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.

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.

Campaigning through the Mud

In what seems like ages ago, the McCain campaign and GOP at large were concerned about a potential backlash against attacking Obama unfairly.  In a February article in the Jack Kemp, albeit not your typical Republican, told the Politico, “You can’t run against Barack Obama the way you could run against Bill Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry” because it would highlight how much a “all white country club party” the Republican party truly is.

“You can’t allow the party to be Macaca-ed,” one operative noted, “The P.C. [politically correct] police will be out and the standards will be very narrow,” said another strategist. Senator McCain even defended Senator Obama after hearing Bill Cunningham, one of the more vile radio talk show hosts on the extreme right, disparage the Illinois Senator in a rant in which the McCain supporter invoked the now Democratic  Presidential nominee’s middle name three times.

According to the New York Times, McCain took the stage at the fundraiser and told the crowd there:

It’s my understanding that before I came in here a person who was on the program before I spoke made some disparaging remarks about my two colleagues in the Senate, Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. I have repeatedly stated my respect for Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, that I will treat them with respect. I will call them Senator. We will have a respectful debate, as I have said on hundreds of occasions. I regret any comments that may have been made about these two individuals who are honorable Americans.

My how times have changed. I wonder where that guy is today? And surprise surprise the so-called PC police aren’t as strong or intimidating as Republicans said they were.

Maybe I am just waking up to the fact that its mud season. And its been that way for some time.

Narrative Dissonance

On Wednesday, Peggy Noon railed against the presumed ineffectiveness of promoting narratives as a campaign device for Republican candidates running for high office in her opinion piece in the WSJ by saying:

I don’t like the idea of The Narrative. I think it is … a barnyard epithet. And, oddly enough, it is something that Republicans are not very good at, because it’s not where they live, it’s not what they’re about, it’s too fancy. To the extent the McCain campaign was thinking in these terms, I don’t like that either. I do like Mrs. Palin, because I like the things she espouses. And because, frankly, I met her once and liked her. I suspect, as I say further in here, that her candidacy will be either dramatically successful or a dramatically not; it won’t be something in between.

Not something they are good at? Not where they live? To fancy? That’s a little hard to believe. In 2000, the Bush campaign pushed a narrative of the then-Governor Bush as a one time lost soul who felt so out of place among the country club elites and overshadowed by his father’s achievements he tried to drink his sense of inadequacies away only to be redeemed by the power and grace of evangelical Christianity. All of which resonated very well with the Republican base and many other religious folk who felt that W. knew family values and understood them best.

Even David Frum recently gave a nod to the success of such narrative spinning on his blog at the NRO:

George W. Bush had very slight executive experience before becoming president. His views were not well known. He won the nomination exactly in the same way that Palin has won the hearts of so many conservatives: by sending cultural cues to convince them that he was one of them, understood them, sympathized with them. So that made everything else irrelevant in 2000 – as it seems again to be doing in 2008. [snip] But he lacked other important aspects of leadership which is how we got into the mess from which he needed to rescue the country and himself.

Amen to that.

To me, this is not only proof that not all Republicans think alike, but also some are a lot more honest with themselves than others, at least on certain topics. That said, on most days I’d rather read Peggy Noonan’s sweeping insights packaged in her crisp prose than sift through David Frum’s endless banter and pontification.

Obama on GOP Attacks: “This is What they Do”

Earlier today Senator Barack Obama met with reporters to respond to some of the Republican attacks last night at the GOP convention. The Democratic Presidential nominee minced no words. He told journalists “This is what they do” when “they don’t have an agenda to run on.” He then coyly asked those same reporters if they were surprised to hear such negative criticisms from Republicans during their convention.

And when asked why has he not gone on the offensive against Senator John McCain’s running mate Governor Sarah Palin after fierce and snide jabs at him last night, Obama told the press corp “Because John McCain’s running for President and I am running against John McCain and as far as I can tell Governor Palin does not have any ideas that are different from John McCain’s and that speech she delivered was on behalf of John McCain.”

Watch it.

But of course, Obama could not let the community organizing jab slide either. For those of you who did not get a chance to see the speech last night Governor Palin said:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved. I guess — I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.

A reporter in the clip below ask Obama to respond by saying “They are talking about work I did right out of college” and asked “Why would that work be ridiculous?” and “Who are they fighting for?” and maybe they are out of touch and don’t get it because they (McCain and Palin) have not been working on behalf of those folks.

Watch it.

(H/T: Jed Report)

Obama’s Post Convention Bump Hits 50 Percent

With Governor Sarah Palin’s vetting stories soaking up so much of the media oxygen few have bothered to notice Senator Barack Obama’s post convention bump this past weekend.  According to the most recent Gallup daily tracking poll, Obama has a 50 to 42 percent advantage over Senator John McCain. Though this is not the largest lead Illinois Senator has held over McCain (a July Gallup found 49 compared to 40 percent of all registered voters favored Obama over the Arizona Senator), its an important milestone nonetheless since it the first time that half of all voters now favor the hope machine than they do McSame.

Obviously, McCain and company will eat into the lead here, but with the truncated and thus far lackluster GOP convention, and Gov. Palin’s Prego-gate and Trooper-gate dominated news coverage at the expense of a McCain’s overall message coming out of the Twin Cities this week, I doubt it will even this up any time soon.

In fact, I predict that by next week the Obama-Biden ticket will still have a solid 5 point lead over McCain-Palin campaign. Or at the very least it will be beyond the margin of error.

Its More than Just the Economy

Andrea Batista Schlesinger at DMI blog has grown weary and skeptical of the attention paid on the foreign policy portion of Senator Joe Biden’s resume in assessing whether or not the Delaware lawmaker is a well matched running mate for Senator Barack Obama.

Enough with the talk about filling in the foreign affairs gap. This just accepts that we are going to live out yet ANOTHER campaign the way the right wants us to — on their turf. The most pressing issues to America’s middle class are economic, economic, and ECONOMIC, so let’s learn a little bit more about where Senator Joseph Biden stood when it came to voting for legislation that matter to the pocketbooks of middle-class Americans.

http://themiddleclass.org/legislator/joseph-biden-412

Aside from the fact, that as Samantha Power has noted, the Democrats should use this election year as in part an opportunity to define themselves the better party on national security, its also clear that ceding ground to the Republicans on security issues by not discussing them they also hamstring their efforts to get their message out on the economy and other issues.

Each time the Obama does not answer forcefully or not all to some absurd charge about some fabricated ties to Hamas or imagined sympathies for the Iranians or is naive about the gravity of certain authoritarian rouge regimes because he says he is open to negotiation under certain circumstances, those stories linger in the press for days or even weeks. One asset Senator Biden does bring to the campaign is his ability to aggressively push back on those issues to make sure those charges don’t go unchallenged and get them off the front pages as Obama pitches his plan to modernize our economy and make it greener, generate job growth, and create a more sensible and equitable tax system.

Stressing Joe Biden’s foreign policy resume is like letting the opposition know you have a good deterrent that you plan to use regularly once campaigning turns into much more of a contact sport.

Its rarely just the economy stupid.

Support John McCain While You’re at the Beach

So after you are done whining about the economy, you can support John McCain’s presidential campaign by simply heading to the beach.  And don’t forget that sun tan lotion.

Hispanics Moving to Obama’s Camp

The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.
-Hillary Clinton campaign pollster Sergio Bendixen, New Yorker, Jan 21, 2008

As Hova once said allow me to point out the bounce.

I suppose not everyone’s crystal ball works in the same way.

Check out the polling data and analysis from Gallup by clicking here.

McCain and the Ageism Charge

Adam Nagourney in the Week In Review section in the NYT today:

Mr. McCain is vulnerable to a double-standard that shadows him whenever he is in public view. Unlike Mr. Obama, if Mr. McCain stumbles on the stairs or over a few facts, it has the potential to become the kind of moment that crystallizes concerns about his fitness.

Now, while it is true that whether fairly or not McCain’s age will be issue in the general election, it is certainly misleading to suggest that Obama has the edge over McCain with regard to double standards. To be certain, McCain will undoubtedly will have to prove to voters that he is full of vigor and a lucid thinker whereas Obama already seems to embody such attributes due to his given his youthful appearance and gift for oratory.

But President Ronald Reagan already shattered the barrier of ageism twice after soundly beating his Democratic opponents in two consecutive contests for the presidency in the 1980s. Shortly after a month after taking office, Ronald Reagan turned 70 years old and looked every bit of his age during the process. Sure McCain at 74 now is about as old as Reagan was when he started his second term, but its not THAT much older and at least there is some kind of precedent for it.

Plus, anyone who has watched Senate or House floor debates on C-SPAN can surely attest to the fact that Americans have no problem of electing and reelecting elderly white men to high office. By contrast, the only black person currently in the U.S. Senate also happens to be the same one running for president too.

More importantly, Obama has no template of viable black men running for president with a Muslim first and last name he can refer to. Nearly every single U.S. president so far has been an old or soon to be old white male with names no voter would confuse with the most wanted terrorist in the world.

as abhorrent a prejudice as ageism it has yet to be exploited for political gain in the same way as racial prejudice was used for decades to bolster the GOP’s infamous Southern strategy.

And of course, though Obama is not innocent of invoking ageist overtones when he said McCain was “losing his bearings,” that comment is no where near as inflammatory as implying that the Illinois Senator is somehow a terrorist sympathizer in fund raising letters as the McCain campaign has already done.

In fact, despite being Christian, Obama is still having to beat back a variety of Islamophobic smears ranging from some implied relationship with Louis Farrakhan to scurrilous emails erroneously stating he grew up in a madrassa. So, whatever ageist prejudice that McCain has had to deal with, whether real or imagined, seems fairly mild compared to the double standards Obama and his campaign has had to overcome.

I dare say, unlike McCain, if Obama captures the presidency, he could emerge as one of the most smeared candidates to ever win a national election.

But lets not lose sight of what is truly going on here. Its obvious that some members of the mainstream media are eager to find a new narrative that revolves around prejudice that somehow rivals the sexism versus racism storyline in the Democratic primary.

I fully expect more stories and opinion pieces about ageism directed at McCain each time he utters another gaffe.

And just think its not even November yet.

Reject Rounce Repudiate

Zenyenta at Senior Moments makes an excellent point about racist voters.

The race in West Virginia turned out pretty much exactly the way everyone said it would. The same will likely hold true for Kentucky. Neither contest change much. Obama is still going to be the presumptive nominee and for all practical purposes he already is. Concern about his ability to attract the white racist vote has reached fever pitch in recent days. I can see that could be a hard vote for an African American to get and he just might have a different electoral approach mapped out. His campaign seems to know what they’re about.

What I want to know is, will the media ask Clinton to reject and repudiate voters like J. K. Patrick of Kentucky?

I really don’t want an African-American as President.

I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion. After 1964, you saw what the South did.” He meant that it went Republican. “Now what caused that? Race. There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people. They know what happened in the sixties. Under thirty—they don’t remember. I do. I was here.

I mean, if Obama has to be responsible for every supporter and past associate and come down one way or the other on specific statements they’ve made, shouldn’t the same apply to Clinton now. Patrick’s kind of thinking contributed greatly to Clinton’s landslide in WV and the expected similar result in KY. Isn’t that something she should be asked to address rather specifically? And McCain- is he not as responsible what his supporters say as Obama? Just asking.

McCain’s Double Talk on the Middle East and Obama’s Response

In an interview in 2006 with former assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration James P. Rubin, Senator McCain urged the Bush administration and others to acknowledge new realities in the Middle East, including the ascendancy of Hamas as governing power in the Palestinian territories.

And when asked if American diplomats should engage Hamas, McCain said, “Their the government and sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them one way or another.”

He also noted that while he understood the antipathy that they inspire among so many people because of their use of violence, “its a new reality in the Middle East and I think the lesson is that people want security a decent life and a decent future then they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.”

(Fatah is the largest political party in the Palestinian territories and an organization founded by Yaser Arafat and other Palestinian nationalists. Among Western nations, its was and still is the preferred party to negotiate with when compared to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.)

Watch it.

This of course sounds like a very different tune than what McCain has been singing these past few days and weeks where he has more than suggested that Obama would appease Hamas, Iran and Syria by engaging them diplomatically.

But it does not stop there. Max Bergmann at the Huffington Post also notes that McCain defended then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s trip to Syria in 2003, despite the over hyped criticism from the right, and said, “Colin Powell is going to look Bashar aside in the eye and say, look, you know. You better clean up your act here. It’s a new day in the Middle East. And I think it’s entirely appropriate to do that.”

He also went on to say “I think it’s very appropriate that Colin Powell is going to Syria. I think we should put diplomatic and other pressures on them” even though he conceded that Syria was “sponsoring and harboring terrorists.”

Sidenote: Of course, none of this really serves to illuminate our foreign policy debate, and I do feel kinda guilty for participating in some of this gotcha criticism, but hopefully we can appreciate the fact that this is complicated stuff and that name calling only impoverishes our understanding of America’s place in the world.

By the same token, I doubt that once this dust up is over we will have no real debate as to whether or not U.S. has over invested itself in Israel and the associated cost of doing so. The same can be said about what the best containment strategy is with respect to Iran or how to improve our relationship with the Muslim world, and what intelligence reforms are needed to prevent future attacks.

I guess election season tends not to breed sober thinking.

Update: Watch Senator Obama’s response to President Bush’s and McCain’s attacks.

I especially like the fact that Obama tried to contextualize his criticism of President Bush’s counterproductive policies in the Middle East while at the same time putting the onus back on McCain to distance himself from Dubya.

John McCain Pounces on the So-Called Bill Ayers Controversy

While on George Stephanopoulus’s This Week show today McCain said the relationship between former Weatherman Underground member Bill Ayers and Senator Obama remains an

open to question…. Because if you’re going to associate and have as a friend and serve on a board and have a guy kick off your campaign that says he’s unrepentant, that he wished [he] bombed more — and then, the worst thing of all, that, I think, really indicates Senator Obama’s attitude, is he had the incredible statement that he compared Mr. Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist, with Senator Tom Coburn, Senator Coburn, a physician who goes to Oklahoma on the weekends and brings babies into life — comparing those two — I mean, that’s not — that’s an attitude, frankly, that certainly isn’t in keeping with the overall attitude.

George Packer of the New Yorker sees things a little differently.

I argued a lot with Bill. And yet, even though I disliked his current politics and felt that he should somehow have paid a steeper price for his terrible past, it was impossible not to like him. He approached everyone in a spirit of good will, as if nothing could be sillier than unfriendliness over a political disagreement. I could sort of imagine him planting a bomb, but it was impossible to imagine him shouting someone down. In a conversation about a new postscript to the paperback edition of “Fugitive Days,” I tried to provoke him by saying that he had an obligation to answer the question of why his use of violence didn’t put him in Osama bin Laden’s camp. He thanked me sincerely for the suggestion (but didn’t follow it). There was something winning about his sweetness, and also a little disturbing.

Now George Stephanopoulos, Hillary Clinton, and a legion of Republican strategists are tying Bill to Obama because they sat on the board of a foundation together. What if they did? And what if they’re friendly neighbors in Hyde Park? Bill and Bernardine are also friends with an old friend of mine who has a sterling reputation as a juvenile-court judge. Does that prove anything, other than that they’ve had successful careers in education and law, respectively? This latest media flap is an absurd and opportunistic piece of guilt by association. Unlike Obama’s membership for many years in the church of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or his comments last week in San Francisco, it raises no questions about his beliefs, only about our trivial political culture.

It deserves to die a swift and ignominious death.

Read George Packer’s entire post here.

McCain Opts for Tolerance

Senator John McCain’s repudiation of right wing talk show host Bill Cunningham’s comments about Obama is an encouraging sign that the general election would be cleaner than either the GOP or Democratic primary. Cunningham repeated Obama’s middle name which is Hussein presumably to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment. Many have praised the Arizona Senator, and rightfully so, for taking a fairly principled and unpopular position among conservatives in saying, “Whatever suggestion that was made that was any way disparaging to the integrity, character, honesty of either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton was wrong.“

But there’s possibly another reason for McCain to advocate for greater tolerance. According to the Politico, focus groups and polling done by Republican officials indicate there could be a huge backlash directed at the Republican nominee for unfairly attacking either a woman or a black man.

GOP officials are certain their words will be scrutinized ever more aggressively. They anticipate a regular media barrage of accusations of intolerance – or much worse.

They seem most concerned about Obama right now.

Of course there are those within the GOP establishment who think being too sensitive will endanger McCains chances. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican strategist told the Politico:

If we approach this campaign from the standpoint that we need to take political sensitivity training because one candidate is a woman or one candidate is black, I think we are approaching it from the wrong standpoint because that already handcuffs us…If McCain is afraid, or shies away from taking on Obama because that’s what they worry about, then they’ve lost the battle to begin with.

We’ll see how long the current consensus will last.

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Linking National Security to the Economy

When all voters are asked to look ahead to the general election, Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee, is seen as better prepared for the presidency, better able to handle an international crisis and more equipped to serve as commander in chief than either of the Democratic candidates.
NYT, “Polls show Obama Is Seen as More Likely to Beat McCain,” 2/26/08

In a funny and thoughtful post on Talking Points Memo, a reader-blogger argued that Democrats need to reframe the national security debate to be more about the economy and less about military affairs, particularly if they want to beat the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in November.

John McCain, born on a Naval Base, has often favored military action over diplomacy. Like it’s the only effective instrument handy.

It’s like they say. If all you have is a hammer, every solution looks like a nail.

Missing from the national security conversation is the economy. George Bush was [sic] recently suggested that essentially, the two have nothing to do with each other. He might be the only one who thinks that.

Today, economic power, in the long run anyway, trumps military power. And we’ve overstretched both. Foreign debt has never been greater. We’re living off China’s credit card. In fact, we’re their biggest customer. Saudi Arabia owns more of American interests than this administration would care to admit.

The blogger makes an excellent point in stating that “Today, economic power, in the long run anyway, trumps military power.” With Obama emerging as the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee he may need to adopt such a message. As of late, Obama has sought to court orphan Edwards supporters with his softer brand of populism, but has yet to emphasize the international dimension of economy growth, save his criticism of the off-shoring of American jobs.

But in his Foreign Affairs essay he does seem to hint at how climate change may in fact be the cross cutting issue that will drive much of his foreign and economic policy thinking. In the piece, and on the stump, he refers to how the threat of climate change can become a source of global and regional instability.

Warmer temperatures and declining rainfall will reduce crop yields, increasing conflict, famine, disease, and poverty. By 2050, famine could displace more than 250 million people worldwide. That means increased instability in some of the most volatile parts of the world.

In the same essay he also highlights how climate change may present new economic opportunities too.

I will invest in efficient and clean technologies at home while using our assistance policies and export promotions to help developing countries leapfrog the carbon-energy-intensive stage of development….By 2050, global demand for low-carbon energy could create an annual market worth $500 billion. Meeting that demand would open new frontiers for American entrepreneurs and workers.

Of course, this is nothing new. Al Gore has been a proponent of this approach long before his 2000 presidential campaign, and so was John Kerry in 2004. But the difference now is that both the message and the messenger can get a fair hearing.

To be sure, neutralizing Sen. John McCain’s stature of being the security candidate will require more than a few robust policy speeches on going green. But if done well Obama could change the complexion of the foreign policy debate to shift away from war on terror and Iraq to a more cross cutting issue with a different kind of urgency. According to the economic plan on his website he will:

“… also enact bold new energy efficiency goals for buildings and appliances, which will both reduce middle class American’s monthly electricity bills and help jumpstart the construction and manufacturing industries. Additionally, the Obama plan will provide tax credits for locally-owned biofuel refineries – which have already started to strengthen the economic vitality of rural America.

Senator McCain, of course, is not your average Republican climate change skeptic either. After all, he not only endorsed a cap and trade regime, but even went so far as to characterize it as “capitalistic and free-enterprise oriented.” He also co-sponsored a Senate bill in 2003 calling for reductions in greenhouse emissions.

But politically McCain might be toned deaf to the current concerns of most voters. On January 27th, he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press:

SEN. McCAIN: But also, I believe that most Republicans’ first priority is the threat of radical Islamic extremism. Now, I know the concerns about the economy…

MR. RUSSERT: More than the economy?

SEN. McCAIN: More than the economy at the end of the day. We’ll get through this economy. We’re going to restore our economy, and many of the measures we’re taking right now–although it’s very difficult now. This transcendent challenge of radical Islamic extremism will be with us for the 21st century.

Obviously, the first priority of the President is to protect the American people from threats both foreign and domestic, but that’s not the only thing he does. Nor should that responsibility be carried out to the exclusion of all others.

Generating economic growth and protecting American jobs should also be considered a top priority because frankly the economy will not rebound by itself in a way that will fairly distribute wealth. Simply saying “we’ll get through this economy” does not exactly inspire a great deal of confidence on those who actually fear losing their health insurance or loss their jobs to overseas competition more than they do a senseless act of terror. This is not to minimize certain national security threats, as much as it is acknowledging that the voting public may be alarmed about staying in Iraq for 100 years, despite the fact that the war costs American taxpayers $2.4 billion a week.

So to the extent that national security concerns become an election issue, Obama should reframe the debate to be more about energy security so he can sell energy independence and going green as a security as well as an economic imperative.

If it is indeed Obama and McCain that face off this fall, it there will be a vivid contrasts on many issues, ranging from taxation to the war in Iraq to health care. But I predict the outcome of the election will largely revolve around who has the better policy imagination and vision, not just experience or mere inspiration.