• 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. How can the government accuse ACORN of deliberately turning in bad forms if the law forces ACORN to turn in all of the ones they collect, no matter how fraudulent they are on their face?

Update: I want to add one more thing for those who are still suspicious of the reason behind the law forcing ACORN to turn in registration forms that appear to be fraudulent. One of the more obvious reasons is that if voter registration groups could decide which forms to turn in, a liberal group like ACORN could simply throw away GOP registration forms and claim they were fraudulent. The law is in place, at least partially, to make sure things like that don't happen.

--A. Serwer

You are, if you're a taxpayer. Wachovia, the bank recently bailed out by the government to the tune of $312 billion, just gave the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee an $8 million loan. It's not unusual for big campaign committees to take out loans at the end of the cycle for one last burst of resources, but it is unusual for the NRCC, which fell victim to one of the biggest campaign-finance fraud scandals ever just last year, to be given a loan by a bank that isn't giving loans to anyone. And it doesn't make it look any better when you learn that Wachovia's leadership tilts heavily toward the GOP. This investigation at Facing South tells the whole tale.

Also, to put this number in perspective and explain the NRCC's serious need for cash, check out this recent New York Times analysis of congressional races making reference to the loan:

The National Republican Congressional Committee has spent well under $1 million on advertisements in House districts, compared with more than $16 million invested in advertising by the House Democrats’ campaign committee. And it can only afford to spend in defense of select Republican seats. On Wednesday, the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call first reported that the Republican campaign group was borrowing $8 million to buy more advertising in the closing weeks, and to avoid being heavily outspent.

On the other hand, a quick check with a Democratic operative suggests that the DCCC wouldn't have had trouble getting a loan if it wanted one; neither the DCCC nor the NRCC has ever defaulted on a loan. And thinking further, given the state of the economy and the "credit rating" of these committees, it might not be the worst investment to put a little money toward politicians -- they're the only people injecting any capital into the market these days, right? But though it's technically legal, it's a glorious example of Washington influence buying at it's finest.

-- Tim Fernholz

The latest criticism of Barack Obama from the right is that he is somehow too ambitious to be president, and too opportunistic. No one mentions that of course he's ambitious -- so is John McCain. In order to become president you have to spend two years and hundreds of millions of dollars telling people how great you are and why you should be in charge of the most important government on Earth. This is not a task to inspire humility. But what's interesting his how the idea of ambition is being tied up in the question of who the "real" Obama is. In this column, Rich Lowry takes up the standard:

But no one can know whether Obama is the leftist his associations suggest, or the irenic uniter of his iconic 2004 convention speech; whether he’s the down-the-line liberal who kowtowed to the base of his own party in the Democratic primaries, or the pragmatist who readjusted to the center as soon as enthralled liberals handed him the nomination. The consistent line running through his career is opportunism, a willingness to accommodate whoever -- Bill Ayers or the swing voter in Ohio -- can help him up the next rung in his ladder of ambition at any juncture.

To which I reply: But no one can know whether McCain is the hard-right conservative his associations suggest, or the independent maverick of all of his speeches; whether he's the conservative who kowtowed to the culturally conservative, free market base of his own party in the Republican primaries, or the pragmatist who endorsed a massive government intervention as soon as he was handed the nomination. The consistent line running through his career is opportunism, a willingness to accommodate whoever -- Jerry Falwell, the U.S. Council for World Freedom or the moderate voter in New Hampshire -- can help him up the next rung in his ladder of ambition at any juncture.

I could add some other questions: Is this the McCain who opposed cutting taxes twice in the last seven years because it is wrong to do so in the time of war, especially while benefiting the privileged, or the one who says we should have $300 billion in tax cuts right now, disproportionately benefiting the wealthy and large corporations? Is this the McCain who said he would run a principled campaign and then took a hard right turn into the mud? Or is this the McCain who says walk softly and carry a big stick, but loudly counsels war with any number of states at a time when our military has been stretched to the breaking point by our conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq?

One has to understand that politicians are human, creatures of contradiction and convenience. We study their records, their proposals, try to get a sense of their characters, but we can't ask them to be any less complex than we ourselves are. To my mind, Obama didn't kowtow to the base half so much as Lowry suggests, or shift to the center, either, a mistaken narrative built on a few centrist votes in the Senate. I'd say McCain's flip-flops are much more glaring, but I understand why he chose to change his positions -- there are deep structural imperatives to doing so. Understanding those structural incentives is key to figuring out the heart of McCain's ideas. To do otherwise by demanding complete consistency -- as Lowry suggests or as Jonah Goldberg in a similar fashion demands or -- is to deny what makes politicians so compelling. I thought conservatives were supposed to have the nuanced understanding of the crooked timber of human nature, but I suppose that went out of style in the with-us-or-against-us years.

Lowry, I'm sure, has a strong opinion about Obama's "true" identity. By pretending otherwise, he's simply trying to spread the McCain camp's new meme of confusion. But he does more credit to his profession and his intellectual integrity when he simply answers his column's question and makes an argument about Obama's candidacy.

-- Tim Fernholz

It's a new election coverage meme: The grass-roots Republican faithful see McCain floundering, and they are freaking out. Politico's Jonathan Martin covers the trend, which includes chants of "terrorist!" and "Obama Osama" at McCain rallies. But nowhere does Martin mention a key factor in why conservative fear and anger this year is so much harsher than it was when Gore or Kerry was running -- race. A significant minority of the right-wing base coming out to these events are watching a black man with a Muslim-sounding name close this election, and they are not happy. If you have any doubts about their motivations, watch these videos.

Now let me repeat: these people are in a minority. But they are part of a disturbingly ignorant, hateful minority whose motivations should not be obscured.

--Dana Goldstein

Excellent news.

Or, at least, it's excellent news from my non-contrarian perspective. Maybe this will be a counterproductive decision that will also lead to a Republican landslide. After all, surely Peter Beinart's claim that the rejection of same-sex marriage rights by New York state courts would be good for same-sex marriage rights in the state has been vindicated by New York's ongoing exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage rights. And who can forget how badly the New Jersey court's civil union decision hurt the Dems in the 2006 elections? And how Goodridge was roundly rejected in Massachusetts? And how the extremely unpopular 2008 California Supreme Court decision has turned the election by cutting Obama's lead in California to a razor-thin 15 points?

Frankly, I don't know when proponents of same-sex marriage will start accepting this kindly concern trolling advice and start recognizing that losing is better than winning.

--Scott Lemieux

This morning I attended a briefing by Ruy Teixeira and William Frey that delved into the demographic trends that underlie our changing electorate. I'm still sifting the massive amount of data they presented, but here are a few preliminary observations. The dog and pony show consisted of Frey's accounts of demographic change in various states, where populations are growing and declining, and what kinds of people cause that growth. Then Teixeira steps in to explain what political behavior is displayed by these changing groups. Here are some initial impressions of their results:

• The project was funded by Brookings' Metropolitan Program, and no surprise, metropolitan areas are hugely important! Considering a number of swing states, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Colorado, the authors concluded that heavy population growth in metropolitan areas and their suburbs make them critical reserves of voters for Democratic politicians. By superimposing the change in partisan voting margin from 1988 until 2004 over maps showing population growth, the authors were able to suggest a correlation between the fastest growing counties and the more Democratic voters. This demographic shift promises returns for the Democratic pary.
• For one example, check out their discussion of Ohio and the mid-west. You can see rapid growth in the Cleveland suburbs, in Columbus and its suburbs, and in the Cincinnati metro area, while other areas have slower or negative growth. Then, take a look at the change in presidential party voting: In all the growth areas, the Democratic margin has been increasing, often by more than 10 percent, since 1988.
• The newest Mark Penn-esque voter demographic to pay attention to is whites with some college, one of the fastest growing segments of the electorate. It's a volatile group but also has been trending Democratic. White working class voters and white college educated voters are both moving in the Democratic direction this year in comparison to 2004. White college educated voters are starting to supplant white working class voters as an increasing number of people have access to some higher education.
• In some states, especially in the intermountain West, Florida and Virginia, minorities are an increasingly important part of the Democratic electoral coalition. In Colorado, for instance, the largest growth is in white college graduates, many of them from California and other classically blue states, and Hispanic-dominated minorities. Minorities have had a greater increase in vote share than any other bloc (17 percent from 2000 - 2006, with the largest rates of increase in Denver and its suburbs). If Democrats continue to capture a large share of Hispanic voters, this trend -- here as well as in New Mexico, where Hispanic-dominated minorities make up 50 percent of the voter share -- will have a powerful electoral impact going forward.

The two authors noted that the future of this coalition depends on winning Democrats' success at governing -- if they are elected and don't respond with effective policies, then no number of sympathetic demographic groups will help them. But slog through the whole report -- there's a lot going on out in that country of ours. As I find new interesting nuggets, I'll bring them to your attention.

-- Tim Fernholz

CNN is unable or unwilling to make the critical distinction between registration fraud and voter fraud. As I've said before, the former is really easy to do, even by accident, and the latter is extremely difficult and rarely occurs. The sheer volume of ACORN registration forms found in Indiana suggests the forms were deliberately filled out wrong, but they do not in any sense prove that there is a widespread liberal conspiracy to steal the election. More likely, ACORN workers were stealing time and trying to get paid without actually doing their jobs. Given how easily the forms were discovered, it would have to be the most inept scheme in the history of the United States.

Last night on Anderson Cooper's show, CNN reporter Drew Griffin concluded the following (via Lexis):

GRIFFIN: It absolutely is a crime. That was a fraud, somebody who filled out those forms. And I looked at them, Anderson. They're obviously a fraud.But the election workers say we have to turn this over to the actual elected board of elections. The board of elections has to then bring in the county attorney to see if an investigation, a criminal investigation, should begin. So all of that will be, you know, weeks, maybe even months down the road, and of course, that's going to be after the election.

Griffin's conclusion leaves open the possibility that there are thousands of fraudulent registration forms that will lead to people voting illegally and thus stealing the election. No where in his report does he acknowledge that voter fraud is very difficult to pull off and thus very rare, he is simply content to frighten people into believing that the fraudulent voter forms could lead to the election being stolen.

By contrast,The New York Times reported yesterday that thousands of voters have been illegally purged from the rolls in several swing states. Cooper gave this non-hypothetical problem about ten seconds of airtime before informing his viewers that they would "look into it in the days ahead."

Here we have one problem that we know is real, is actually happening, and may deny hundreds of thousands of Americans their vote on Election Day. But that's not nearly as sexy or exciting as an election stealing conspiracy that doesn't actually exist. We have a real problem, and a hypothetical one. CNN, like many in the mainstream media, decided the hypothetical problem was more important.

They're "keeping them honest," all right. Everyone but those who might actually affect your right to vote.

--A. Serwer

Nationwide, only 2 percent of eligible children take advantage of No Child Left Behind's "transfer provision," which compels districts to allow kids attending a failing school to transfer to a higher performing one. Why is the provision so rarely used? In many districts, there simply isn't a great school to transfer to, and NCLB does not allow transfers across districts (in my view, a major flaw of the legislation). There's also the problem of transportation; many districts just don't provide a good way for students to get to a school outside of their neighborhood.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that now even those districts that have been providing busing are cutting back, citing high fuel costs and budgetary belt tightening. But it's no coincidence that some of the districts now canceling busing programs have long fought desegregation. The entire state of Alabama won a federal waiver releasing it from the transfer provision. Milwaukee, DeKalb County in Georgia, and Tampa Bay have also wiggled out from under the requirement.

If local governments can't or won't provide this service, the federal government should step in, creating voluntary transfer programs that offer districts funding incentives for taking students in from across boundary lines. How would it work? Read about Hartford, Conn. The simple truth is that integration matters to the academic performance and social development of children of every race and class, and it simply cannot be achieved without government intervention. Consider the case of Wannesha McKennedy, who lives outside of Atlanta and would like to attend a better high school. The Journal reports:

McKennedy's daughter, Wannesha, had been accepted at a well-regarded high school in an affluent part of northern DeKalb County. But it is 22 miles away from the family home. Mr. McKennedy couldn't figure out a way to drive her there and still get to downtown Atlanta to start work on time at 7 a.m. And so, for her junior year, Wannesha will stay at her neighborhood high school, which has missed its NCLB achievement goals for the past three years.

Without transportation, the promise of choice is a "joke," says Mr. McKennedy. "If you're going to have it, you need buses."

--Dana Goldstein

Pirates are claiming that an $8 million ransom has been arranged for the return of MV Faina, a ship hijacked off Somalia while carrying 33 Ukrainian T-72 tanks and a collection of other weapons. I'm skeptical of an accord on two levels. First, I simply don't think it's a good idea to pay the pirates to give up the ship; in such a high profile case, this will have the inevitable effect of making pirates believe that they can get away with anything. It would be better to take the risk of storming the ship and arresting or shooting the pirates, particularly with the credibility of the United States Navy on the line.

If the USN is operating off Somalia for no purpose other than to moderate pirate ransom demands, then we have a serious problem. At the same time, I'm not sure that I would take any ransom agreements at face value. Just because the pirates think they're going to get a ransom doesn't mean they actually will; the French have, in two recent cases, used the promise of ransoms to lure pirates away from ships and arrest them. This, I think, would be the best outcome of the MV Faina case. Future pirates might not fall for the same trick, but the point is to convey that a life of piracy doesn't pay.

--Robert Farley

From the AP:

Palin pre-empts state report, clears self in probe

Trying to head off a potentially embarrassing state ethics report on GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, campaign officials released their own report Thursday that clears her of any wrongdoing.

In other news, Phoebe and I have conducted a