Debate

Question 1: Edge McCain. Obama recites stump speech talking points. McCain answers with concrete plan. Haven't heard him talking about buying mortgages up before.

Question 2: McCain seems on his game. Warren Buffet as SecTres: fat chance, but nice bipartisan pander. Meg Whitman -- women's vote. Obama's answer -- stump speech. He's looking like the attacker -- why? McCain is suckering him some by being the nice guy, Obama not adjusting. Tiny edge McCain.

Question 3: McCain: "Obama's cronies and friends." Not good. Al GSE's fault (where's regulation? Thought he was all about regulation?). Out and out allegations of corruption from Dems. So much for bipartisanship. Obama: Explaining things well. "I have to correct Senator McCain (not surprisingly)". Big edge Obama. (Stupid C-span feed breaking up, can't hear everything).

Question 4: Obama hits history. Is he starting to sound too attacky? A little bit to my ears, at least. Back to stump speech. Doesn't answer question all that well. Opening for McCain. McCain not annoying like Palin is -- none of that "maverick" bullshit. McCain on attack now. He's doing well. He's flipping on drilling. If he knows how to fix economy, why hasn't he done it in 30-odd years in Congress? McCain now promising everything to everyone. 700 billion in hands of terrorist organizations?? WTF? Obama: stump speech. He's clearly running out the clock. Probably not a bad plan at this point, but boring. C-span breaking up again. Is he calling for line item veto? Back on the attack. They both seem a like they're squabbling.

Question 5: (Good question). McCain empathetic. I've done this and that. Earmarks again. Not answering question. Spending freeze except for military -- nonsense. Obama: Stump speech. He's hitting his stride. McCain promising everything to everyone again.

Question 6: C=span entirely cut out for 15 minutes



McCain sounds better, more reasonable. You can see why the press people like him -- he's charming when it suits his purposes. Obama sounding too animated.

Pandering to Israel blah blah blah. Obama does better job of ducking the question. McCain winning, but both men look good, better than the VP candidates. Final question used by Obama to go over his biography and more stump speech. McCain answers question, plus goes over his biography.

McCain impressive, Obama not so much. If the polls say Obama wins, it's halo effect from the economy. No way he won this thing, unless McCain spoke in tongues during Cspan outage.*

Michelle Obama looking hot in red dress. She's going to make a helluva First Lady.

*Polls say Obama won. Big. Something going on here I don't get.

Placebo II

Things are loosening up. Started yesterday, despite the Dow collapse, but really seeing movement today. It's still early, but my sense is the worst is over. I don't know if it's the bailout, or people are just tired of living in fear. Rather hope it's the first, as the fear can easily come back once people catch their mental breaths, as it were. Once they've decided the bailout is working, even though it hasn't been implemented yet, there's little chance of going back.

A hop, skip, and a jump.

OK, a hop.

From This:

CLEARWATER, Fla. -- "Okay, so Florida, you know that you're going to have to hang onto your hats," Sarah Palin told a rally of a few thousand here this morning, "because from now until Election Day it may get kind of rough."

You betcha. And the person dishing out the roughest stuff at the moment is Sarah Palin.

"I was reading my copy of the New York Times the other day," she said.

"Booooo!" replied the crowd.

"I knew you guys would react that way, okay," she continued. "So I was reading the New York Times and I was really interested to read about Barack's friends from Chicago."

It was time to revive the allegation, made over the weekend, that Obama "pals around" with terrorists, in this case Bill Ayers, late of the Weather Underground. Many independent observers say Palin's allegations are a stretch; Obama served on a Chicago charitable board with Ayers, now an education professor, and has condemned his past activities.

"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.

"Boooo!" said the crowd.

"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.

"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

Palin went on to say that "Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room, and they've worked together on various projects in Chicago." Here, Palin began to connect the dots. "These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes -- remember that's what Joe Biden had said. "And" -- she paused and sighed -- "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America, as the greatest force for good in the world. I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as 'imperfect enough' to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country."

"Boooo!" said the audience.

To this:



A nationalistic movement marked by distinct feelings of persecution and an extreme, "us against them" mentality? Check. Always on the lookout for a scapegoat? Check (they've so far blamed blacks and Hispanics for the economic crisis, for example, but there's always someone, from the generic "elites" to the "feminazis" to the NYT, which Palin dredges up here). Mindless leader worship? Check (They've even found their leader, Palin, for now, although they'll find another if she won't do). We are also heading into an economic slump; such periods are ripe for demagoguery, and these people were easily demagogued even when the economy was the strongest in history.

Will things work out that way? I don't know. I'll even venture out on a limb and say the odds are against it. But I also don't know how anyone could look at this and not be concerned. It isn't about the election, isn't about McCain or even Palin, who are just cynical opportunists trying to ride a wave. It's about the attitude of a small but growing chunk of the American population.

Obama's ads finally getting better

And he isn't ducking and cringing. He's running a competent campaign, at last. In the ad he mentions "children's vaccines and mammograms." I wish he'd had this kind of focus all along, but I give him credit for learning and adapting. Not even one month to go....

The simplifying beauty of a supply and demand curve

Krugman did it. The relevant graphs are on slides seven and eight. If Krugman would pull those out, simplify them some, explain them a little bit, then replace the relatively arcane "financial multiplier" with GDP points, a lot fewer people would start out their posts with "I don't know anything about this stuff, but...." I also suspect the number of people who believe this is a manufactured crisis would go down by quite a bit as well. Somehow seeing something in graphic form sinks in for some people in a way that reading it or seeing it in tabular format does not.

You gotta wonder

How long can rural white people keep voting Republican? After reading his Wikipedia entry, it looks like Stanley is one of those oldschool, Roosevelt-Truman Democrats, but there should be lots more of them, especially after the past eight years.

(h/t Kathy G. The music clips she posted were also good, despite my own musical tastes leaning -- just a tad -- closer to Otis Redding than The Oak Ridge Boys.)

The pivot begins

Krauthammer:

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self- definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

It's got nothing to do with the economy, or the Iraq War, it's all about Obama and McCain's failed Hail Mary passes. The Bush policy decisions -- and their outcomes -- that forced McCain into those desperation moves aren't discussed, and won't be by Krauthammer or anyone like him, because they supported those policies, and a discussion of those policies' merits can only reach one conclusion. So we get McCain's bad campaigning (would he be any further behind if he hadn't "suspended" his campaign?), and a compliment of Obama's temperament and intelligence -- anything but policy. And as the good ship Straighttalk sinks under the waves, we'll get more stuff like this, until the right starts their counterattack, when Obama's "temperament and intelligence" will almost certainly be found wanting. The sad thing is that many on the motivated left will agree with this sort of thing, and come to believe that they won this year, not because they support better, more deserving policies than the Republicans, but because Obama is such a wonderful candidate. Dems should be smarter than that, smarter than the Republicans were when they turned the past eight years into a Bush fetish party. It didn't work for them, and it won't work for the Dems. Obama will win because the Republicans did an awful job of governing; if the Dems want to keep on winning they will do a good job of governing. That means keeping their policies -- which most Americans agree with -- at the center of the discussion at all times, not Barack Obama.

...

If someone has "first rate temperament and intelligence," doesn't it make sense that they would make good decisions regarding policy and so on? I mean, what else is there? Temperament, intelligence, and experience are the underpinnings of judgment, and if Obama has the first two, and is rapidly acquiring the third, he would seem to be pretty much ideal, wouldn't he? But when the time comes Krauthammer will have no problem at all pivoting again.