On Excerpts of The Battle for America 2008

I have never been much of consumer of campaign books. I tend to think they more or less rehash everything that has already been dissected in contemporaneous reporting even if they do offer juicy tidbits about campaign infighting, portraits of a frustrated candidate, and a loads of humorous anecdotes. Couldn’t I get much of that on YouTube spoofs anytime I want? Aside from a peculiar variety of political junkies, I often wonder to myself who actually purchases such books.

But after reading the an excerpt of “The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election” by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson in the Washington Post today, I think I’m beginning to understand the appeal of that genre of books. Of course, the 2008 presidential contest from primary to the end of the general election is an unusual serious of events featuring an unlikely stew of characters giving life to grand themes. Somehow the white guy from the South, former Senator John Edwards, became the underdog and a white woman from a northern blue state and black guy with a Muslim name became the main competitors on the Democratic side. And even in that struggle contained hues of David versus Goliath storyline that the media found easy to sell to a eager public.

Meanwhile, the Republican corp had a number of cartoon characters from the adamantly anti-immigrant then-Congressman Tom Tancredo to the jolly aw shucks evangelism of former Arkansas Mike Huckabee. A more disciplined Senator John McCain had to emerge from the ashes before taking the lead. And that only happened after his big win in New Hampshire.

The media’s appetite for sideshow personalities like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Joe the Plumber, and Bill Ayers made the long campaign easy fodder for water cooler talk for those who wanted a little gossip go with wonky debates on the minutiae of preconditions, the importance of a employer mandates in a health care plan, and the intricacies of the delegate and Superdelegate count.

Historians will have fun with that moment in American politics for generations to decades to come – maybe even longer than that.

But everything revolved around the eventual victor Barack Obama. Compared to his competitors, his campaign was heralded a marvel of near pitch perfect management with few dips in morale matching the posture of its intrepid leader. And the public, particularly his supporters, were very impressed with his cool demeanor, keen intellect and soaring rhetoric.

Balz and Johnson, however, seized on the moments in which those notions did not hold up.

Aides worried that Obama’s low morale might infect others in the campaign and spoke to him about it. They tried to buck him up, but at points in the spring and early summer of 2007, he was deeply frustrated — with his own performance and with that of much of his campaign. On July 15, he met with his senior staff at the home of Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and confidante to both Obama and his wife, Michelle. One adviser recalled it as the moment Obama began to take a more direct role in the operations of his campaign. He was blunt in his critique, and the exchanges among some of his advisers became testy. Beyond fundraising and the operation overseeing the Internet and new media, the campaign was not performing well, Obama said. The message still wasn’t where it should be. The political operation wasn’t up to speed. The campaign lacked crispness and good execution. He believed it was becoming too insular and wanted new people added to the inner circle. He told his team members they were all doing B work. If they continued on that course, they would come in a respectable second.

“Second is not good enough,” he said.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the excerpt so far, however, was then-chief campaign strategist and now White House senior adviser David Axelrod’s candid and prescient assessment of the big O’s potential weaknesses in a 2006 memo.

“It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched,” he said of Obama’s 2004 Senate opponent.

Many in the blogosphere and beyond often wondered if Obama was in fact the happy warrior beneath all that cool even if he could seduced legions of voters with great speechifying. The sheer force of the machinery of the campaign helped quell, thought not silence, many of those lingering doubts. And Obama knew it telling Balz and Haynes:

As he reviewed the campaign from his transition headquarters in mid-December, Obama offered a frank assessment of his two main competitors: Clinton and John McCain. “I was sure that my toughest race was Hillary,” he said. “Hillary was just a terrific candidate, and she really found her voice in the last part of the campaign. After Texas and Ohio she just became less cautious and was out there and was working hard and I think connecting with voters really well. She was just a terrific candidate. And [the Clinton campaign] operation was not as good as ours and not as tight as ours, but they were still plenty tough. Their rapid response, how they messaged in the media was really good. So we just always thought they were our most formidable challenge. That isn’t to say that we underestimated John McCain; it’s just that we didn’t think that their campaign operation was as good.

I cannot help but note the irony here that the campaign that was often dubbed as personality driven and almost free of doubt was in fact the very same tightly organized campaign that achieved success in no small part due to a healthy fear of losing. Its not news, but still a tidbit worth chewing. And maybe with enough of these kinds of insights it might even form a book worth reading.

Using Blagogate to Spread Rumor and Innuendo – Part 2

Thinking they smell blood in the water Republicans have released this internet video squarely aimed a conservative bloggers. Unsurprisingly, the main messages in the vid are since Obama and Blago campaigned together, they must be co-defendants; any contact that the president-elect or his people had with Blago must be suspect; since the Obama team has been less than forthcoming so far, they must be hiding something and therefore are guilty of something.

Perhaps, the RNC does not realize this is, but the presidential campaign is over. Its been over for more than a month. In fact, the nominee of your own party, the very same candidate that Obama defeated had this to say about the ad earlier today On ABC’s “This Week”:

I think that the Obama campaign should and will give all information necessary. You know, in all due respect to the Republican National Committee and anybody — right now, I think we should try to be working constructively together, not only on an issue such as this, but on the economy stimulus package, reforms that are necessary. And so, I don’t know all the details of the relationship between President-elect Obama’s campaign or his people and the governor of Illinois, but I have some confidence that all the information will come out. It always does, it seems to me.

That’s DC talk for ‘You guys are looking desperate and are embarrassing me.’

More of that Transracial Talk

If he loses, he’s black. If he wins, he’s a post-racial figure.  Before then-Senator Barack Obama became President-elect Obama, that how I imagined the narrative would play out. So far, I have to say I have been more wrong than right, but its still too early. We have at least four and potentially eight to find out.

Of course, the first signs of it are starting to emerge. Case in point Marie Arana. The Washington Post’s Book World editor has made the latest attempt to alert the rest of us to the fact that “Obama is not black, but transracial or even postracial.”

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

Perhaps, it was repeated because that is how Barack Obama frequently described himself even as he reminded people of the white side of his family. After all, its still possible for someone to recognize himself as a biracial black man or even for someone biracial to describe himself as simply black, which is what he often did. Case in point here is what Obama told the New York Times as a 28 year old in 1990 what it meant to be elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review:

But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance.

Maybe this is too vague for some, but it seems to be abundantly clear how Obama sees himself here.

Of course, some pundits are still confused, and will continue to push the whole “Obama as transracial figure” media narrative for whatever reason. Fine. Knock yourself out.

But for those who insist on it I only make one recommendation. Please read Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates piece on Barack Obama in Time Magazine in 2004.

Here’s the money quote:

Back in the real world, Obama is married to a black woman. He goes to a black church. He’s worked with poor people on the South Side of Chicago, and still lives there. That someone given the escape valve of biraciality would choose to be black, would see some beauty in his darker self and still care more about health care and public education than reparations and Confederate flags is just too much for many small-minded racists, both black and white, to comprehend.

Barack Obama’s real problem isn’t that he’s too white — it’s that he’s too black.

House What?

From CNN:

“If you still want to be stubborn about America’s failure in Afghanistan, then remember the fate of Bush and Pervez Musharraf, and the fate of the Soviets and British before them,” the message [by Ayman al-Zawahri]  said. “And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them.”

The message said Obama appears “to be captive to the same criminal American mentality towards the world and towards the Muslims.” The speaker cited Muslims’ ire toward Obama’s support of Israel.

The speaker also said Obama, former and current Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and “your likes” fit Malcolm X’s description of “house slaves.”

An English translation of the message used the term “house Negroes,” Malcolm X’s term for blacks who were subservient to whites.

Laura Mansfield, a terrorism analyst, said this wouldn’t be the first time al-Zawahiri used the Arabic term “abayd al bayt,” which literally translates as slaves or servants of the house.

From Dr. Melissa Harris-Lacewell:

I wonder what Malcolm himself would think of Barack Obama. I have no doubt that he would be a critic, but somehow I doubt he would have labeled Obama a House Negro. I have written about the transformational narrative that underlies Malcolm’s personal journey and I think his criticisms would have been more nuanced. I suspect he also would have felt deep love and admiration for Barack and for his family of girl children. What do you think Yolanda,what would Malcolm say to all this?

And by the way, the House Negro comment is based in a deeply flawed understanding of American slavery. Brother Malcolm was a brilliant leader, but he was actually a pretty poor historian. Enslaved black people who worked in the homes of their enslavers did not necessarily live a better or easier life. Often in the course of one man or woman’s life they would work multiple kinds of tasks including field and domestic labor. Often those who worked in closest proximity to enslavers had less autonomy, were more constantly under racist surveillance, had less opportunity to form social relationships with other enslaved people, were separated from their own families, and were vulnerable to unique and horrible forms of sexual, verbal, and physical abuse. There is certainly no evidence that these domestic slaves felt more attachment to their white enslavers.

Now of course, vile yuck mouth propagandist like Ayman al-Zawahri are not very concerned about providing accurate account of history as much as they want to simply want to inject themselves in the news cycles and play mind games. With Bush fading into the sunset soon and the withdrawl from Iraq on the horizon, al-Zawahri realizes that he will begin to lose one of his principle recuritment tools and now he is trying to portray Obama as another Bush. But before he could or would lament this fact he had to declare victory somehow to rally his own troops to huncker down as they prepare for the pending conflict in Afghanistan.

…on the American people’s admission of defeat in Iraq. Although the evidence of America’s defeat in Iraq appeared years ago, Bush and his administration continued to be stubborn and deny the brilliant midday sun. If Bush has achieved anything, it is in his transfer of America’s disaster and predicament to his successor. But the American people, by electing Obama, declared its anxiety and apprehension about the future towards which the policy of the likes of Bush is leading it, and so it decided to support someone calling for withdrawal from Iraq.

Al-Zawahri continued his blather by noting, “A failure in Iraq to which you have admitted, and a failure in Afghanistan to which the commanders of your army have admitted. The other thing to which I want to bring your attention is that what you’ve announced about how you’re going to reach an understanding with Iran and pull your troops out of Iraq to send them to Afghanistan is a policy which was destined for failure before it was born.”

This cat sounds like a man running scared itching to talk shit just the cat on the block who like popping shit right before he walked away with broken limbs and a disfigured face. Those B-2 bombers are coming for you al – Zawahri.

Here is the tape.

Mount Obama?

Think I am joking? Not a chance. In a press release dated two days ago, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda W. Baldwin Spencer plans on renaming Boggy Peak (see picture) Mount Obama.

As much as I like the sound of that, I think this is going too far. I mean the brotha has not even been sworn in yet.

I wonder if Rahm Emanuel or David Axelrod had anything to do with this.

His Excellency, Barack Obama
President Elect of the United States of America

Excellency,

Antigua and Barbuda joins the American people, and the peoples of all nations, in celebrating your historic election as President of the United States of America.

As Chairman of the Group 77 and China, and as Chairman of the Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community, I am conscious of the promise of your presidency in shaping a new paradigm in America’s relationship with the other nations of the world.

Your election will not only transform America, it can transform the world.

Your message of change will ignite hope and action in people of many countries who might still be passive in the face of inadequacies and injustice.

Your manifest devotion to family will strengthen families around the planet.

On behalf of the people and the Government of Antigua and Barbuda, I take this opportunity to extend our condolences on the passing of your beloved grandmother.

In lasting tribute to your election, I shall take immediate measures for Antigua and Barbuda’s highest mountain peak to be dedicated in your honour and renamed “Mount Obama”.

The people of Antigua and Barbuda and the rest of the Caribbean keenly anticipate your visit to our region for the Summit of the Americas, in the early months of your presidency.

With assurances of my highest esteem,

W. Baldwin Spencer

Voter Suppression and Provisional Ballots

CNN is reporting “six Republican election board workers in Philadelphia were told to leave their polling precincts” since they lacked authorization such as a court order to work at that particular polling precinct. Apparently, some in the McCain-Palin campaign might respond by taking legal action. Campaign officials are even publicly suggesting that it’s part of an effort to intimidate Republicans in a part of the state where they don’t predominate.

Bill Porritt a campaign spokesperson told CNN “Election board officials guard the legitimacy of the election process and the idea that Republicans are being intimidated and banned for partisan purposes does not allow for an honest and open election process.”

Historically, its been the GOP who has led efforts to intimidate and suppress voter turnout, especially in neighborhoods filled with people of color, naturalized immigrants, and poor people. Coincidentally, 45 percent of the city is African American, 10.5 percent is Hispanic, nine percent is foreign born, and 21 percent lives below the poverty line, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau.

Nevertheless, certain Republican figures, such as former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton are propagating this ridiculous notion of “reverse intimidation” directed at GOP lawyers and officials.

Check it out.

Part of the GOP’s suppression strategy is to challenge votes, or dispute someone’s right to vote on technical grounds, at the polling sites, which inevitably extend wait times on lines. This often results in people having to cast provisional ballots, not regular ballots.

So what’s wrong with provisional ballots? Well, the Brennan Center explains:

In part because of their novelty, in many states, provisional ballots generated confusion before, during, and after the 2004 election. A number of states did not plan for provisional balloting until shortly before the election, and the rules kept changing up until the last minute. Not surprisingly, this led to widespread problems at the polls and afterward.

A report of the Election Protection Coalition found that provisional ballot problems were among the top five complaints registered on its 1-866-Our-Vote hotline. Most of the reported incidents consisted of complaints that provisional ballots were not available at polling sites, that poll workers did not offer or refused to allow voters to cast provisional ballots, and that poll workers were confused about provisional balloting procedures and rules.

Problems in administering provisional ballots may have disenfranchised many eligible voters. For example, where provisional ballots were not available or not offered, eligible voters were turned away from the polls as before HAVA. And provisional ballots also created problems that did not exist before. For example, reports from poll sites across the country suggest that many voters who should have been entitled to cast regular ballots were given provisional ballots—which had a lower chance of being counted—instead.

In addition, in part because of cumbersome procedures, provisional ballots led to delays at many polling places; the resulting long lines peeled off a not insubstantial number of voters.

Polling Still Trending in Obama’s Direction

Now while most political observers fully expect the race to tighten up in the next few days nationally and in certain battleground states, the most recent polling spell nothing but doom for John McCain. Obama has the lead in two different polls in Florida and the same is true of Indiana.  He is also leading in at least one poll in Montana, and continues to lead by double digits in several different Ohio and Pennsylvania polls, and is up by a whopping 22.3 points in Michigan.

Take a look.

Though Nate Silver concedes much of this is good news for the Obama campaign, he cautions Obama supporters against reading too much into the recent polling.

To find good news for McCain, you have to go South — to the deep South — where new polling in Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana suggests that those states have yet to become competitive.

As a result of all of this, there is now no perceptible rebound for John McCain; in fact, the race may still be trending toward Obama, although the safer assumption is that it’s flat. Meanwhile, Obama’s electoral position appears as strong as ever. John McCain’s chances of winning the election have dwindled to 3.7%, down from 6.5% yesterday.

Today’s article in the Washington Post on the recent polling summarized the implications of the findings:

What all the polls, battleground and national, point to is that Obama now has multiple routes to 270 electoral votes, the winning number, while McCain has to win virtually everything that is competitive. Pollster.com lists seven tossup states. All were won by President Bush four years ago.

Many analysts have long predicted that the race could stay close until the end but that it could pop open in the final weeks — and if that happened, it would most likely go in Obama’s direction.

(H/T: FiveThirtyEight.com)

Reactions to Criticism of the Powell Endorsement

Some of the folks at These Bastards had the following to say about conservatives fuming over Powell’s endorsement of Obama:

Immediately Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, George Will, and Dan Billings fired off e-mails and gave interviews alerting the American populace to this chain of events. More intelligent people would have tried to attack Powell’s credibility based on his tenure in the Bush Administration. But to Rush and the like we are in yet another grand year of the glorious freedom experiment in Iraq, so that’s out. So they did the next best thing, kicked open the front door, strode out onto the porch and yelled “The Negroes is congregatin’ and endorsifyin’!” Because I guess Colin Powell and other black figures aren’t allowed to deviate from the standard line of pasty white guys they’ve endorsed since time immemorial.

So, word to the wise black folks. Endorsing a person of the same race is kinda racist, unless you are white. I think it has something to do with the equinox or the Magna Carta. If I understand it correctly, the only way to move race relations forward is for the black community to rally around the old, white guy. For the 44th time in a row. To prove to us you aren’t voting based on race. We promise to return the favor the next time a black guy runs. Honest.

And Morris O’Kelly at the NYT’s Fifth Down had the following reaction:

It wasn’t enough for Colin Powell to have been a professional soldier and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was “irrelevant” that he was once Secretary of State. When it came down to Powell offering his informed, influential and most important, single-minded opinion, the FIRST criticism leveled at him trumpeted race.

Limbaugh didn’t acknowledge his credentials and couldn’t attack his record.

The FIRST criticism leveled at Powell trumpeted race, and Powell’s previous service to America was summarily dismissed. This, despite the fact that Powell had never made any overture to appease or please African-Americans.

Nobody publicly accused Republicans Susan Eisenhower or Christopher Buckley of being “race traitors” when they endorsed Obama, or alleged Joe Lieberman was a race loyalist after switching parties and kowtowing to McCain. So when a respected and reputable black uber-American is first characterized as a race loyalist…it’s at best questionable.

By every Republican measure, Powell (like McCain) had put “country first.”

Others, such as Pat Buchanan, took an even lower road, alleging that other, “more qualified” generals were passed over in favor of Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You know, “affirmative action” at the highest level.

Even after all these years, the credit Powell deserved still escaped him.

No such questions were posed of Dr. Henry Kissinger as to whether his support of Senator John McCain was also based in race. Buchanan didn’t accuse Senator McCain of gender affirmative action with the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Joe the Plumber and Taxes

From Dean Baker:

Much of last night’s presidential debate centered on “Joe the Plumber,” Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber who Barack Obama met while campaigning in Ohio. According to the New York Times, Mr. Wurzelbacher says that he is planning to buy a plumbing business that has profits of between $250,000 and $280,000 a year.

While this income would put Mr. Wurzelbacher above the threshold where he could expect to pay higher taxes under Senator Obama’s tax plan, the increase in his tax bill would be relatively modest. Under Senator Obama’s plan, the tax on income above $250,000 would increase by 3 percentage points from 33 percent to 36 percent. This means that Mr. Wurzelbacher could expect to see his tax bill rise by between $0-$900, assuming that this plumbing business would be his entire taxable income. If he has additional taxable income, then he would see a larger increase in his taxes.

Whoa that sounds really burdensome for someone making $250k or more a year. Interestingly enough, Wurzelbacher is not even in that top 5 percent of the income earners to even be worried about such a hike.

Some are speculating whether or not Wurzelbacher was actually planted by the McCain campaign to portray Obama as a tax and spend liberal.

Here is the exchange between Joe the Plumber and Obama in case any of you missed it.

CBS/NYT Poll: Obama leads McCain 53 to 39 Percent

Its hard to know how much faith to place in national polls but the 14 point spread reported in the newest CBS/NYT poll should give many observers pause, especially since its largely consistent with how other polls have been trending.

Here is how CBS interpreted the results.

The Obama-Biden ticket now leads the McCain-Palin ticket 53 percent to 39 percent among likely voters, a 14-point margin. One week ago, prior to the Town Hall debate that uncommitted voters saw as a win for Obama, that margin was just three points.

Among independents who are likely voters – a group that has swung back and forth between McCain and Obama over the course of the campaign – the Democratic ticket now leads by 18 points. McCain led among independents last week.

McCain’s campaign strategy may be hurting hurt him: Twenty-one percent of voters say their opinion of the Republican has changed for the worse in the last few weeks. The top two reasons cited for the change of heart are McCain’s attacks on Obama and his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate.

I bet McCain is kicking himself for not picking Romney now.

The New Yorker Endorses Obama

The New Yorker more than made up for its sad attempt at satire this summer with its recent full-throated endorsement of Obama. To date, this has got to be the most forceful and persuasive case for Obama I have seen yet.  The editorial draws contrasts between the Obama-Biden and the McCain-Palin ticket on numerous issues, but the differences on energy and on the courts were the most dramatic and powerful points in the piece.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”

On the courts:

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.

We Fight on that Lie

Ta-Nehisi Coates sums up John McCain’s posture on Iraq in very stark terms.

There is no sense here that one may have other reasons, short of cowardice, for wanting out of Iraq. But this is like being back on the block. Your man tells you that he got jumped by some cats from across the tracks, so you and him go to war. The beef lasts for months, and then you find out he never got jumped to begin with. But when you pull out, he calls you a chump.

This reminds me of a scene in The Wire when Slim Charles shares some of his wisdom on the Art of War with Avon Barksdale. Charles wanted to retaliate against a rival gangster Marlo Stansfield for the latter’s presumed involvement in murdering a close associate of the Barksdale set.  Even when Barksdale the righleader informs him Marlo had nothing to do with the murder Charles still presses the point. “It don’t matter who did what to who at this point. And now there ain’t no going back. Once you in it you in it. If its a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight,” implores Charles.

Check it.

John McCain is Now for Fair Pay after Being Against It

In an effort to win over women voters, Senator John McCain is willing to say whatever he thinks they want to hear. Consider the issue of fair pay. With Gov. Palin as his cut woman by his side, Senator McCain has come to embrace fair pay as progressive cause he is worth campaign on, at least when talking to women: 

Earlier this week he assured an audience of women voters that:

I want to assure you, that we not only have a role model, but we will hire people and we will make sure people come to our administration wherever there is discrimination. We will eliminate it, we will fight it, and if necessary we’ll take ‘em to court. We’ll do those things.

Watch it. 

Suddenly, John McCain has found his feminist voice on pay discrimination.  This is a strikingly different tune than what he said just a few months ago when the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a bill that would strengten anti-pay discrimination legislation, came up for a vote in the U.S. Senate and McCain opposed it. While McCain did not actually cast a vote for the bill either yea or nay, he did tell the media that:  

I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.

[snip]

This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.

Never mind that the Fair Pay Act would merely correct what a bad Supereme Court decision, Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co.,  tried to errode by weakening provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The 1964 Civil Rights Act says a plaintiff must file a complaint within the 180 days “after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred.” The law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, creed, disability, age, and national origin.  For decades, the Supreme Court and lower courts understood this provision to mean that employees could sue within 180 of receiving a discriminatory paycheck since each check represented a related yet distinct instance of discrimination in a series of discriminatory acts.

But Justice Alito, however, had a different interpretation of the law.  In the Ledbetter decision the Justice Alito caluously concluded that Ms. Ledbetter filed her compliant too late and was not entitled to any compensation for her being discriminated against by her employer, despite the fact that she was doing the same job as her male peers, but being paid less for doing so. 

In writing for the majority, Justice Alito found Ms. Ledbetter should have filed her suit with the EEOC within 180 days of the original decision to pay her differently. “Current effects alone cannot breathe life into prior, uncharged discrimination,” declared the Justice.  Never mind that Ms. Ledbetter had no way knowing much leas proving she was discriminated against until she was informed about through recieving an anonymous note from a fellow co-worker.  

Now the bill as it was written in April would just restore the law back to its pre-Ledbetter interpretation and Mr. Straight Talk Express opposed it then, but is for it now. 

In arguing that the Fair Pay Act is another instance of unnecessary of government intrustion, and “opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems” not only does it stand in tension with McCain’s rhetoric on the need for tighter regulation, but also highlights his view of the Courts. The Ledbetter decision was as much about discrimination as it was about who has access to the courts and under what circumstances to seek justice for a wrong done to them.  With the Ledbetter decision, Justices such as Samuel Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court sought to err on the side of big business at the expense of worker’s rights and ensure that workers don’t have a much of an opportunity to take their employer to court when they have been discriminated against. 

And John McCain must like these Juges because he told a conservative crowd this past spring what his models for the federal bench look like: 

Two of the best of those are Judges Alito and Roberts. You can be very proud of them. My friends, I want to tell you, I will try to find clones of Alito and Roberts. I will try to find people just like them.

(H/T: Think Progress)

Stumping on the Economy

A little history and analysis from Dan Balz at the WaPo:

Only once since World War II has a political party maintained control of the presidency for three consecutive terms, which was from 1981-1993. Eisenhower’s eight years were followed by Kennedy’s and Johnson’s eight years, which were followed by Nixon’s and Ford’s eight years, which were followed by Carter’s four years.

Voters would not give Democrats a third term after the Clinton presidency, despite a robust economy and a nation at peace. After the tumult of Bush’s eight years, what might compel voters to reward the Republicans with a third consecutive term in control of the White House?

McCain has managed to make the best of this terrible environment. His pick of Sarah Palin proved enormously effective in the short term. His party appears newly energized, even enthusiastic about their ticket, even if they still distrust the leader of that ticket.

[snip]

How long can he sustain all this? Absent external events, he was doing well. With the economic news of this week, the polls hint at a deflation in his position. The playing field has once again tilted slightly toward Obama, who now must take advantage of it.

This of course begs the question as to why the race remains so close given the present climate. I of course will leave that to readers of this blog to figure out. But I do think that aside from Obama being a black guy with a funny name who is still largely unknown to huge swaths of the electorate and still manages to come off as inexperienced, it has a lot to do with the fact that the hope machine has never been as compelling candidate when stumping on the economy as much as he was campaigning as an anti-war advocate against Senator Clinton in the primary.

As Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com observed yesterday, “Obama’s never going to be a Clintonesque natural out there on the stump in responding to the economy — he might have to repeat a message three times where with Clinton it would have sunken in the first one.” Of course, this does not entirely account for his lack of support among those in Kentucky or West Virginia, but it may help explain some skepticism on the part of some persuadable independents and crossover voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Nevada, and perhaps Ohio.

Of course, Obama is slowly morphing into a harder edged populist during these past few weeks, but he is going to have to work a lot harder to among certain segments of voting population.

Regulation Chatter

In a post entitled, “Obama’s Faulty Logic” Sebastian Mallaby at the WaPo’s blog Post-Partisan apparently has grown tired of the regulation versus deregulation soundbites on the campaign trail have devolved into an “appealingly simple” rhetorical trope. The UK economist takes issue with how the Obama campaign tried to draw “link between the Wall Street blow-ups and a lack of regulation,” and suggesting that the conventional wisdom regarding deregulation was somehow unique to Bush, McCain and his advisers.

Malaby tells us that:

Embarrassingly for Obama, the principal piece of financial deregulation over the past decade was the reform of Glass-Steagall, the law that separated investment banks from deposit-taking ones. This reform was sponsored by McCain’s friend, former Republican Senator Phil Gramm, but ending the division between the two types of bank was a policy that the Clinton team also supported, which does not fit the Obama narrative.

Mallaby fails to point out, however, that even after the push for deregulation of financial markets and other areas of our economy including telecom and elsewhere was not only met with deep skepticism within the Democratic party, but was widely considered an long term strategy for generating economic growth.  Yes, the Washington consensus of the Clinton years erred on the side of deregulation as a means of harnessing the power of the market, but few thought the federal government should permanently abdicate its role as a regulator or overseer of the market.

To the contrary, one of the great lessons of the late 90s, particularly after the financial contagion crisis, is that that government does have a role to play in world where capital – and the shocks associated with it – moves at the speed of a few clicks on a mouse.

But the Bush administration was wedded to the notion that the market will solve its own problems even if industries experience such dramatic change that they necessarily merit regulation and oversight. Consider mortgage lending. Mortgage lending has changed dramatically during the last several years. According to the Pew Center on the States, “10,000 lending institutions were in business 20 years ago; today, just a few dozen lenders dominate.” But once the source of capital went for home loans went from mainly small lenders to primarily bonds underwritten by the financial markets, the evaluation of the loans themselves changed. Put simply, they were less likely to be valued on the basis of their performance than they were on their size and terms.

This evolution of the lending market also coincided with another change. By incorporating the use of data metrics, such as credit scoring and consumer data, credit became much more accessible. As a result, the subprime lending sector expanded as the creditor market overall began to grow.

In order to keep up with the proliferation of loans in a market with increasingly lax lending standards many resorted to a less rigorous computerized underwriting. This imprecise method of rating the creditworthiness of borrowers often led to many people being offered subprime loans despite qualifying for more conventional loans.

Subprime loans are high cost loan products often, but not always, sold to borrowers are low-income or have a modest savings, or with less than pristine credit. By contrast, prime loans are sold at market rate to people with solid credit scores at competitive low interest rates. To hedge against the lending to borrowers with “higher credit risks,” subprime borrowers are charged higher rates. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, more than 80 percent of those loans came with adjustable interest rates as opposed to a 30 or 40 year fix rate mortgage loan.

To be sure, when done responsibly subprime lending can lead to opportunities for many people who might otherwise never own a home or obtain credit civil rights advocates have an interest in preserving the subprime market. But during the past few years, we have witnessed an explosion in risky mortgage products and a rapid decline in the use of sensible lending practices.

Congress should have stepped up their efforts in calling hearings to shine a light on the most egregious violators of fair housing laws and place pressure on federal agencies to go after these so-called independent brookers who are exploiting borrowers and find out why there was such an incentive from wall street investors to get as many loans on the books as possible.

A little oversight would have revealed the inefficiencies withing the market and the looming burst of the bubble was near.

As Obama rightly noted in his speech at Cooper Union in New York earlier this year:

Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we’ve failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practice. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both.

Nor is this trend new. The concentrations of economic power and the failures of our political system to protect the American economy and American consumers from its worst excesses have been a staple of our past: most famously in the 1920s, when such excesses ultimately plunged the country into the Great Depression. That is when government stepped in to create a series of regulatory structures, from FDIC to the Glass-Steagall Act, to serve as a corrective, to protect the American people and American business.