people like him. It doesn't make me like him, but from what I hear some people think it's charming. In 2000, he went around saying he was going to "beat Al Gore like a drum."

Still, the person who let him say this should be pouring through the want ads.

After I whip his you know what in this debate, we're going to be going out 24/7," McCain said of his upcoming debate with Obama, but seeming to consider recent criticism that his words have been too inflammatory, he quickly told supporters to be respectful.

I don't think McCain meant anything particularly nasty by this. He was just talking trash, the way candidates do. But my advice would be not to tell everyone you're going to "whip" the black man running for president.

--A. Serwer

On the right:

Despite signals that Senator John McCain would have new prescriptions for the economic crisis after a weekend of meetings, his campaign said Sunday that Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, would not have any more proposals this week unless developments call for some.

And on the left:

"Today, Senator Obama will be in Toledo, OH where he will deliver a major economic policy address to lay out his economic rescue plan for the middle class. Our economy is facing its greatest uncertainty in over 70 years, we have lost 760,000 jobs this year and the unemployment rate is expected to reach 8 percent. Families, who saw their incomes decline by $2,000 in the economic “expansion” from 2000 to 2007 now risk seeing deeper income losses. Retirement savings accounts have lost $2 trillion. Millions of homeowners who played by the rules have seen their housing values plummet and are having a hard time making their mortgage payments. And credit markets are nearly frozen, preventing businesses large and small from accessing the credit they need to meet payroll and create jobs." -- Obama campaign statement

It's unclear to me why McCain doesn't come up with some kind of alternative proposal to alleviate economic distress. Well, not unclear to me on policy terms: The economics of conservatism don't have convincing answers for these problems. But, politically, it seems like his best chance to gain ground on Obama. Perhaps it's a once bitten, twice shy situation -- rolling out his rapidly shifting, now-all-but-abandoned mortgage purchasing program last week was more or less a disaster. But the big question over the weekend was, what will McCain's message be? It seems like he hasn't decided yet.

-- Tim Fernholz

President Bush delisted North Korea as a state sponsor of terror on Saturday. In response, North Korea has resumed disassembly of its nuclear infrastructure. The central U.S. concession was that surprise inspections of undeclared facilities suspected of housing nuclear infrastructure can only be performed with the consent of the North Koreans. The United States wanted these inspections because of enduring concern over a parallel uranium nuclear program, although the existence of such a program has never been demonstrated. This possibly mythical uranium program was the proximate cause of the collapse of the Agreed Framework in 2002. Jeffrey Lewis has more discussion.

It seems clear that President Bush wants an enduring compromise on North Korean nuclear weapons before he leaves office. The agreement as it now stands isn't a noticeable improvement on the Agreed Framework, and the disruption of that accord pushed North Korea toward development of nuclear weapons and the nuclear test of 2006. In short, this agreement is about rescuing as much as possible from the disastrous foreign policy of Bush's first term.

Of course, the North Koreans are hardly innocent; they've acted erratically over the past few months, which is particularly troubling in the context of what may be a succession crisis. However, in thinking about whether the North Koreans were actually abandoning the nuclear accord or simply negotiating forcefully, it's worth noting that the threats they engaged in were very public. If they'd really been interested in firing up the program again, they would have attempted to conceal their efforts, rather than show them to the world.

If Obama wins the presidency, I don't expect him to treat North Korea any more lightly than second-term Bush. Indeed, if North Korea makes any trouble, Obama may be tempted use it as an opportunity to demonstrate "resolve." That's all fine and good; there are limits to what we should offer North Korea, and they need us more than we need them. Any display of resolve, however, should be careful to preserve the essence of the agreement, which is the dismantlement of plutonium facilities. The uranium program in particular shouldn't be a sticking point, in no small part because the surveillance capabilities of the United States on the Korean Peninsula are already immense.

--Robert Farley

Michelle Malkin and other conservative bloggers are attempting to draw an equivalence between the tone and rhetoric of recent McCain-Palin rallies and the fact that two men torched a McCain sign in Sellwood, Oregon.

The problem with this argument is that Rick Davis is absolutely right that campaigns can’t be held responsible for “the occasional nut” who does something crazy. That’s not the criticism of the McCain campaign that’s being made. The issue isn’t that random people sometimes do crazy things. (I see Malkin’s sign burners as comparable to whoever sent an envelope of white powder to an Obama HQ in LA, which also did not make the front page—and it shouldn’t have.)

The issue is that the McCain campaign, and their buddies in the conservative media, are enabling and encouraging crazy behavior by making the argument that Obama is an un-American subversive who is part of a secret socialist conspiracy to steal the election. The opposite argument, that the Obama campaign is encouraging a violent response to its rivals, simply can’t be made, regardless of what the occasional nut does.

—A. Serwer

Check out this great New York Times article from yesterday on the curious case of Michael Cantrell, an engineer who bilked the government out of millions of dollars in missile defense money. Much of the money went to a useless alternative missile defense project, while the rest went into the pockets of Cantrell and an accomplice. Cantrell took advantage of loopholes, connections, and poorly structured lines of authority to lobby Congress for a missile defense side project that the military was largely uninterested in. By pushing the project, Cantrell was able to generate kickbacks from various defense contractors. When the military tried to quash the project, Cantrell used his political connections to stop the inquiry.

It's not quite right to say that such a scam could only happen to the missile defense project, because there are other cases of military contractors bilking the government. But certainly scams like this are easier when they're conducted inside projects with ill-defined goals, poorly understood parameters, and deeply politicized motivation. Missile defense is intended to pay off in the distant future; as such, it's difficult to evaluate progress. Proponents can legitimately say that even unsuccessful tests represent steps in the right direction. In such an environment, projects that don't really go anywhere cannot go anywhere for a very long time before anyone notices. Moreover, because missile defense is so distinct from most of the tasks performed by the military, both civilians and military officers can fall victim to confident-sounding charlatans.

This problem is magnified when the project itself is basically a scam. The primary justification for missile defense has never been the actual defense of the United States from ballistic missiles, but rather a combination of political entrepreneurship on the part of the Republican Party (Democrats go along, but Republicans have always been the motivators) and a desire on the part of contractors and Congressmen to acquire as much pork as possible. Since a successful missile defense isn't really the goal in the first place, it's hard to differentiate the extreme fraud from the everyday fraud, and difficult to explain to Ted Stevens why he shouldn't get his piece of the action.

I suspect that this will not be the last incidence of severe corruption in the National Missile Defense project. Such small-scale scams, however, shouldn't make us forget that the project is, itself, a big-scale scam.

--Robert Farley

• As John McCain's prospects for becoming president fade more every day, it's clear he's going to go out hitting the wingnut trifecta, insinuating Obama and ACORN are committing vote fraud (actually, it's registration fraud), using Bill Ayers to explain why Obama is responsible for the financial meltdown (seriously), and of course blaming Obama for being ambitious, to which I second Tim's thoughts. The RNC has decided to go with the Chicago corruption angle in their new ad, tying Obama not only to Ayers, but William Daley and Tony Rezko.
• The Wall Street Journal invites us to mourn with McCain campaign staffers who lament the negative turn taken by the candidate but it's difficult to muster any sympathy when we learn from Bill Keller that the McCain campaign bullied The New York Times into doing its Ayers story last weekend. It does feel like an era is ending in American politics, to which I again second Tim's remarks.
• You can't make this stuff up. The Alaska legislature is releasing it's report today on the state trooper firing probe, and the McCain-Palin campaign releases their own report which, astonishingly, absolves Palin of any wrongdoing. Palin's essential corruption -- and I don't mean the type of quid-pro-quo corruption that infects politicians -- is her utter lack of a sense of the duty holding a public office entails. Indeed, her rapid rise, we learn from The Washington Post, was one big PR campaign designed to sell the GOP on her "energy expertise" bona fides. And speaking of PR, Palin will appear on Saturday Night Live on October 25.
• Barack Obama is purchasing a half hour of airtime for October 29, less than one week before Election Day. The campaign has not said what the content of the buy will be, but my hunch is that it will contain something much more substantive than a final pitch for his presidential campaign.
• It's probably a futile exercise, but I'm transfixed by trying to understand the mind of professional conservatives who are so committed to their interpretation of real world events that any sense of cause and effect utterly disappears. Renowned historian of American liberalism's fascist past, Jonah Goldberg, passes along an email -- which he admits to having "no idea whatsoever if there's merit to this, and if there is how much merit," -- arguing Obama's rise in the polls is responsible for the market tanking. Shortly thereafter, Goldberg finds another correlation (this time with graphs!) to which he writes "Still, I think Pethokoukis' point that Obama's success may make investors more pessimistic about the future has some plausibility to it."
• Cindy McCain sure knows how to win over the veteran vote. Responding to a question about John McCain's time spent as a POW and whether he still experiences trauma as a result, she observed that "my husband, he’d be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing."
• Quote of the day (well, yesterday) from Joe Biden, responding to Sarah Palin's "I was in the second grade when he [Biden] was elected to the Senate" line: "That’s true, but she was in sixth grade the last time John had a new idea." I think that one deserves a rare "oh, snap!" from me.
  
• It's a good thing Connecticut now allows same-sex marriage, because it gives Charles Keating one more place to express his long-held, deeply-felt love for John McCain.

--Mori Dinauer

Not content to leave the insanity enveloping the far right over ACORN, John McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis today contended that McCain deliberately blew up the original bailout package because it contained money for ACORN:

"So we can actually say that in addition to saving taxpayers millions of dollars, and we're very happy that no more taxpayer dollars were added to the pile of money going to ACORN. Uh, by their own admission because, by the Democrats' own admission because John McCain came to town and blew that package up. Thank goodness."

Of course, after the original bailout plan failed, McCain blamed Obama, which sort of contrasts with the campaign's contention that Obama and ACORN are deeply connected. Not only that, but McCain attempted to take credit for the passage of the bill before it was passed, after which he blamed his rival for the bill's failure.

At any rate, for the campaign's new story to be true it would have to mean that McCain lied to the American people about doing his best to get the bailout passed, since he never indicated at the time that he would try to prevent the package from passing or his reasons behind doing so.

So either McCain is lying now, or he was lying when his campaign claimed that he had come to "show leadership" by making sure the first bill got passed. There's no way that both can be true.

--A. Serwer

The silliest part about the claim that ACORN is secretly trying to steal the 2008 election, other than the claim itself, is the idea that the large number of fraudulent forms submitted in Indiana would never have been turned in otherwise. But, as Adam Doster points out, ACORN is required by law to turn in all registrations, no matter how suspect. ACORN flags the ones that seem problematic to help state officials discern fraudulent registrations from real ones. CNN did not note that the law in fact, requires ACORN to submit voter registrations, even if they're filled out with names like Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In my last post, I suggested that the bad forms were turned in deliberately -- this is indeed the case. They were turned in deliberately because the law compels ACORN to do so.

Moreover, as a commenter pointed out on the last thread, Indiana has one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country. Namely, voters in Indiana have to submit a government issued photo ID in order to vote. Try getting a government issued photo ID for your potted plant or puppy. It won't happen. This is the difference between voter fraud and registration fraud. The Right has an interest in conflating the two in order to create anxiety about voter fraud and restrict access to the polls for likely Democratic voters, but the media should not be complicit in mixing the two together. As I've said before, registration fraud is common; voter fraud is practically nonexistent.

The more I learn about the crackdown on ACORN, the more I suspect partisan motivations.