First of all, one thing that seems certain is that this alignment will result in Chuck Schumer running unopposed for re-election. Paterson and the new Senator, as well as the newly elected State Senators who have given the Democrats a majority in the State Senate, will all be juicy but expensive targets to take on in a state that tilts heavily Democratic; the NY GOP can only spare so many resources, and even in a good year for Republicans (as 2010 is likely to be), and Schumer is nearly bulletproof unless he goes the way of Spitzer.

Second, I don't think Bill Clinton will be interested in the job. Hillary, frankly, is apparently jumping at being Secretary of State to escape the dull anonymity of the Senate (bear in mind that Democratic Senators lacking seniority and committee chairmanships will now be expected to fall quietly in line with the Obama agenda no less than his Cabinet members) for the world stage and never have to campaign in Rochester and Buffalo again. I don't see Bill wanting to become a freshman legislator.

Third, while David Paterson is a protege of Charlie Rangel, Rangel's powerful position as Ways and Means Chairman means he won't be much interested in a "promotion" to the Senate. Likewise, Louise Slaughter would have been the logical choice among upstate Congresspersons, but Slaughter is 79 and chair of the House Rules Committee; like Rangel, she's too powerful and too old to leave her House slot and start over.

So who does that leave? There would appear to be five logical contenders.

(1) Andrew Cuomo is the logical favorite, for reasons of naked self-interest (Paterson fears, justifiably, that the State Attorney General and former HUD Secretary may challenge him for the nomination for his dad's old job). Cuomo has no particular regional base in the state - his father was from Queens, but Andrew has spent years in Albany and Washington - but has statewide name recognition and has won statewide election. Brian Faughnan suggests that the camera-hungry Schumer may be opposed to Paterson picking the high-profile Cuomo. Of course, Cuomo's tenure at HUD will sooner or later lead to tough questions about his role at the creation of the housing crisis. A Cuomo appointment would also set off a second round of musical chairs, as the AG job is a powerful one with many open investigations.

(2) Kirsten Gillibrand - I agree with ironman at Next Right that Gillibrand is a strong contender. Paterson is a black urban liberal from Harlem (if that's not redundant); to win statewide, he needs to draw support from upstate and reach out to white and/or Latino voters. Tabbing Gillibrand has the hallmarks of the classic ticket-balancer: she's relatively young (42), telegenic, Catholic, a mother of two young children and represents a traditionally Republican district she won in 2006 from the excessively hard-partying John Sweeney. Gillibrand might want to get out of Dodge - her district is sooner or later going to give her a tough re-election battle (in 2008, Gillibrand and her self-funding opponent combined to raise more money than the combatants in any other Congressional district in the country), and as Clyde Haberman notes, New York is likely to lose Congressional seats by 2012, so Democrats in marginal upstate districts will be scrambling to hold on.

The downside? Egos (of which New York politics has a perennial surplus) would be bruised if Gillibrand leapfrogs over more veteran lawmakers, including her old boss Cuomo (who she worked for at HUD). Democrats could well lose her House seat. And liberals may not be happy with picking a member of the Blue Dog caucus who has a 100% rating from the NRA, opposed Eliot Spitzer's plan to give drivers' licenses to illegal aliens, is a sponsor of the SAVE Act and of employer verification of legal status of workers and, supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. (I'd expect her to drift leftward in the Senate, but if you're a Democrat looking to install someone in a safe seat, you might want someone more reliable).

(3) Nydia Velazquez - Another NY City arch-liberal (she voted to investigate President Bush for impeachment proceedings over the Iraq War), Congresswoman Velazquez - the chair of the Hispanic Caucus and the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress - would cement Paterson's ties with Latino voters. There's speculation that she may prefer running the Hispanic Caucus, which makes little enough sense to me, and I'm not sure how well she would play in a statewide election. Wikipedia notes that "During her [1992] campaign for the House seat, her medical records, including documented clinical depression and an attempted suicide [in 1991], were leaked to the press. She quickly held a press conference and said that she had been undergoing counseling for years and was emotionally and psychologically healthy." (This 1992 NYT report discusses the suicide attempt.)

(4) Byron Brown, the Mayor of Buffalo and a former State Senator. Brown is African-American, a mixed blessing for Paterson if he's looking to expand his appeal across racial/ethnic lines, but he's also the mayor of a key upstate city. Brown's record as an executive means he's less immediately identifiable along hot-button voting lines.

(5) Brian Higgins, a Congressman also from Buffalo, first elected in 2004. Higgins claims to be a New Democrat but is a much more conventional liberal than Gillibrand.

As for the GOP side, it remains to be seen. Mayor Bloomberg, now an Independent, has twisted many arms in the City Council to remove term limits so he can run for a third term in 2009; I assume that means he's staying put in 2010. Rudy Giuliani probably couldn't win a statewide election for the Senate at this point, but would be a very strong candidate for Governor if he was more motivated than during his disappointing presidential campaign; if the voters are unhappy with Albany, well, lots of politicians run on "change" but no living political figure has a record of bringing about as dramatic change as Giuliani did as Mayor of New York. Combative, maverick Long Island Congressman Peter King has talked about running for the Governorship as well, but King would probably be the GOP's strongest candidate for the Senate seat, depending who Paterson picks.

It's going to be an interesting two years here in the Empire State.

Washington National Cathedral also transcends politics and even the separation of religions. Though nominally an Episcopal church, it welcomes everyone. It is at once deeply Christian and deeply interfaith. The Episcopal Church has a long history of inclusiveness. The first black bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, John Walker, presided there. Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first female presiding bishop in the Episcopal Church, was inducted there. And Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson of the Diocese of New Hampshire was the first openly gay bishop in Christendom. "We are a place that welcomes people of all faiths and no faith," says Lloyd, echoing Barack Obama's words of two years ago. "Whatever we once were," Obama said then, "we're no longer just a Christian nation. At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation and a Buddhist nation and a Hindu nation and a nation of nonbelievers."

***

The cathedral sponsors programs on interfaith dialogue with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Bahais and people of other faiths. Former president Mohammad Khatami of Iran attended a Christian-Muslim-Judaic conference there in 2006. Twice a year, there is an Abrahamic roundtable with Bishop John Chane, Rabbi Bruce Lustig and professor Akbar Ahmed of American University's School of International Service. Last spring, a "Lighting to Unite" event concluded the centennial. The theme: "One Spirit among many nations." With a background of sound and lights, the festival drew believers and nonbelievers from all over the country. "We wanted them to experience their humanity," says Lloyd, "to have the sense that they shared a common life with each other."

I am drawn to the cathedral over all of the other sacred spaces in Washington because it is the most pluralistic of the places of worship I've been to.

On Nov. 12, Deepak Chopra, a Hindu, spoke there to a packed house. Asked about Obama in the question-and-answer session afterward, he said that the president-elect "has transcended religious identity. Just imagine when he puts his hand on the Bible to be sworn in and says, 'I, Barack Hussein Obama' . . . How wonderful!"

It would indeed be wonderful for the country to have a president who worshiped at a place most likely to welcome all Americans and all people of the world alike.

Now, peaceful civil relations between people of all faiths, or no faiths, is a good thing. Governmental recognition that we are a nation of people of all faiths, or no faiths, is a good thing. But this is pretty much the worst possible way to choose a church, the purpose of which is precisely the promotion of a single faith in the belief that it is the true path to God. You don't feed the body by browsing the supermarket; you pick food and eat it. You don't house the body by roaming the neighborhood; you pick a home to sleep in at night. Quinn's recommendation that the Obamas settle for spiritual homelessness is bad for their souls and, ultimately, bad for the nation if we are to be led by a lost soul. And it's even bad politics; a city as overwhelmingly African-American as Washington would be deeply offended if the nation's first black president chose, for reasons other than denominational compulsion, to turn up his nose at the District's many black churches. Quinn is, whether she realizes it or not, patronizing Obama by assuming that he has no particular faith, an attitude common to liberal opinions about Obama's faith. (It's likewise similar to the media's bafflement, in dealing with Sarah Palin, at the idea that she would pray for divine guidance in considering whether to run for president in 2012.

Meanwhile, the Obamas have already made a significant life-in-Washington decision by choosing to send their daughters to Sidwell Friends, one of the capital's most exclusive private schools, rather than sending them to one of the city's crummy (and largely black) public schools. I won't criticize this decision; it's undoubtedly the best educational option for the girls, and the Obamas' entry into politics doesn't forfeit their children's right to the best education their parents can afford to give them. But it would be nice if President Obama uses his influence to give the parents of other DC children more choices in getting their children into better schools. As I've said before, being a hypocrite may be bad, but making bad public policy is worse. If a little fear of the hypocrisy charge gives Obama pause in thinking about whether other DC families should have more educational choices, then his decision about where to educate his daughters will pay benefits for more than just the new First Family.

"You have reached the position of president, and a heavy legacy of failure and crimes awaits you. A failure in Iraq to which you have admitted, and a failure in Afghanistan to which the commanders of your army have admitted," the message [from Zawahiri] said.

On the subject of Iraq, the message said that while "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."

He really should stop doing that. (UPDATE: Here, too).

If you are wondering, November 2 was the last time the Daily News didn't have Obama's picture on the front page.

Howard Kurtz has more on the media gold rush of fawning Obama commemoratives.

Sources here, here and here, from the master GPO budget-history site here. House/Senate historical partisan breakdowns here and here.

The budget data is explained here, including this note on fiscal years:

The Federal fiscal year begins on October 1 and ends on the subsequent September 30. It is designated by the year in which it ends; for example, fiscal year 2007 began on October 1, 2006, and ended on September 30, 2007. Prior to fiscal year 1977 the Federal fiscal years began on July 1 and ended on June 30. In calendar year 1976 the July-September period was a separate accounting period (known as the transition quarter or TQ) to bridge the period required to shift to the new fiscal year.

I use 1947 as a starting point, as it's the first year after full demobilization from World War II; the war budgets were colossal - in Fiscal Year 1943, the deficit was over 30% of GDP. And before the New Deal, federal spending was generally less than 10% of GDP.

You can see this in the bold passages in what I quoted: you have some people saying fiscal conservatism is about low taxes, but then you have Chafee voting for higher taxes and opposing tax cuts proposed and passed by a Republican President and Congress, also on the theory of being "fiscally conservative." These people can't agree what they stand for.

The problem is that too many people have gotten locked into two notions peddled by the Democrats and their media allies: that balancing the budget is the be-all and end-all of "fiscal conservatism," and that spending cuts are impossible, so the only way to ever balance the budget is to raise taxes - and then, when spending keeps rising, raise them again. The WaPo, typically, simply assumes these premises.

No wonder voters who want lower taxes abandoned these people. And maybe if they'd made a concerted effort to beat back overspending, they'd have been listened to. It is a fair criticism of Bush and the GOP Congress that they failed to restrain federal spending, and even added a new and hugely costly entitlement by adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare. But where were the Northeastern "fiscal conservatives" when the spending battles were going unfought? Where were they when the GOP nominated a genuine spending hawk for President in John McCain and he couldn't even win New Hampshire? In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that the best spending records in the GOP come from people like Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint who are also rock-ribbed social conservatives. Even in the Northeast, the guy who's fought the toughest spending battles is Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri, a solid social conservative. (Cato, for example, gives Carcieri the best fiscal report card of any Republican Governor in the Northeast). The social liberals in the party, with precious few exceptions, haven't held up their end of the deal.

Consider two candidates. Candidate A promises that he'll spend 15 cents for every dollar you make, and tax you 12; he'll make up the difference by issuing Treasury bills. Candidate B promises you a balanced budget...he'll spend 22 cents of every dollar and tax you 22. If your interest is in smaller government and lower taxes, how can you favor Candidate B? How can you call Candidate B the "fiscal conservative" if you intend that term to have any meaning whatsoever?

I suppose if you play with the numbers long enough you can argue that excessive federal deficit financing leads to runaway growth in interest expenditures, but in the real world the federal government has the world's lowest borrowing rate and has rarely been close to as heavily leveraged (in terms of debt service as a percentage of annual expenditures) as the kinds of corporations that get themselves in serious trouble with too much debt. Some debt is healthy. And even if you are concerned about deficits, the cure is certainly not to let spending run free and just keep jacking up taxes; it's to bring spending in line with tax revenues. That's what living within your means is really about.

The key to winning back voters disenchanted with the GOP as a steward of taxpayer funds is spending and the size of government; show we can cut those, and broader support will follow. I don't agree with all of P.J. O'Rourke's diagnoses but he's surely right that the GOP lost credibility by failing to deliver tangible progress in shrinking the federal footprint. The opportunity for the GOP's revival will come from the fact that the whole federal government is now in the hands of people who intend to expand that footprint like there's no tomorrow. Sarah Palin gets this, as several Republican Governors do, but of course, she and other GOP Governors who grasp the theory now have to go back and prove they can pare back their own state budgets in tough economic times. Because at the end of the day, holding the line on spending is the real test of fiscal conservatism.

There's a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," Zelman says. "But the problem wasn't just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren't real buyers. They were speculators."

+++

The juiciest shorts - the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default - had several characteristics. They'd be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. "The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM," says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he'd hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. "She was this lovely woman from Jamaica," he says. "One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, 'How did that happen?'" It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. "By the time they were done," Eisman says, "they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn't make any of the payments."

I. It Takes Two Sides To Have A War

A. The False Narrative

At its core, Beinart's thesis is grounded in one of the familiar tropes of passive-aggressive liberal pundits: the idea that the "culture war" - political battles over cultural and social issues ranging from abortion to crime to immigration to racial preferences to same-sex marriage to guns to the role of religion in the public square - consists entirely of conservatives picking fights against liberals who just want us all to get along. In this narrative, two things are true: (1) that liberal positions on, say, economic issues are popular but liberal candidates keep losing elections over cultural issues that shouldn't matter in elections; and (2) that conservative positions on cultural issues are outside the mainstream and doomed by their unpopularity. Of course, it's logically impossible for both of these things to be true (unless liberals win all the time, and it will take more than two bad election cycles to prove that), but that's not really my point.

The point is this: we have political conflict over social and cultural issues because we have two sides that disagree on a broad range of issues, and neither is willing to change its position. If these issues were actually unimportant or indefensible, the side that was losing elections on them would throw in the towel and adapt its positions, as for example happened with the end of the political battles over segregation and Prohibition. And if cultural liberals disdained conflict, they would never start battles on these issues - yet they do so all the time. Indeed, abortion wasn't an issue in national politics until Roe v. Wade; the NRA wasn't a force in politics until liberal politicians pushed increasingly intrusive gun-control measures.

Pundits like Beinart like to frame these issues as a "war" promulgated by only one side because they can pander to the sensibilities of voters who think it's rude to fight about these issues. It's a political strategy designed to seize the moral middle ground. But Beinart and his ilk can't possibly be so insular as to believe that any of this this is true. Let's do a little thought experiment to show the unreality of this entire theme.

B. Imagine There's No Culture War. It Isn't Hard To Do.

Let's imagine that Beinart was right. Let's imagine that social and cultural conflict are political losers. Let's imagine that the wise Democrats who were just swept into power last week have no intention of using government power to alter the social and cultural landscape. Consider what things would be true if that were the case:

(1) Not only would Barack Obama make Supreme Court and other federal judicial nominations entirely without regard to how his nominees might handle hot-button issues like abortion, but Obama would face no significant pressure from interest groups on the Left to choose nominees who would uphold Roe v. Wade, roll back restrictions on racial preferences, etc. These issues simply would not come up at confirmation hearings. In fact, we know that the Democrats raised such hot-button issues in the confirmation hearings of numerous nominees for the Supreme Court and lower federal courts (probably the single Democrat who pressed these issues most frequently was Joe Biden), we know that Democratic candidates were quizzed on the issue throughout the primaries by liberal interest groups, and we know that there is absolutely zero chance that Obama would nominate a Supreme Court Justice who he suspected of being less than 100% committed to upholding Roe.

(2) The Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress would not seek to push change on social and cultural issues through new legislation and executive orders. Yet there is extensive evidence that they will do just that. Obama promised in 2007 that "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do" - and FOCA is all about abortion, sweeping and comprehensive new federal legislation to repeal the ban on partial birth abortion, preempt every single state law placing even modest limitations around abortion - "effectively nullify informed consent laws, waiting periods, health safety regulations for abortion clinics, etc." and remove legal protections for doctors and hospitals who refuse as a matter of conscience to perform abortions. Obama's people are talking about rolling out a battery of new executive orders that will go into effect immediately, including on stem cell research and federal funding for abortion providers overseas. (In fact, Obama has said in the past that he opposes the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of taxpayer money to subsidize abortions in the U.S.). The wish-list of "progressive" actions on social issues is likely to get a lot longer in the weeks to come, and every time you see an Obama Administration or Democratic Congress pushing new laws or new regulations or executive orders on these topics, ask yourself if the Democrats really aren't interested in a battle over the culture.

(3) Democrats would not run campaign commercials seeking to gain political advantage on social and cultural issues. Yet where they believed that they could gain advantages by doing so, they did. Obama was so eager to run ads attacking the GOP for its unpopular opposition to embryonic stem cell research (a big electoral winner for the Democrats in 2006) and attacking Republican opponents of immigration that he cut radio ads claiming that John McCain opposed stem cell research and was anti-illegal immigration *, in both cases the polar opposite of McCain's actual position. Obama ran, in some jurisdictions, ads about abortion, as did many Democrats nationwide (even in a State Senate race in my part of Queens).

(4) Speaking of Sarah Palin, Democrats would not have attacked her on cultural grounds. As Ramesh Ponnuru noted in response to Beinart:

[T]hat bit about Palin's brand is, I think, incorrect. It's not culture-war crusading that made Palin the most popular governor in America. And while it's clear that her being pro-life was a prerequisite for her getting on the ticket this year, I doubt McCain put her on it in order to fight the culture wars: He probably saw her pluses as 1) she's a fresh female face, 2) she's a popular governor, 3) she has a record of fighting corruption, including Republican corruption, and 4) she's acceptable to the party base. The resulting ticket has not done much to elevate the issues of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Palin became a culture-war flashpoint, first, because of the reaction to her by liberals and the counter-reaction by conservatives and, second, because of her adoption of the traditional attack-dog (with lipstick!) role of a vice-presidential candidate.

If you don't believe Ramesh, go back and read Palin's convention speech or her speech when McCain introduced her as his running mate and compare the amount of time she spent talking about hot-button social issues as opposed to economic issues, government reform and national security. It was Obama's supporters who pushed attacks on Palin over things like book-banning, the teaching of evolution, sex education and rape kits, none of which were things Palin set out to talk about in this race.

I'm not suggesting that Palin never engaged in cultural wedge politics, just underlining the fact that an awful lot of the social and cultural wedges driven over Palin came from her opponents, which would not have happened if the culture wars were over as Beinart imagines.

(5) The Democrats would not have picked a culture warrior of the Left as their nominee. Obama is the furthest thing possible from the kind of anodyne, Mark Warner-ish technorat who is concerned only with economic issues and the functioning of government programs. Look back at Barack Obama's career, from the State Senate up through the Democratic primaries, and you'll see that this is a guy who put a disproportionate amount of his time and energy into issues like abortion, sex education, racial profiling, gun control, the death penalty, drivers' licenses for illegal aliens, racial preferences, and race-specific redistricting. His long affiliation with the divisive Jeremiah Wright was, plainly, an effort to play to the cultural sensibilities of his State Senate constituents. The millions of dollars he poured through Bill Ayers into things like "Afrocentric" public education in Chicago was certainly all about cultural politics. (This is aside from the extent to which Obama's "historic" campaign marketed Obama as one big walking racial-politics issue). As noted above, Obama picked as his running mate a guy best known to the country from the Bork, Thomas, Roberts and Alito hearings, and Obama himself voted against Roberts and Alito on strictly ideological grounds. The Democratic Congressional leadership is studded with culture warriors - there are many more Nancy Pelosis there than Harry Reids.

(6) The Left wouldn't have an active infrastructure for pushing its side on social issues in election campaigns. Yet we have, for example, TIME Magazine reporting with a straight face on the existence of a "Gay Mafia" (their term, not mine) pouring money into races over gay issues - "Among gay activists, the Cabinet is revered as a kind of secret gay Super Friends, a homosexual justice league that can quietly swoop in wherever anti-gay candidates are threatening and finance victories for the good guys." (I swear, these are actual quotes from the article). We have Emily's List, "dedicated to building a progressive America by electing pro-choice Democratic women to office." Heck, in North Carolina the Democratic Senate candidate accepted the endorsement of "Godless America PAC."

(7) The Left would accept its losses and move on. Instead, we have fierce battles to take to the courts whatever the cultural Left loses at the ballot box, most recently the lawsuits filed to enjoin Proposition 8, the same-sex marriage ban. A lengthy and concerted campaign also knocked the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, an anti-racial-preferences proposal, off the ballot.

There is simply no way to look at the Democratic Party as presently constituted, and the interest and pressure groups that support it, and argue with a straight face that they are disinterested in fighting a culture war. They have their positions, they'll fight to win, and they make political hay when they can. It's insulting to our intelligence to claim otherwise.

II. Is Beinart's Side Winning?

The alternative reading of Beinart's argument, which he's not quite willing to come right out and say, is that yes, his side is waging a culture war - and winning. Obviously in the aftermath of a decisive election victory by a candidate like Obama, with increasing margins for the Democratic majorities in Congress and in a number of state legislatures, that's a tempting claim to make. But I'd suggest that there are some cautions before the cultural Left engages in triumphalism here.

The first is the referenda - even if Republicans were quite unpopular on this Election Day, socially conservative positions did a lot better in referenda. Besides Proposition 8 passing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in gay-friendly deep-blue California, you had similar ballot initiatives pass in Arizona and Florida. A ban on racial preferences passed in Nebraska and a similar measure lost only narrowly in Colorado. (Pro-life initiatives did less well in some places like South Dakota where they were poorly funded). These are not the results you would expect from a nation that has suddenly taken an abrupt left turn.

Second, while the Democrats are still intent on fighting a culture war, their behavior over the past 3-4 years suggests that they nonetheless recognize that there are serious downsides to them doing so. Even with the nomination of Obama, the national party has run away as fast as it can from its previously aggressive agenda on gun control, which is just as bad politics for the Democrats in most districts as stem cells is for most Republicans. Obama did try to avoid talking much about a bunch of the wedge issues he'd used throughout his career. And at the Congressional level, we've seen a lot of putatively pro-life, pro-gun, and even anti-illegal-immigrant Democratic candidates, a nuber of whom have been elected. Only time will tell if these rank-and-file Democrats will have any impact in muting the culture-warrior inclinations of the party's base and leadership, but the fact that they were supported by the party at all suggests that a more conservative stance on many social issues is still necessary to get elected in many parts of this country.

Third, Beinart's own analysis suggests that we shouldn't read too much into 2008:

In 2000, in the wake of an economic boom and a sex scandal that led to a president's impeachment, 22 percent of Americans told exit pollsters that "moral values" were their biggest concern, compared with only 19 percent who cited the economy.

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and "issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage" down to only 6 percent.

Most analysts of politics and history would find bizarre Beinart's argument that social and cultural issues are off the table during times of economic stress (tell that to Jerry Falwell, who started the Moral Majority during the pit of the Carter years). But an economic crisis eight weeks before a national election is another matter. So social and cultural issues don't seem to have mattered much in this election - well, neither did national security, yet nobody would seriously argue that national security is no longer an issue in American politics. It just happened that we had a race unusually dominated by a sudden economic crisis. Democrats who build a long-term strategy on re-creating those conditions will end up disappointed.

Has the political landscape on social and cultural issues moved left? Certainly the Left is now empowered. But ironically, the status quo argument of pundits like Peter Beinart will become completely and openly indefensible if the next few years are characterized by broad-ranging efforts to use the federal government to impose change on the social and cultural landscape; voters who hate hearing about these issues may discover they're not fond of a party that wants to spend its first month in office pushing taxpayer funding for abortion. If the Democrats believed the culture wars were over, they'd leave them be. If they push their agenda and hit stiff resistance from the American people, they may find out that their side of the war isn't as popular as they'd like to believe. And ironically, their doing so may be the ticket back to the top for Republicans who lead the resistance.

Let's start with Meg Stapleton, one of the few people on Palin's staff who wasn't originally a McCain aide:

Stapleton told ABC News the Fox News report on Africa and NAFTA was taken out of context. She explained that during a briefing session, someone asked Palin to explain the McCain-Palin stance on an issue, and as she was responding, "in the middle, she said 'country of Africa' and somebody instantly wrote it down and said, 'Oh, my God, she thinks it's a country.'"

But "she knows it's a continent," Stapleton said. "It was just a human mistake, just like Obama saying 57 states. I don't think anyone ever doubted that Obama knows there are 50 states."

+++

Regarding the $150,000 worth of clothing, Stapleton claimed it was the campaign that said, "This is what you need as a VP candidate, and it was the campaign and/or the RNC [Republican National Committee] -- but it wasn't the governor -- saying this is what she needs."

Stapleton added that a New York stylist was told to go and make Palin look presidential, that Palin was simply presented with her wardrobe and staff and told, "Here's your people, here are your clothes."

The only items Palin remembers requesting from staff are toothpaste and coats for cold weather, Stapleton said.

Palin even saw a price tag of $3,500 on one suit jacket and said she didn't want to wear it, Stapleton said -- but she was told to wear it anyway.

Stapleton claimed there also was a directive to buy any and all clothes before Sept. 4, the day the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., ended, so that it could be buried as part of other convention costs.

*

Then we have McCain foreign policy adviser Steve Biegun:

He says there's no way she didn't know Africa was a continent, and whoever is saying she didn't must be distorting "a fumble of words." He talked to her about all manner of issues relating to Africa, from failed states to the Sudan. She was aware from the beginning of the conflict in Darfur, which is followed closely in evangelical churches, and was aware of Clinton's AIDS initiative. That basically makes it impossible that she thought all of Africa was a country.

On not knowing what countries are in NAFTA, Biegun was part of the conversation that led to that accusation and it convinces him "somebody is acting with a high degree of maliciousness." He was briefing Palin before a Univision interview, and talking to her about trade issues. He rolled through NAFTA, CAFTA, and the Colombia FTA. As he talked, people were coming in and out of the room, handing Palin things, etc. She was distracted from what Biegun was saying, and said, roughly, "Ok, who's in NAFTA, what the deal with CAFTA, what's up the FTA?" - her way, Biegun says, of saying "rack them and stack them," begin again from the start. "Somebody is taking a conversation and twisting it maliciously," he says.

More from Biegun and other more general statements of support on the record from Tracey Schmitt here. You can read Randy Scheunemann's defense here. On NAFTA:

Scheunemann suggested the Africa and NAFTA incidents were inaccurate.

"I was not present for all of her sessions, so I can't disprove that," he told ABC News. "I severely doubt that it is accurate. It's certainly not accurate in any of the sessions I had with her."

More here from Scheunemann and Nicolle Wallace defending Palin on the record ("The only thing I've seen her ask for is a diet soda.").

Steve Schmidt:

Steve Schmidt, the campaign's chief strategist, defended Mrs. Palin in an e-mail exchange with The Times concerning, among other articles, a Newsweek report that at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Mrs. Palin had greeted Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Salter in her hotel room while "wearing nothing but a towel, with another [towel] on her wet hair."

"The towel story categorically is not true," Mr. Schmidt told The Times in the course of telephone and e-mail exchanges over the weekend.

(The Washington Times report has more quotes from people properly noting, in any event, that the informality suggested by that story isn't exactly unusual on the campaign trail).

Charlie Black, on the NAFTA and other specific stories:

"Answer to all of this is no, except she was victim of hoax perpetrated by Canadian talk radio re Sarkozy," Mr. Black said. "Even then, she said nothing wrong in the call. We think she did an excellent job and added a lot to the ticket. 'We' includes John McCain."

And here, of course, is Gov. Palin's own response:

Believe what you want, but in my book when you have multiple named sources standing by specific accounts, and on the other side you have reporters making vague allegations purportedly based on the word of unnamed and unidentifiable sources, the people going on the record and giving specifics have the better argument.

You can watch more of Gov. Palin's most recent press conference back home in Alaska here.

Among those tied to Obama politically, personally, or professionally are:

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.

+++

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors.

+++

Jarrett, a powerful figure in the Chicago development community, agreed to be interviewed but declined to answer questions about Grove Parc, citing what she called a continuing duty to Habitat's former business partners....

Yet again, a reminder that Obama's "new politics" is just a new name for the oldest kind of politics there is.

Most famously, his tome Dead Right proclaimed the intellectual and electoral barrenness of conservatism in general and the GOP in particular, and offered Frum's own prescriptions for the renewals of both. The blurb on the original edition's cover read, "The great conservative revival of the 1980's is over. Government is bigger, taxes are higher, family values are weaker, and the Democrats are in power. What will the Right do next?"

Hilariously, Frum's question was answered a scant two months after the August 1994 publication of Dead Right, when a back-bencher from Georgia led the GOP's takeover of Congress with a majority that lasted for nearly a decade and a half. Along the way they stopped Bill Clinton's wave of tax increases, killed socialized medicine, ended Welfare as a permanent dole, balanced the budget for a couple of years, and later cut taxes under an eight-year Republican administration. They also did plenty of other, less salubrious things, of course, but one can imagine how far Frum's jaw must have dropped when his soothsayings of doom were proven wrong before Dead Right - well reviewed by no less than Frank Rich - had even been remaindered.

Read the whole thing.

Q: What is this story about?

A: In broad outlines, two things. One, the Palin family had a long-running dispute - predating Sarah Palin's campaign for Governor - with Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, the ex-husband of Gov. Palin's younger sister Molly. Trooper Wooten remains employed as a State Trooper. Two, in July 2008, Gov. Palin fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, a Cabinet-level employee whose job includes supervising the State Troopers. (Technically, Monegan was demoted, not fired, but the point is that he was removed from his job, and chose to decline the reassignment). The issues are whether Gov. Palin acted improperly in seeking to get Trooper Wooten fired or in firing Monegan.

Q: So, what did the Legislature find?

A. Nothing. As Beldar explains, the Legislature's not in session, so it hasn't done anything, and neither has the 12-member bipartisan Legislative Council under whose authority the investigation was conducted. (As the Anchorage Daily News noted when the Council voted to release his report: "His report was released Friday by a 12-0 vote of the Legislative Council, with eight Republicans and four Democrats voting. Some members of the panel said they didn't agree with Branchflower's findings, however." This despite the axes to grind against Palin by both Republican and Democratic members of the Council) The investigative report by Stephen Branchflower, a retired prosecutor living in South Carolina, is entitled to no more and no less deference than previous determinations by Ken Starr, Robert Ray, Lawrence Walsh, Donald Smaltz, George Mitchell, and other investigative one-man bands. And to the extent that Branchflower shows his own work, you or I are perfectly qualified to second-guess his opinions - and so is Petumenos, the Personnel Board investigator.

Moreover, Branchflower's report is inherently one-sided, as he didn't have access to Gov. Palin, her husband, her sister or a number of other people supportive of the Governor. Obviously, that's due to the battles over the scope and authority of Branchflower's investigation, which in turn were driven by the McCain-Palin camp's justifiable concerns about the fairness of the investigation. Branchflower refused to reference or incorporate the written response by Gov. Palin to the Personnel Board's investigation or the sworn statements of Todd Palin and other witnesses who provided statements late in the game. He also does not appear to have interviewed Trooper Wooten, receiving only a written statement from him. (See Branchflower Report ("BR") 5, 7). But he did find time to interview Democratic Senate candidate Mark Begich, who was actually the first person he interviewed. BR 2. As such, his report should be considered only as one part of the story. Indeed, if you look at his crucial conclusion on page 67 of the report regarding the Palins' concerns about Wooten, Branchflower draws inferences against the Palins while admitting that "in the absence of an interview with either Governor Palin or Todd Palin, the specific answers to [his] questions [about the genuineness of their motives] are left unanswered," then goes about construing the remaining evidence against them on what, as I note below, is a fairly slender foundation. Gov. Palin has, of course, subsequently submitted to an interview that will be part of the conclusions to be drawn after the election by both the Legislature and the Personnel Board, in both of which Gov. Palin obviously has more faith than in Branchflower.

I should also note here that the meandering and repetitive 263-page report is only the public volume. There is also a confidential portion the public can't examine. We can only evaluate Branchflower's public work to see if it supports his conclusions. As discussed below, the public report simply does not purport to address many of the important issues.

Q: Who is Stephen Branchflower?

Branchflower has a longstanding working relationship with Monegan dating to Branchflower's time as a prosecutor in Anchorage, where Monegan was Chief of Police * (as does Branchflower's wife). Likewise, Democratic State Senator Hollis French is "a former prosecutor and colleague of Branchflower". * That's not all that surprising (it's a small law enforcement community), but obviously Branchflower was likely to be predisposed favorably towards Monegan and French, both of whom are aligned against Palin here.

Q: Who is Hollis French and what does he have to do with all this?

Branchflower was handpicked as the investigator by Hollis French (over the objections of the Alaska Attorney General, a Palin ally, who wanted a retired judge or other more objective figure), and French effectively controlled the investigation including the witness list. * (Alaska TV station KTVA describes French as "responsible for managing the case"; the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) calls him the investigation's "project director." *). Here is the basis for concluding that French was running Branchflower's witness list:

Rep. David Guttenberg (D.) asked Branchflower why he was requesting subpoenas for only those people attending the meeting and not Tibbles himself.

Branchflower said he would "have to defer that question to Mr. French."

"I put the list together with, talking to Mr. French," Branchflower added.

Sen. Gene Therriault (R.) told Branchflower, "I don't understand why you would have to defer that question to Sen. French. If it's your list you're in complete control of the list, then why can't you answer the question?"

Branchflower had no explanation. He only offered, "I'm not sure why his name was removed. My initial request was to have him on the list." At that point, French interjected. "It appeared to me there wasn't the political will to subpoena Tibbles."

The Branchflower report was originally designed to be released five days before the election on October 31 but was moved back to October 10 after complaints about the timing. *

Hollis French isn't just a Democratic State Senator on the Legislative Council; as I note below, his de facto alliance with Monegan in the events that led up to Monegan's firing means that he's effectively involved in the facts under investigation, and really ethically should have recused himself from this entire process. But French is also a prominent Obama supporter whose testimonials are featured on Obama's own website * * *, and he had a job to do: provide what he promised would be an "October Surprise" for the McCain-Palin campaign. Speaking to Newsweek in early September, "French ... acknowledged that some of his public comments about the ongoing probe may have been out of bounds. 'I said some things I shouldn't have said'"...

Palin questioned French's impartiality from the time that "French was quoted in The Wall Street Journal [in early August] saying the governor could be impeached as a result of the [Branchflower] probe." (French argued that he'd been misquoted). * Here's how Beldar describes French's conduct:

Democratic state senator Hollis French, who's managing the investigation, is already jumping to conclusions, muttering about "impeachment" to the press, and yet simultaneously he's short-circuited any kind of basic due process by refusing to share with Gov. Palin or her counsel the historical evidence (e.g., emails) that the Legislature's investigator is collecting to use against her! At least one Alaska legislator has already called for French to step down, citing his obvious bias. French has already boasted to ABC News of his desire to "release his final report by Oct. 31, four days before the November election," as an "October surprise" that's "likely to be damaging to the Governor's administration."

John McCormack notes:

Hollis French is now managing the investigation into Monegan's firing, and French has already made partisan remarks about it to the press, saying to the Washington Post: "It undercuts one of the points they are making that [Palin] is an ethical reformer."

Amanda Carpenter notes that some press reports support the notion that Wooten's union, the PSEA (which as discussed below was at loggerheads with Palin in the dispute that precipitated Monegan's demotion) is also coordinating with the Obama campaign:

The same week PSEA filed their complaint, CNN reported that Obama campaign officials had been contacting Wooten's union, although Obama spokesmen have vehemently refuted CNN's report as well as one from the Wall Street Journal's John Fund that said more than 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researches had been deployed to Alaska to dig up dirt on Palin.

As for Monegan's credibility, certainly Branchflower presents him as a respectable law enforcement figure, and his testimony seems reasonable on its face. That said, he obviously has an axe to grind against Palin. And Monegan himself was once subject to a domestic violence order of protection for making death threats against his now-ex-wife, so he may not be the most unbiased observer of Wooten's situation.

Q: Who is Timothy Petumenos?

I'm not, as yet, as familiar with Petumenos, though I am sure we will learn more about him and the Personnel Board. I assume, given that Gov. Palin submitted her own request for a Personnel Board investigation, that she felt it would be a more sympathetic venue.

UPDATE: Powerline notes that Petumenos is a Democrat who donated money to Palin's opponent, Tony Knowles, in the 2006 election.

Q: OK, that's all well and good, but let's discuss the merits here. Did Gov. Palin act improperly or illegally in firing Walt Monegan?

Branchflower says she had every right to fire Monegan - he exonerates the Governor on the totally obvious ground that she was entitled to fire such a high-ranking officer in her cabinet for any reason or no reason; Monegan serves at the pleasure of the Governor. (See Finding Number Two at p. 69-71 of Branchflower's report). As discussed below, Branchflower's only basis for complaining about Monegan's firing is that he believes that it was partly motivated or precipitated by the dispute over Wooten. In other words, all roads lead back to Wooten.

The evidence shows fairly overwhelmingly that Gov. Palin had legitimate policy-related reasons to want Monegan gone; in her written response to the investigation ("PR"), Gov. Palin refers to these as "good-faith disagreements about appropriate government policy." PR 4(paragraph 16). Monegan was insubordinate; he broke openly with Palin over her efforts to cut his agency's budget, siding instead with Hollis French, of all people, in a budget dispute tied to Palin's Administration's negotiations with the Troopers' union, the PSEA, whose contract was due up in June 2008:

* 12/9/07: Monegan holds a press conference with Hollis French to push his own budget plan.

* 1/29/08: Palin's staffers have to rework their procedures to keep Monegan from bypassing normal channels for budget requests.

* February 2008: Monegan publicly releases a letter he wrote to Palin supporting a project she vetoed.

* June 26, 2008: Monegan bypassed the governor's office entirely and contacted Alaska's Congressional delegation to gain funding for a project.

Allahpundit has explained the latter, an example of Palin in early July 2008 trying to put her foot down to stop a lobbying trip to DC planned by Monegan and Monegan disobeying her:

In a July 7 e-mail, John Katz, the governor's special counsel, noted two problems with the trip: The governor hadn't agreed the money should be sought, and the request was "out of sequence with our other appropriations requests and could put a strain on the evolving relationship between the Governor and Sen. (Ted) Stevens."

Four days later, Monegan was fired. He said he had kept others in the administration fully apprised of his plans to go to Washington.

Consider how even Andrew Halcro - a 2006 Gubernatorial candidate defeated by Palin and now the blogger who started this whole kerfuffle, and thus a person most ill-disposed towards Sarah Palin - described the budget battle:

the Palin administration wanted Monegan to go in another direction. They wanted him to cut corners on a budget that had already fallen behind over the last decade. Under Former Governor Murkwoski there was significant investment made to try and catch up with growing costs but Palin's budgets have again started to starve the agency.

To make matters worse, the change to the state's retirement benefit program adopted by the legislature in 2004 has had a negative effect on the departments ability to recruit new Troopers.

+++

Monegan and his department were getting too far out in front of Palin, acting in ways that were independent and contrary to the governor's wishes. Palin needed to replace Monegan with someone who would be seen but not heard while doing the governor's bidding.

+++

Walt Monegan was fired because he fought too hard. Governor Palin fired Monegan because she understood too little and wanted a puppet as commissioner.

Regardless of whose side you took in the budget battle, the fact is, taking public sides against your boss' budget decisions is very close to the top of the list of ways to get yourself fired in politics. There's simply no way to gloss over the differences of policy and politics that led Monegan to get demoted. Branchflower really had no choice but to find that demoting Monegan was a legitimate exercise of Gov. Palin's authority.

Petumenos concurs that there was no impropriety in demoting/reassigning Monegan.

Q: So, if Gov. Palin had legitimate reasons to fire Monegan, what on earth is Branchflower complaining about?

It's all about Wooten.

Branchflower found that Gov. Palin "abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act," which provides:

The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.

It's undisputed that Gov. Palin did nothing to act in her financial interest, so the question is whether she acted to benefit a "personal" interest. As noted above, it's undisputed as well that she had other legitimate reasons to remove Monegan, and no personal interest in doing so.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that the strongest case against Gov. Palin is true: that she pressured Monegan to fire Wooten, and that the degree of the pressure to fire Wooten is illustrated by the removal of Monegan from his position when he wouldn't do it himself. (This involves multiple leaps over gaps in Branchflower's evidence, but we'll go there for now for the sake of argument. I'm also glossing here over Branchflower's confused legal definition of what state of mind is required to "knowingly" violate the Ethics Act, although I would argue as well that as a legal matter, Branchflower really has no basis to argue that Gov. Palin "kn[e]w that ... her conduct [was] in violation of the Act," BR 51).

Branchflower's theory is that firing Wooten would be a "personal benefit" to Gov. Palin because it would benefit Gov. Palin's father and sister and that she wanted "to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family reasons." BR 65, 67. Now, as a legal matter, Palin's lawyers note that there's pretty much no precedent in Alaska law for finding a violation of this provision of the Ethics Act in the absence of any financial interest. And of course in a material sense, as noted below, it's hard to see how getting him fired would benefit his ex-wife.

That said, obviously it's not hard to see why in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, and with child custody issues still open to revisiting, one could see a benefit to Gov. Palin's sister to ruining Wooten. Branchflower has no evidence of this, as a result of which it's improper for him as an officer of the State to jump to that conclusion, but leave that aside for now. The fact is, "personal interest" is at best vaguely defined (Beldar suggests as an example that it could possibly include such things as pardoning someone who could incriminate a governor).

Here is Palin's lawyers' argument in response:

To the extent the Governor is alleged to have sought a non-financial personal benefit from an attempt to have Mr. Wooten dismissed, that benefit would have been a benefit shared generally with the public -- namely, the benefit of a trooper force free from rogue officers who have been found guilty of acts of violence and recklessness against the public. The Ethics Act specifically permits state officials to act in such circumstances, and thus even if the allegations were true -- which they assuredly are not -- there would be not probable cause to pursue the claim in this matter.

Beldar has his own take on what a "personal interest" is (he notes that "Branchflower reads the Ethics Act to prohibit any governmental action or decision made for justifiable reasons benefiting the State if that action or decision might also make a public official happy for any other reason," which I suppose might be a useful rule where you have a clear-cut benefit like a financial interest), as does Paul Mirengoff.

Petumenos, at pp. 17-19, essentially agrees with the Governor's lawyers, and specifically notes that it would be problematic to construe the statute as broadly as Branchflower does - apparently without precedent in Alaska law - in a way that would act as a positive constraint against a Governor acting in the best interests of the public on a matter in which she has no concrete interest similar to a financial interest.

My own view is much the same: acting to get rid of a trooper who is a hazard both to the public and to the State Treasury (through the risk of lawsuits against the State if he misbehaved) is not just a defensible use of the Governor's authority, it's her job. It's illogical to find a significant ethical violation - as required by the precedents cited by Gov. Palin's attorneys - if the Governor reasonably and sincerely believed she was acting in the best interests of the people she was elected to represent. The Governor is, after all, the state's Chief Executive, with sole and really irreplaceable responsibility for public safety and the public fisc. If she had information causing her to believe that one of her subordinates represented a threat to public safety, there's really no good reason why she should have been precluded from doing everything in her power to remove that threat (this is especially true in a small state where people are more apt to know each other).

I just don't see how a legal prohibition on Gov. Palin acting for a "personal interest" - where she had no financial interest at stake - could be triggered if she reasonably and sincerely believed she was acting in the best interests of the public in the case of a trooper who was a menace to society. The fact is that if it is shown that she reasonably and sincerely thought that Wooten should not be a trooper, the benefit of removing him from that position would not be significantly greater for her - as the sister of his estranged and presumably embittered ex-wife - than for the average citizen. There should only be any sort of ethics complaint here if there's a reasonable basis for finding that her concerns about Wooten were pretextual and not supported by a reasonable and sincere desire to protect the public interest, in which case the personal aminus becomes a more significant element in the decisional matrix. As I discuss below, Branchflower does not come close to meeting that standard.

Q: Did Gov. Palin pressure Monegan to take action against Trooper Wooten?

Branchflower dedicates the bulk of his investigation to this question. As to Gov. Palin personally, the evidence suggests that while she repeatedly made clear to Monegan her grievances with Wooten as a trooper, she (1) never directly or indirectly instructed Monegan to fire Wooten and (2) took to heart Wooten's admonition early in her term that for legal reasons she should not talk directly to Monegan about Wooten.

On the first point, Monegan has been unequivocal:

"For the record, no one ever said fire Wooten. Not the governor. Not Todd. Not any of the other staff," Monegan said ... "What they said directly was more along the lines of 'This isn't a person that we would want to be representing our state troopers.'"

Now, Monegan admits that he was never asked to fire Wooten. He also admits that after he advised Gov. Palin early in her term (February 2007) that it would be unwise to discuss the employment of a particular trooper with him, she did not raise the issue again.

That said, and for today at least I'm skimming over some of the details here that were covered exhaustively in the reports, basically the investigators' conclusions turned on Todd Palin and some of the Governor's key staffers constantly pestering Monegan about what a bad trooper Wooten was.

The argument as to why this was improper is, mainly, that Monegan really couldn't fire Wooten - apparently, under the collective bargaining agreement (and possibly state law as well, I'm writing quickly here and can't recall offhand) since he'd already been investigated and given a slap on the wrist, there was no way to reopen his case.

Of course, (1) the Governor can change the law and (2) the collective bargaining agreement was open to renegotiation - it expired in June 2008. That's not to say in either case that Gov. Palin had imperial power to just rewrite the civil-service laws, but it's worth remembering that the rules here were not cast in stone forevermore, and in fact the example of how Wooten got away with the things he had done seems to have stuck in Gov. Palin's craw as an example of why she should be reconsidering the supervision of the troopers.

Q: Did Gov. Palin reasonably and sincerely believe that Trooper Wooten should not be a State Trooper?

I believe the evidence shows rather compellingly that Trooper Wooten's conduct, and specifically the conduct that the Palins complained about, demonstrates his unfitness to serve as a State Trooper and that his continuance in that position presented a risk to public safety as well as a liability risk to the State of Alaska. The record clearly supports that both Gov. Palin and her husband believed this to be true. Thus, to challenge the Palin family's complaints about Trooper Wooten, her critics must argue that Trooper Wooten is a good person to have exercising armed authority on behalf of the State, or, alternatively, that the Governor should not have done anything about him even though he was a menace.

And it's not just limited to dangers to the public. The evidence is also quite clear that Gov. Palin was concerned, repeatedly, about the possibility that Wooten could do something to a member of the Alaskan public that would open the State to the threat of a big-dollar lawsuit, a concern apparently triggered by public reports about other troopers whose conduct led to such judgments during the time period in question. If you know anything about litigation, you know that if the State continued to employ Wooten after the Governor herself knew that he was a 'ticking time bomb,' that would present elevated risks of a massive damages award in the hands of a skilled trial lawyer. New Governors are not required to check at the door the things they have learned in life outside government; there would be no way in such a lawsuit to keep it from coming out that the state's chief executive knew of an extensive history of Wooten's misconduct that rendered him unfit to carry a gun and a badge.

Consider Monegan's comments to the Washington Post, which support the conclusion that Gov. Palin was concerned that Wooten was a symptom of larger problems with the State Troopers that could lead to harm to the State:

Monegan said Palin mostly backed off, but kept raising the matter indirectly through e-mails. In the fall of 2007, Monegan said he alerted her to a bad jury verdict against a trooper in rural Alaska, and she replied by mentioning Wooten, but not by name.

"She said troopers like this one and my former brother-in-law, or that trooper I used to be related to, are the things that make people not trust troopers," Monegan told The Post yesterday.

Mike Gravel, who surely has no particular motive to side with Palin, thinks this is plenty of reason to want the man off the force:

This trooper should have been fired ... if the unions didn't want to step up to the plate. ...

This is a guy that shouldn't be wearing a badge, not when he threatens people's lives. ...

Did they have to wait 'til he killed somebody before they got rid of him?

Certainly Todd Palin is utterly unapologetic about the hazard posed by Trooper Wooten:

"We had a lot of conversations about a guy who threatened my family and verbally assaulted my daughter. We talked about my concerns. We talked about Wooten possibly pulling over one of my kids to frame them, like throwing a bag of dope in the back seat just to frame a Palin," he said of his conversations with one Palin aide.

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"I make no apologies for wanting to protect my family and wanting to publicize the injustice of a violent trooper keeping his badge and abusing the worker compensation system. The real investigation that needs to be conducted for the best interests of the public at large is the Department of Public Safety's unwillingness to discipline its own."

*

As I said, I have not had time to synthesize in a post all of the evidence here. Let's note the big one. In February 2005, as the marital dispute between Mike Wooten and Molly McCann was escalating, Sarah Palin (then a private citizen) was called by her sister to listen in on a big argument between Wooten and his wife (Palin noted in an August 2005 email that this particular altercation was precipitated by the revelation that Wooten had been cheating on his wife). Fearing for her safety in a heated argument, Molly called her older sister Sarah "in case I do need help," and Sarah stayed on one open line and had her son Track listen in with her. You can read the State Trooper investigator's interview 2 months later with Sarah Palin here (I'd block-quote at greater length but I can't copy and paste from these PDFs) - what they heard was chilling, and I wonder how Democrats can read her witness statement and take sides with Wooten as he storms in yelling at his wife in a rage (Palin notes that he's a very big guy, towering over his wife, and was likely wearing his service revolver) and tells her, "If your dad helps you through this divorce, if he gets an attorney he's gonna, he's gonna eat an F'n lead bullet. I'm gonna shoot him." and "I know people in all the right places, in high places. I know judges. I know attorney's [sic]. I have relationships with these guys. You guys are all going down." Palin got concerned enough that she had Track call Molly's neighbor, and Palin drove over to their house herself, eventually leaving when Wooten seemed to have calmed down. Palin noted in an August email the history of Wooten's "physical abuse of his wife." On April 11, 2005, Molly obtained a Domestic Violence Protective Order against Wooten.

Just for one example out of many, this, which also comes from an April 2005 report originating with Molly and Chuck Heath, should give a flavor of Wooten's menace:

Page also relayed that Inv. Wooten may be taking some kind of steroid supplement and having problems with alcohol and relayed a story where (nv. Wooten drove while intoxicated from the Mug Shot Saloon. Page said he had encouraged Molly and Heath to report this behavior to the troopers but they are scared. Page has personally observed Jnv.Wooten's behavior change over the last few months and described him as "disconnected."

+++

Mike has also told Molly that he is taking a testosterone supplement that is illegal. He gets the substance from a friend he weight lifts with whose name she does not know. She cannot recall the name of the substance, just that it has a three letter initial name like MTD, and comes in small, blue pills.

(That's aside from the drinking and driving angle in that particular report).

So far as I can tell, nobody but Wooten himself seriously disputes that Wooten made the threats in question. Wooten "told troopers he never said anything like that about his father-in-law," but the state troopers' investigation did not find in his favor on the facts, concluding only as follows:

Molly McCann, Sarah Palin and Track Palin allege that on February 17, 2005, Investigator Wooten made a comment to Molly McCann that he would shoot her father if he hired a Iawyer for her. McCann advised that Investigator Wooten made this comment to her, and that Sarah and Track Palin who were listening over an open telephone line overheard it. Investigator Wooten was questioned about the comment and denied ever making the statement. Although McCann, Sarah Palin and Track Palin all recalled hearing the statement, a statement 'or implied threat to a non-present third party is not a crime. Although McCann and Sarah Palin felt that their father's life was in danger by the statement, neither mentioned the threat to their father for several weeks. Nevertheless, a statement of this sort by a trooper reflects badly on [Alaska State Troopers].

Newsweek cites subsequent comments by the divorce court judge asking Palin and her family to cool the jets on their complaints about Wooten and eventually dissolving the domestic violence protective order, but those are steps, as Beldar notes, that are fairly common for a divorce court looking to put the family dispute behind everyone, and they don't really address whether the death threats are consistent with believing that Wooten is a menace to public order as a State Trooper. Certainly the Washington Post's characterization of his remarks suggests a concern for something other than getting to the bottom of whether Wooten was a bad Trooper:

Anchorage Superior Court Judge John Suddock reviewed the complaints filed by Palin and her family. At trial on Oct. 27, 2005, the judge expressed puzzlement about why the family was trying to get Wooten fired, since depriving the trooper of a job would harm his ability to pay family support to Palin's sister.

"It appears for the world that Ms. McCann and her family have decided to take off for the guy's livelihood -- that the bitterness of whatever who did what to whom has overridden good judgment," Suddock said in an audio recording from the trial on TV station KTUU's Web site. "Aesop told us not to slay the goose who lays the golden egg. For whatever reason, people are trying to slay the goose here and it tends to diminish his earning capacity."

(See also BR 53-54). Branchflower mainly concluded that concerns over Wooten must be pretextual because the Palins dispensed with much of their security detail...but that's a logical non-sequitur; you could believe that Wooten is a dangerous guy with a hair-trigger temper who has no business in law enforcement and still not think he would hunt down and kill the governor of the state. At the same time, Branchflower's report makes clear that Gov. Palin expressed not wanting to have Wooten at events she was attending.

There's a whole bunch of other problems with Wooten I lack the time here to fully explore (including a number of findings against him by a state police internal investigation) - some minor, some more serious, but collectively giving the impression of a guy who drank too much, was very confident that he was above the law, and had little respect for rules - a bad combination indeed. The most notorious is the time he Tasered his 10-year-old stepson (he "offered" to do the same to Palin's daughter Bristol, who witnessed this lunacy). Wooten himself - who has been married four times - tries to minimize the Taser incident but nonetheless admits it was terrible judgment:

He said that he was a new Taser instructor, and his stepson was asking him about the equipment. "I didn't shoot him with live, you know, actual live cartridge," Wooten said.

Instead, he said, he hooked his stepson up to a training aid "with little clips. And, you know, the Taser was activated for less than a second, which would be less than what you would get if you touched an electric fence. ... It was as safe as I could possibly make it."

He said his stepson was on the living room floor surrounded by pillows, that he "was bragging about it," and that the family laughed about it.

Asked whether it was a dumb decision, Wooten told CNN, "absolutely."

This is a guy the state was supposed to trust with deadly force?

Q: What did Petumenos find?

Here's his summary of findings:

1. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act by making the decision to dismiss Department of Public Safety Commissioner Monegan and offering him instead the position of Director of the Alaska Beverage Control Board.

2. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in any other respect in connection with the employment of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten.

3. There is no basis upon which to refer the conduct of Governor Palin to any law enforcement agency in connection with this matter because Governor Palin did not commit the offenses of Interference with Official Proceedings or Official Misconduct.

4. There is no probable cause to believe that any other official of state government violated any substantive provision of the Ethics Act.

5. There is no legal basis or jurisdiction for conducting a "Due Process Hearing to Address Reputational Harm" as requested by former Commissioner Walter Monegan.

6. The Amended Complaint by the PSEA should be dismissed.

7. Independent Counsel recommends that the appropriate agency of State government address the issue of the private use of e-mails for government work and revisit the record retention policies of the Governor's Office.

These findings differ from those of the Branchflower Report because Independent Counsel has concluded the wrong statute was used as a basis for the conclusions contained in the Branchflower Report, the Branchflower report misconstrued the available evidence and did not consider or obtain all of the material evidence that is required to properly reach findings.

We can pick over as we go the debates about the details here, but the argument that there's somehow a formal and uncontested finding that Gov. Palin acted unethically is now unsupportable.

MORE READING: The
McCain-Palin campaign's August 30, 2008 press release makes many of the same points addressed above. * (You can get the graphic version here). And H/T Flopping Aces for some of the links in this post.

Perhaps the most tangible sign of victory in Iraq is the removal of the security walls in Baghdad; one would have to be positively churlish towards the war effort to resist being moved by the sight of those walls coming down, and what they mean to life in the Iraqi capital. And it's not just walls of concrete crumbling as the counterinsurgency "surge" pays its dividends:

On Oct. 1, the Sunni-dominated Awakening movement, widely credited with helping restore order to neighborhoods that were among the most deadly, passed from the American to the Iraqi government payroll in Baghdad. There is deep mutual mistrust between the new employer and many of its new employees, many of whom are former insurgents.

Another element of the transition, which has attracted far less notice than the Awakening transfer, is the effort by the Iraqi Army to begin turning over neighborhoods to the paramilitary National Police. In the future, its officers, too, will leave and be replaced by regular police officers.

At a macro level, only 5 of Iraq's 18 provinces have yet to have full control handed back to Iraqi authorities, although U.S. efforts are still important in securing Iraq's borders.

Have we gone so far along the path to victory that even Barack Obama couldn't screw it up? Not so fast:

U.S. commanders are also worried that security could worsen if the Iraqi parliament refuses to approve a new security agreement by the end of December, when the U.N. Security Council mandate under which the coalition operates in Iraq expires.

Without a new agreement or a new U.N. mandate, U.S. military operations would have to stop. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government is pressing for changes in the draft agreement before submitting it to parliament.

December, of course, is still on George W. Bush's watch, but nobody doubts that the President-elect will have real influence on that process, let alone on the U.S. military's ability to keep faith with our allies in Iraq going forward. But while an Obama Administration may still present a threat to victory in Iraq, the declining public interest in the conflict and the prominence of economic issues at home has basically made it politically impossible to make the case against Obama's wartime leadership, even as he plainly and inarguably got one of the two most important decisions of his time in the U.S. Senate - his opposition to the surge - as wrong as possible (on the other, preventing the financial crisis, he did no better).

Republicans in the 1990s tasted the bitter fruit of electoral irrelevance of one issue after another on which conservative policies had been implemented and succeeded - the Cold War, crime, welfare. (The Democrats don't have this problem). If John McCain loses, it may be because he really did prefer losing an election to losing a war. Certainly many Iraqis would prefer to see McCain win. It will be too bad if American voters don't see things the same way.

At the end of it all, there remain only three arguments for voting Obama that are not built entirely on willful ignorance or willful deceit regarding his record:

(1) The partisan argument: if you are determined to vote for a Democrat, any Democrat, Obama fits the bill. He's a member of the Democratic Party.

(2) The ideological argument: if you really and truly want to see the left wing take over, then the argument for voting Obama is basically the same as the argument for voting for Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich. He will, in fact, move the government to the left as much as he is able to do.

(3) The race argument: if you think the nation ought to vote for Obama because of the color of his skin, well, you're going to vote for Obama no matter what. (I disagree with Moe Lane's reading of this WaPo profile of an Obama supporter - I think the really distressing thing is her apparent sole fixation on Obama's race. But if, as Moe argues, that also renders her vulnerable to being used for Obama's political purposes, well, there's that too). This should not be confused with the argument that Obama would somehow be good for race relations as a whole in this country; to the contrary, the relentless effort by Obama and his supporters to play the race card against any and all criticism is a difficult instinct to turn off once it is activated, and is almost certain to have a corrosive effect over the next four years. Remember, people once thought electing David Dinkins would be good for race relations in New York City, too.

But that's pretty much it. Everything else that's been trotted out as a basis for voting Obama requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Instead, we get compelling political arguments like this one:

H/T. This too.

I'm not convinced that Obama's going to win. I'm convinced that he's significantly more likely than not to win, but of course by now we've all been through the reasons to question the polls, and for McCain supporters to refuse to submit to media efforts to declare the race over. But win or lose, certainly the GOP will need to do some serious thinking about how we got to the pass in which a candidate like Obama became thinkable, in which the illusions on which his candidacy has been based have never really been effectively punctured. In the event of defeat, certainly there will be much fun to be had exploiting the gulf between the Obama of his record and the Obama of his image, as it will be impossible for him to govern as both even if he is able to summon the executive competence and fortitude that he has never in his life had reason to display. But the nation should never have had to contemplate being punished with an Obama Presidency.

The text of the speech is here, and while the precise challenges of the present day have changed, so many of the principles Reagan talked about then (especially the segment on the soft, slow slide towards socialism starting around 18:20) is still vital to today's election.

Notice three things. One, this predates the happy-warrior Reagan - he's tough and uncompromising. Two, you won't get lost in a fog of generalities - Reagan was pithy and philosophical, but as always he also came loaded for bear with statistics and specifics to back up his points. And three, I had seen clips of that speech before but this is the first one that showed the crowd.

It's instructive to compare Reagan's stark choices to Obama's "Closing Argument" speech on Monday in Ohio. There's a bunch of interesting and telling tropes in that speech, but just to touch on two of them - the speech may as well have been entitled "A Time For Not Choosing," because a core theme speech was the idea that hard tradeoffs are, in fact, not really tradeoffs at all:

We don't have to choose between allowing our financial system to collapse and spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street banks.

The choice in this election isn't between tax cuts and no tax cuts. It's about whether you believe we should only reward wealth, or whether we should also reward the work and workers who create it....

When it comes to jobs, the choice in this election is not between putting up a wall around America or allowing every job to disappear overseas. ...

When it comes to health care, we don't have to choose between a government-run health care system and the unaffordable one we have now. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change under my plan is that we will lower premiums....

When it comes to giving every child a world-class education so they can compete in this global economy for the jobs of the 21st century, the choice is not between more money and more reform - because our schools need both....

And when it comes to keeping this country safe, we don't have to choose between retreating from the world and fighting a war without end in Iraq....

Both Reagan and Obama do a play on the "this is not right vs. left" argument, but Reagan argued that "left" is really "down" to a socialist future, while "right" means America's traditional liberties:

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Obama, by contrast, does the same thing - but while Reagan insisted, into the teeth of an electoral disaster, that his ideas could stand the test of history, Obama uses the "no left, no right" meme to disguise his Great Society big-government liberalism behind an updated version of Michael Dukakis' "competence, not ideology" slogan:

Understand, if we want get through this crisis, we need to get beyond the old ideological debates and divides between left and right. We don't need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government - a more competent government - a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans.

Not exactly the words of a man confident that he can openly proclaim a "progressive" ideology and survive. To the very end, Obama will refuse to admit what it is that he is selling. A time for choosing, indeed.

I was a grudging supporter of the Paulson Plan (a/k/a the "Wall Street bailout") on the theory that it was absolutely necessary at the time as a policy matter to restore confidence and liquidity in the financial markets, which have ripple effects for pretty much the entire rest of the world economy. One of the main policy arguments in favor of the Paulson Plan was that it was relatively minimalist and not really going to be a long-term money-loser for the government. One of the sounder political arguments against the plan was that casting it as a "bailout" of the unpopular financial industry would lead to a long procession of pretty much everybody else coming to Washington to ask to be bailed out of whatever was ailing them, at large expense and without any analogous hope that the taxpayers would get their money back. This has come to pass quickly, and the Rangel proposal is its reductio ad absurdum. Consider:

Q: Why Does New York State Need A Bailout?

A: Because it can't pay its bills.

Q: If New York Does Not Cut Spending or Get A Bailout, How Will It Pay Its Bills?

A: Raise state/local taxes on New York taxpayers.

Q: So, Who Will Pay New York's Bills If There Is A Bailout?

A: Federal taxpayers.

Q: Aren't Those The Same People?

A: Basically, yes. If states and cities aren't bailed out in equal proportion to the tax money they send Washington, then it's not precisely the same, it's a "spread the wealth" transfer. So it's possible that New York will get to soak the taxpayers of some other state, especially with Rangel chairing the committee; then again, the high cost of living in NY means that the state's taxpayers generally pay a high per-capita share of federal taxes and will pay a much larger share if Obama gets in and passes his tax plan. But in the aggregate, the burdens of state and local taxpayers are being relieved by ... those same taxpayers' federal tax dollars.

Q: What Is The Purpose Of This Shell Game?

To diffuse responsibility. If Gov. Paterson or Mayor Bloomberg raises taxes or cuts spending, they take the blame. But if the same dollars get laundered through the colossal federal budget, it's easier for the impact to get lost. The purpose is thus to ensure that taxpayers do not directly see where the money is coming from, and get to imagine that somebody else is paying it.

Of course, they could consider cutting spending. Presumably Gov. Paterson is asking for help because he has wholly eliminated non-essential spending from the New York State Government, right?

Obviously the other way to do this is, have the federal government use borrowed money, since the feds can borrow at a lower rate and with fewer state-law restrictions on borrowing. But the accountability point stands. Politicians should not spend money they can't afford to raise from their own constituents.

A. Honor

(1) McCain The Faithful Warrior

John McCain is a professional soldier by birth, upbringing and career. We have had war-hero candidates in several recent elections - George H.W. Bush, John Kerry, Bob Dole - but these men were fundamentally citizen soldiers, men who left behind the world they grew up in to meet their country's call of duty. They were men who were asked to be heroes and discovered that they had it in them. John McCain was raised to be a hero.

That doesn't make the professional soldier more or less noble than the citizen soldier; for most of our nation's history, we have depended upon the ability to meld professional warfighters with citizen soldiers to create an armed force that greater than the sum of its parts. It just means that we have to remember that McCain's internal code of conduct is much more expressly military - a code that places honor, the keeping of one's word and one's loyalty to country and comrades above all else and against all perils.

I won't recount here in any detail the most famous of all McCain stories, his refusal to accept early release as a POW in Vietnam, at the cost of solitary confinement and torture that left him with permanent injuries. But recall that what McCain was doing in that episode was all about the POWs' code of conduct and code of honor. McCain saw the other men around him suffer greatly for that code of honor, and he refused to betray them by betraying it. Indeed, when McCain speaks even to this day about the episode in which he finally broke one night under torture and signed a false confession, you can hear in his voice that he has never forgiven himself even for that moment of wholly understandable weakness. But when morning came, he still refused to go home. He established then and there that when McCain perceives that an issue of his honor is at stake, he will not yield no matter what he must suffer.

(2) McCain The Unfaithful Husband

McCain's code of honor does not, unfortunately, extend to every aspect of his life; most famously, he failed at what most of us regard as the most solemn vow a man can take. His first marriage collapsed in the late 1970s due principally to McCain's serial infidelity to his first wife, who like McCain had suffered serious injuries during his imprisonment, in her case in a car accident. Under all the circumstances - their long time apart, the hardships of war, the burdens of their physical disabilities - we may find it understandable that the marriage fell apart; but that doesn't in any way justify McCain in cheating on his wife and eventually leaving her to marry a younger, healthier, wealthier woman.

It's beyond the time and space I have available here to fully explore the relevance to a public official's career of purely private sins such as marital infidelity. I would briefly digress to suggest the following points, and apply them to McCain:

First, character does matter, and matters more for executives than for legislators due to the nature of the job and the broad discretion executives enjoy. Elections are never just about "the issues," given the broad range of unforeseen circumstances that can arise and given the serious questions voters must always ask about whether a candidate will keep his or her promises on the issues. That's why I'm writing this series, after all. I never bought the argument made by the Democrats throughout the 1990s that character is wholly irrelevant.

Second, private character is not irrelevant. We know that private problems can become public ones if, for example, a philanderer has an affair with, or sexually harrasses, a subordinate employee (Clinton, Foley), gets busted for hiring prostitutes or soliciting sex (Spitzer, Craig), puts unqualified lovers on the public payroll (McGreevey) or has to negotiate or regulate public business with an ex-mistress (Corzine, Frank). While it is true that men will do things for sex they might not do for other temptations, the weakness of character still tells us something about the man, and I am not at all convinced that strength of character can be so subdivided as to make private failings irrelevant to predicting public behavior. (This is aside from issues of deceit and recklessness involved when a public official dares the press to catch him when he knows he's guilty (Hart), chases skirts after he has been caught before (Clinton), engages in illegal activities to cover up an affair (Clinton) or lies directly to the public, to his supporters and to his closest aides (Clinton, Edwards)). Finally, a man with private sins may feel unduly and improperly constrained by his own glass house, and may let the fear of a hypocrisy charge frighten him away from standing up for virtue when it is appropriate or necessary to do so.

Third, however, character is not a series of yes/no questions. It is the test of the whole man, and the test of a lifetime. We understand that all our leaders have sins. Some are more serious than others (surely, marital infidelity is one of those), and some are more recent and current than others, but we are well-advised to judge the whole man, the whole record. A 24-year-old DUI conviction did so much damage to George W. Bush in the week before the 2000 election because, relatively speaking, he did not have a long, countervailing record of positive proof of his character when he ran for president. The same is true of rookie candidates like Obama and Edwards and Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin - having less by which to judge them, each incident and each failing grows larger in proportion. And a character flaw becomes more serious when it reinforces negative impressions about a candidate's public career. For conservatives, at least, Bill Clinton's serial infidelity and pervasive dishonesty about the matter was troublesome because it was so completely consistent with the public Clinton.

McCain comes to us with an exceptionally long public career and many, many incidents that have called upon him to show us his character and what he has made of. He has passed many tests, sometimes tests few living men have been exposed to. He has taken many stands. He is, in short, the ultimate known quantity; he is not going to be anyone in office but the John McCain we already know so well. Nor is there any real fear that McCain will get himself into similar messes in office - this is 30 years ago, and he's been happily and steadily married ever since. He is, frankly, 72 years old; he's not 42 anymore.

Do we see patterns of McCain's infidelity in his public life? Well, I suppose you could argue that we have, in the sense that he's been less than faithful to the Republican party over the years. As you can see from the examples I cite below, McCain obviously does not see loyalty to political ideas or institutions as covered by his code of honor, and so he can be tempted away from his loyalty to them. But on the fundamental question of whether the government should serve the general public interest or more narrow interests - even when those interests are the interests of large or influential groups - and on those issues, such as national security, that he plainly regards as matters of honor, McCain's military code of honor does, in fact, compel him to take stand after stand by the light of his conscience even when it's not obviously in his own best interests. We can trust him to do the same in office because we have been watching him do it all these years.

B. The Keating Five

I referred previously to Sarah Palin as an unlikely source for political reform, and in his own way, so is John McCain. Befitting his background, McCain came to Congress as a defense hawk who sought a place on the key national security committees; nothing in his background suggested a guy who would be a leading voice on domestic policy. But you can't really tell the story of John McCain's career as a Washington gadfly of reform without its origins in the "Keating Five" scandal of the late 1980s (McCain's so old even his scandals are ancient). While some of McCain's reformist streak predates the scandal, virtually every account of his career notes that having his honor called into question was the deepest cut McCain could possibly suffer, and one that motivated many of his later forays into cleaning up the ethical morass of Washington as a form of personal redemption.

Here's how the Arizona Republic describes the genesis of the scandal:

It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp.

As federal auditors examined Lincoln, Keating was not content to wait and hope for the best. He had spread a lot of money around Washington, and it was time to call in his chits.

One of his first stops was Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.

The state's senior senator was one of Keating's most loyal friends in Congress, and for good reason. Keating had given thousands of dollars to DeConcini's campaigns. At one point, DeConcini even pushed Keating for ambassador to the Bahamas, where Keating owned a luxurious vacation home.

Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with regulators to deliver a message: Get off Lincoln's back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting with five senators and the regulators. One of them was McCain.

+++

Despite his history with Keating, McCain was hesitant about intervening. At that point, he had been in the Senate only three months. DeConcini wanted McCain to fly to San Francisco with him and talk to the regulators. McCain refused.

Keating would not be dissuaded.

On March 24 at 9:30 a.m., Keating went to DeConcini's office and asked him if the meeting with the regulators was on. DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous.

"McCain's a wimp," Keating replied... "We'll go talk to him."

Keating had other business on Capitol Hill and did not reach McCain's office until 1:30. A DeConcini staffer already had told McCain about the "wimp" insult.

When he arrived, Keating presented McCain with a laundry list of demands for the regulators.

McCain told Keating that he would attend the meeting and find out whether Keating was getting treated fairly but that was all.

The first meeting, on April 2, 1987, in DeConcini's office, included Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, as well as four senators: DeConcini, McCain, Alan Cranston, D-Calif., and John Glenn, D-Ohio.

(Years later, McCain recalled that DeConcini started the meeting with a reference to "our friend at Lincoln." McCain characterized it as "an unfortunate choice of words, which Gray would remember and repeat publicly many times.")

For Keating, the meeting was a bust. Gray told the senators that as head of the loan board, he worried about the big picture. He didn't have any specific information about Lincoln. Bank regulators in San Francisco would be versed in that, not him. Gray offered to set up a meeting between the senators and the San Francisco regulators.

The second meeting was April 9. The same four senators attended, along with Sen. Don Riegle, D-Mich. Also at the meeting were William Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., James Cirona, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Michael Patriarca, director of agency functions at the FSLIC.

In an interview with The Republic, Black said the meeting was a show of force by Keating, who wanted the senators to pressure the regulators into dropping their case against Lincoln. The thrift was in trouble for violating "direct investment" rules, which prohibited S&Ls from taking large ownership positions in various ventures.

"The Senate is a really small club, like the cliche goes," Black said. "And you really did have one-twentieth of the Senate in one room, called by one guy, who was the biggest crook in the S&L debacle."

Black said the senators could have accomplished their goal "if they had simply had us show up and see this incredible room and said, 'Hi. Charles Keating asked us to meet with you. 'Bye.'"

McCain previously had refused DeConcini's request to meet with the Lincoln auditors themselves. In Worth the Fighting For, McCain wrote that he remained "a little troubled" at the prospect, "but since the chairman of the bank board didn't seem to have a problem with the idea, maybe a discussion with the regulators wouldn't be as problematic as I had earlier thought."

+++

After the meeting, McCain was done with Keating.

"Again, I was troubled by the appearance of the meeting," McCain said later. "I stated I didn't want any special favors from them. I only wanted them (Lincoln Savings) to be fairly treated."

Black doesn't completely buy that argument. If McCain was concerned about Keating asking him to do things that were improper, why go to either meeting at all?

Black said McCain probably went because Keating was close to being the political godfather of Arizona and McCain still had plenty of ambition.

"Keating was incredibly powerful," Black said. "And incredibly useful."

McCain's reservations aside, Keating accomplished his goal. He had bought some time, though the price was very high.

You can read the whole thing for an accounting of McCain's longstanding relationship (financial and political) with Keating and the blow-by-blow of the meeting. The five Senators - four Democrats, including John Glenn, last seen stumping for Obama, and McCain - got reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee under the Democrat-controlled Senate in 1990:

In the end, McCain received only a mild rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Still, he felt tarred by the affair.

"The appearance of it was wrong," McCain said. "It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain noted that Bennett, the independent counsel, recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation.

"For the first time in history, the Ethics Committee overruled the recommendation of the independent counsel," McCain said.

+++

McCain owns up to his mistake this way:

"I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."

As Adam Clymer of the New York Times noted in 1995, partisan politics was behind even the tepid reprimand McCain received:

During the Keating Five scandal, committee Democrats resisted dropping the case against John McCain, the Arizona Republican, because that would have left only Democrats accused of improper dealings with Charles Keating, the savings and loan executive.

Basically, McCain's self-assessment is correct: like Glenn, he exercised terrible judgment in associating his good name with Keating, benefitting Keating in his dealings with the regulators. Neither McCain nor Glenn was as culpable in the scandal as DeConcini, Cranston or Riegle - fundamentally, all they really did was show their faces at a meeting - but they were wrong to do even that much. It's a lesson McCain shouldn't have had to learn, but learn he did.

C. The Maverick

We've now assembled the essential picture of John McCain as he stood nearly two decades ago, as a first-term Senator in his mid-50s: war hero who suffered greatly for his code of honor in Hanoi; philanderer who wrecked his first marriage, trying to make better on the second try; legislator tarred by scandal for his association with a crook and burning with a desire to reclaim his reputation for honor. I will freely admit that if McCain had run for President in 1992, at the stage of his career that Obama is at now, he would have had difficulty extricating proof of his honor and integrity from the wreckage of the Keating Five, and would have lacked much in the way of a record. But McCain has walked many miles since then to earn our trust; let us review the portrait that emerges:

(1) Party Disloyalty

The list of issues on which McCain has fought powerful interests inside and outside his own party is too long to recount here. Let us start with McCain the un-party man. For example, Gamecock has rounded up a fairly comprehensive list of McCain's deviations from conservative orthodoxy, including national security issues like interrogation policy. Jonathan Chait has described McCain's apostasies during Bush's first term:

It is no exaggeration to say that, during this crucial period, McCain was the most effective advocate of the Democratic agenda in Washington.

In health care, McCain co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Ted Kennedy, a patients' bill of rights. He joined Chuck Schumer to sponsor one bill allowing the re-importation of prescription drugs and another permitting wider sale of generic alternatives. All these measures were fiercely contested by the health care industry and, consequently, by Bush and the GOP leadership. On the environment, he sponsored with John Kerry a bill raising automobile fuel-efficiency standards and another bill with Joe Lieberman imposing a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was also one of six Republicans to vote against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

McCain teamed with Carl Levin on bills closing down tax shelters, forbidding accounting firms from selling products to the firms they audited, and requiring businesses that gave out stock options as compensation to reveal the cost to their stockholders. These measures were bitterly opposed by big business and faced opposition not only from virtually the whole of the GOP but even from many Democrats as well.

McCain voted against the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. He co-sponsored bills to close the gun-show loophole, expand AmeriCorps, and federalize airport security. All these things set him against nearly the entire Republican Party.

As Chait recognizes, McCain's stands on these issues is not really about ideology; it's McCain going his own idiosyncratic way. Some of these issues, of course, smell to conservatives like media or populist grandstanding. And as I stressed with Obama, I don't view adherence to principle or party loyalty as bad things, nor do I see deviation from the party line as necessarily good. I'd prefer that the GOP was running a principled conservative. But when we fill in the broader picture of McCain's tilts at Washington windmills, a clearer focus emerges, one that is about more than just what is passingly popular or fashionable. The picture that shows that no exterior influence can wholly explain John McCain's stubborn independence. McCain may tack at times with the wind, but he very frequently steers by his own stars.

(2) Scourge of the Hill

Let's touch on a few more that illustrate specifically my point about McCain's independence from powerful forces in all camps:

-Campaign finance reform, of course, is McCain's most famous signature domestic issue. I've never agreed with McCain's policy precriptions on this issue, nor have most conservatives. But nobody questions the sincerity of his crusading spirit on the issue, nor the price he has paid for it. It's not just that McCain has made lifelong enemies of principled conservative commentators like George Will; he also burned his bridges with the leadership of activist groups like the National Right to Life Committee and the NRA who chafed at the way his restrictions on issue ads interfered with their ability to promote their positions during elections. As a result, McCain to this day faces reactions ranging from indifference to seething opposition among the grassroots leadership on the Right that cuts across issues and blocs. (Indeed, it is quite possible that without Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket and Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee, the NRA would never have endorsed McCain).

-Then there's McCain's years-long battle against pork barrel spending projects, a battle that Tom Coburn has since joined but on which McCain for years led alone. The AP describes the origins:

McCain's crusade started with the line-item veto.

McCain, newly elected to the Senate, jumped aboard an effort by Republican fiscal conservatives to pass a line-item veto giving the president authority to cancel specific provisions - namely, wasteful dollars - without vetoing an entire bill.

A history buff, McCain asked his staff to bone up on the time-honored Washington tradition of tucking money into spending bills for pet projects back home, without any government review of whether the projects are needed. Aides learned the practice, known as earmarking, went back many decades, beginning with boat locks along the country's rivers and lighthouses dotting the coasts.

He also had aides ferret out current-day earmarks, and when he saw the list, McCain was incredulous. He strode to the floor of the Senate to read the list into the Congressional Record, much to the annoyance of colleagues unused to public scrutiny of their pet projects.

Thus began "the scrub," McCain's effort to expose every earmark in every spending bill. They weren't easy to find; earmarks often are added late at night, when the Senate is still in session but when most lawmakers have gone home. McCain stationed aides on the floor to inspect each amendment as it was offered.

In the Senate, an institution where comity and collegiality rule, McCain was not winning popularity contests. His bull-in-a-china-shop tactics ignited a feud with the Appropriations Committee members responsible for most of the earmarks.

The feud simmers to this day. Earlier this year, the senior Republican on the panel, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney over McCain. Cochran told The Boston Globe the thought of McCain as president "sends a cold chill down my spine."

As the AP piece notes, and as we have seen on the trail, McCain still has to answer tough questions about his opposition to this or that local project. But he stands his ground - it's who he is.

-McCain opposed President Bush, the GOP Congressional leadership, the pharmaceutical companies and the AARP in opposing the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs, something George Bush and Al Gore had campaigned on in 2000 and which was regarded as universally popular. McCain thought it was fiscally irresponsible, and he was right.

-McCain has battled for years against subsidies and trade barriers that use taxpayer funds to artifically prop up the price of corn ethanol despite serious questions about whether ethanol is a boondoggle as an alternative fuel. There's a reason why ethanol subsidies have such a lock on the political process: would-be presidential candidates must swear fealty to the ethanol lobby if they hope to compete in the crucial Iowa caucuses. McCain, nearly alone among recent presidential candidates (I believe Bill Bradley was an exception) refused to bend on the issue, as a result of which he skipped Iowa in the 2000 primaries, finished third there in 2008, and appears well behind ethanol-backing Barack Obama in this year's general election in Iowa. Remember: ethanol isn't just a moneyed lobby, it's also a popular cause in Iowa. But in this case the people are wrong, and McCain's not afraid to tell them that.

-McCain has likewise stubbornly supported free trade, proudly declaring himself a free trader in this year's debates. As with immigration and his foreign policy views, trade is a core part of McCain's internationalist worldview. He's been unfraid to campaign for it even in NAFTA-hating sectors of Ohio. It's who McCain is.

-As he has noted in a few of the debates, he opposed President Reagan on the use of Marines as peacekeepers in Beruit in 1983, a deployment Reagan later regarded as the worst mistake of his presidency. (Even efforts to spin this as somehow not the case note that "What McCain voted against was a measure to invoke the War Powers Act and to authorize the deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon for an additional 18 months. The measure passed 270-161, with 26 other Republicans (including McCain) and 134 Democrats voting against it."). *

-While many of McCain's positions over the years have been popular with the press, in 1999 he cast just about the most unpopular vote, from the media's perspective, in recent Washington history, to remove the President of the United States from office. As he explained at the time, with a nod to the inevitable hypocrisy charge given McCain's own marital history as well as the fact that he would be voting to wound a man who would still be in the White House, sitting atop high approval ratings, for the remaining year and a half of his term (while his primary opponent, George W. Bush, maintained studious silence on the issue), McCain, typically, viewed the vote as a matter of honor:

All of my life, I have been instructed never to swear an oath to my country in vain. In my former profession, those who violated their sworn oath were punished severely and considered outcasts from our society. I do not hold the President to the same standard that I hold military officers to. I hold him to a higher standard. Although I may admit to failures in my private life, I have at all times, and to the best of my ability, kept faith with every oath I have ever sworn to this country. I have known some men who kept that faith at the cost of their lives. I cannot--not in deference to public opinion, or for political considerations, or for the sake of comity and friendship--I cannot agree to expect less from the President.

Most officers of my acquaintance would have resigned their commission had they been discovered violating their oath. The President did not choose that course of action. He has left it to the Senate to determine his fate. And the Senate, as we all know, is going to acquit the President. As much as I would like to, I cannot join in his acquittal.

-McCain then turned around and took a position that was unpopular with his party - to support President Clinton's pursuit of a war in Bosnia following on ths heels of his acquittal - but also angered the White House by calling for more ground troops and for formal Congressional approval of the war. McCain's resolution was shot down by a joint effort of Senate leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. (McCain took a similar middle course on the recent FISA debate, angering the Bush White House by arguing that the issue should be sent to Congress but also angering opponents of the Bush surveillance policy by supporting the effort to enshrine it in law).

-McCain's battles with defense contractors are legendary, including his fight to impose fixed-price contracts and his famous showdown with Boeing:

At stake is a $21 billion contract, of which Boeing, as prime contractor, gets the lion's share. The FCS program is billed by the Pentagon as an "overwhelmingly lethal" weapons system integrating battlefield computers into one vast communications network. It supports 550 workers at Boeing's Kent site and, according to the company, puts roughly $175 million into Washington state's economy each year.

McCain, R-Ariz., has complained that the contract was not structured according to standard procurement procedures, an allegation similar to the one that began the investigation of the tanker deal. The contract does not provide for enough oversight and scrutiny, and gives the companies too much leeway on pricing, he said.

The hearing was packed with defense contractors, their lobbyists and public-relations executives, who were watching it carefully for several reasons.

This session was McCain's first hearing as chairman of the powerful Airland Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee; he has vowed to redo the mammoth military-procurement process, and this was his first step.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, McCain has had trouble attracting support from defense contractors. * * * McCain's battles with defense contractors are a sign of his view, shared by Gov. Palin, that being pro-business doesn't have to mean accepting longstanding deference to the interests of particular businesses.

-Wall Street: Of course, we know about McCain's calls for reform of lobbying powerhouses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even during times when they were employing as a lobbyist Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager in 2000 and still a major figure in McCain's current campaign. But McCain also has a fairly long record of dissenting from his party by supporting regulation of the private sector of the financial industry. This, again, is not a stand I agree with, but it is yet another sign of how McCain marches to the beat of his own drum.

-Vietnam: McCain's integrity is also shown by his capacity for forgiveness. In 1996, in conjunction with the Clinton Administration, McCain joined across the aisle with John Kerry to work on normalizing relationships with the regime in Vietnam that tortured him. This wasn't always popular work; families of long-missing POWs often didn't appreciate the conclusions of McCain's and Kerry's work on the POW-MIA issue. But McCain answered the call to move forward rather than dwell on entirely justified grievances.

(3) Taking Names

I referred to this in the last installment - McCain hasn't just been willing to fight for reform, he's been willing to name names and make a lot of enemies to do it. McCain frequently embarrassed individual fellow Senators with his attacks on pork projects, including the now-famous "Bridge to Nowhere." McCain also chaired hearings on the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, despite the damage it did to the GOP's reputation on Capitol Hill. (Here's Salon in 2005 describing one such session). (Tom DeLay still hasn't forgiven him). *

(4) Iraq and Immigration

If you want an illustration of how John McCain's integrity played into his presidential campaign, even at great political risk, look at Iraq and immigration. McCain entered the race in 2007 as the consensus front-runner or co-front-runner for the nomination - the next guy in line, with a national reputation and good standing in the polls. By the late summer of 2007, his campaign was basically dead in the water. His public approval ratings tell the tale:

McCain's crash in 2007 was not the result of the rise of any one opponent, or any new scandal. It was, principally, driven by his decision to lead the fight in the Senate for comprehensive immigration reform, a hugely controversial piece of bipartisan legislation (his co-sponsor was the hated Ted Kennedy) that was massively unpopular with the Republican base. Grassroots activists were up in arms, and pundits branded McCain "McAmnesty." It was practically a textbook example of how to destroy a primary campaign by picking a fight with his party's base. But McCain saw the Senate fight through to the end.

It could be argued, of course, that McCain was playing to the middle and aiming for the general election. After all, Latino voters are an important general election constituency in a number of states. But at the same time that McCain was risking his neck with primary voters over immigration, he was doing the same with the general electorate over what was then the massively unpopular war in Iraq.

We can all well remember how setbacks in the Iraq War in 2006 helped the Democrats capture Congress and emboldened previously waffling candidates like Obama to become full-throated advocates of immediately commencing a withdrawal from Iraq. Many on the Right thought that the main challenge of 2008 would be the unpopularity of the war, and careful observers noted that throughout the spring and summer of 2007, Mitt Romney was leaving himself room to run away from the war effort in time for the general election if it went badly.

Not McCain, whose famous declaration - "I'd rather lose an election than lose a war" - perfectly captured the extent to which the war remained a matter of principle to the old warrior. McCain had been a supporter of the war since the beginning (and an Iraq hawk for a decade before that), but had also repeatedly angered the White House and the Pentagon with his calls for more troops. When the Bush Administration adopted the "surge" strategy that incorporated a short-term increase in troop levels, McCain went all-in on the strategy, banking his campaign on America's success. Had the surge failed, McCain would have been toast in the general election, and probably early enough that it would have cost him the primaries as well. But as on immigration, McCain eschewed the cautious approach and the conventional wisdom in favor of his longstanding principles. That America stands within reach of victory in Iraq is in no small part due to his persistent advocacy of the war and the surge, even when they were especially unpopular with those people - moderates and swing voters disaffected from Bush - who McCain would need to court in the general election. But even when McCain most desperately needed votes, he still put the good of the war effort first. When has Barack Obama done anything like that? When has the moment ever called for anything that Barack Obama delivered?

IV. Joe Biden: Business As Usual

I'm not going to spend much time here on Joe Biden. First of all, nobody's voting on Joe Biden. Second, whatever Biden's intentions and however long his tenure in Washington, there just isn't any point in taking seriously the idea that Biden could be any sort of agent of "change"...let's review:

Biden served in the Senate for most of the 1970s without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Biden served in the Senate for all of the 1980s without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Biden served in the Senate for all of the 1990s without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Biden has served in the Senate for the first nine years of this decade without making a mark as a reformer or exposing any significant corruption.

Oh, and Biden's son is a Washington lobbyist.

None of this makes him a bad guy or a bad Senator. But Biden is practically part of the furniture in the Senate; it's pretty hard to define what "business as usual" in the Senate means if it doesn't include Joe Biden.

V. Conclusion

Anyone who expects their politicians to be saints is in for a lifetime of rude surprises. John McCain and Sarah Palin haven't gotten as far as they have in politics without understanding how to do the things politicians do; you can pick over their records for projects they shouldn't have funded, contributors or endorsers they shouldn't have solicited, lobbyists they shouldn't have hired or worked with, etc. They aren't otherworldly figures descended to this fallen vale of tears to save us from our own vice. Their motives aren't always purely altruistic, and their ideas of reform aren't even always well-advised. And neither, for that matter, is Barack Obama an especially spineless political climber, at least by Chicago standards.

But what matters on the issue of integrity in office on matters of both politics and policy is that both McCain and Palin have been willing to stick their necks out and crack heads to make things happen. Time and again, each of them has stood up against corruption and waste even in their own party, making important and powerful enemies in their own ranks in the process. And Obama has never had the courage to do any of that; he was always, at every turn, happy to take what the machine was there to give him and look the other way, or worse. Obama has his issues he can campaign on, but on the question of integrity, he has nothing at all to offer. Change? Change how Washington politics works - even a little, even gradually, even one grimy hand-to-hand battle at a time? There is no plausible case you could make that Obama's record shows him to be any kind of change agent at all, let alone the kind that McCain and Palin have proven themselves to be. If Obama tries to change Washington, it will only be to aggrandize his own power and that of his party.

As I always say, in politics you judge a man's vices by the friends he keeps and his virtues by the enemies he makes. McCain and Palin have made enemies worth having. But all around him, all through his career, any enemy worth making has ended up instead as one of Obama's friends.

Nor is there any particular proposal for preventing that institution from falling prey to the same forces that grip the regulated industry. I have said it before, but it is worth repeating: the regulators became overconfident in the same way, and for the same reasons, that the bankers became overconfident. Just as a long and unusually rosy period in the housing market convinced the bankers that they had gotten better at pricing credit risk, a long period without a large bank failure persuaded the regulators that they had gotten better at regulation. They believed that their computer models, and an improved understanding of how markets and the economy worked, would allow them to see problems in time and halt them. Obviously, they were wrong.

Regulators, no matter how diligent or well-staffed or well-funded, never have

(1) The same degree and timeliness of access to information about a business and its daily operations as the people who run it and interact continuously with its employees; or

(2) The same incentive to ensure the continuing profitability of the business as the people who draw their income from it.

Also, while you do get good people who go into government for all sorts of reasons, people who have the specific skill set of being really shrewd observers of financial markets are probably the people least inclined to take far lower-paying jobs regulating those markets than making money in them; draw what conclusions you will about the ability of the regulatory agencies to be all-wise and all-seeing under the best of circumstances.

Now, if you are talking about regulating an industry to keep it from unscrupulously ripping off other people outside their businesses, at least you have an argument about whether people with less competence and less information are nonetheless properly charged with restricting the business' operations. But the crucial issue in debating the second-order aspects of the credit crisis (i.e., why institutions let themselves get overexposed to risks derived from bad loans), at the end of the day, is whether regulators were better situated to protect the interests of the financial industry itself than the people who worked in it. You should expect some skepticism about that kind of argument.

While I am at it, no surprise that Gov. Palin isn't distancing herself from McCain on immigration. The devil is in the details, though, as far as what hoops people have to jump through to get citizenship and what law enforcement tactics short of mass deportations would be appropriate.

I swear the immigration debate drives me up the wall. About 95% of it should be common sense. Enforce the border, make it hard for illegal aliens to get jobs and don't give them driver's licenses, make it faster and easier for people to come here legally, more guest workers and H1-B visas, make sure there are real but not impossible hurdles for illegal aliens who stay out of trouble and learn English to earn citizenship...I know all of that would set people off Left and Right, but really it's not hard to come up with a non-ideological, common-sense set of proposals that the broad middle of this country can accept. But the whole thing always gets framed as an ideological death struggle between mass deportation and mass amnesty.

* - Goolsbee is a living reminder that Obama never really gets rid of people who embarrass him, he just hides them a while until the coast is clear.

** - Mickey Kaus has explained how bogus, toothless 'work requirements' were an old dodge by opponents of welfare reform...hey, guess who was one of those in 1996? Barack Obama!

*** - Which are intended to replace the current tax subsidy for employer-provided health care. Funny how the Obama camp will attack removal of the tax subsidy as a tax hike and attack the refundable credit as a giveaway rather than admit that the two are linked - the point of the proposal is to shift people into the individual market and make health care more portable and less tied to your job.

PS, you really do have to read that Tomasky piece on Rudy, one that such a liberal journalist would never have written if he'd been the GOP nominee in 2008:

There's one way of measuring a politician's success. The things he did in his day that were controversial - are they accepted wisdom now? One can't say "yes" to that question about everything Rudy did, by a long shot. But as far as that first year is concerned, this is true: No person could run for mayor and be taken seriously by saying or suggesting that he or she would depart radically from the basic path Giuliani set in 1994-95. Bring in more accountability, apply a new and needed standard of civic behavior, be forceful but fair with the unions, get the cops out on the street, prove that things that were broken could be fixed. It couldn't be done. The local Democratic Party, which I scolded eleven years ago in the pages of this magazine...for its tectonic adaptation to the new rules, has learned this lesson too slowly. Or has it even learned it yet?

Almost every favorable word the WaPo writes about Obama is based on their hopes and projections about what they think and hope he might do as president, not what he actually has done.

+++

So how about international trade? Where's the historic evidence on that? "We also can only hope that the alarming anti-trade rhetoric we have heard from Mr. Obama during the campaign would give way to the understanding of the benefits of trade reflected in his writings." Let's see: Campaign promises made to anti-trade unions who've given him millions of dollars and votes, on the one hand, versus vague sentiments in his second book and the WaPo's "hopes," on the other hand. Which weighs more? Hopes!

+++

There's never a "we know he would do this" because he "successfully championed legislation." There's never a "we know he's really committed to that" because "he risked his career by bucking his own party." Instead - as the WaPo again admits - "We had hoped, throughout this long campaign, to see more evidence that Mr. Obama might stand up to Democratic orthodoxy and end, as he said in his announcement speech, 'our chronic avoidance of tough decisions.'" Earth to WaPo: When you hope something, and it never comes true, that's called a "hoping in vain."

Iraq, of course, is one of the classic examples of this. Sooner or later, the next president will face decisions that create a tension between the desire to bring the troops home ASAP and the need to keep a certain number of boots on the ground to avoid having the hard-won successes of the past two years unravel. You can insist until you are blue in the face that such tradeoffs don't exist, but that's the reality: we may be less needed and in lesser numbers than before, but our troops are still performing important functions in helping the Iraqi government and military solidify the gains that have been made.

When those tensions arise, when top military brass and experts in the area are saying they need to have less aggressive withdrawal timetables and the anti-war movement is pressing for a rapid pullout, which side will Obama choose? The anti-war faction looks at his 2002 war speech and 2007-08 opposition to the surge, and tell themselves that Obama will side with them. The rest - including conservative Democrats who, like the WaPo editorial board, may not now think the war was a good idea but think precipitate withdrawal would be disastrous - look at his 'stay the course' position of 2003-06 and his more conciliatory statements during the general election, and tell themselves that he will side with security.

They can't both be right. And realistically, even given the strong signal of his opposition to the surge, there's no way for anybody to be quite certain which side is being lied to by Obama. Maybe he doesn't even know.

Of course, that sort of hedging act is done by almost every politician...but with Obama, it encompasses nearly everything in his record, because even on issues like abortion where he's staked out a very consistently extreme record for a period of years, people seem to convince themselves that he's been lying all along, he doesn't, for example, really support federal taxpayer money to subsidize abortions.

This essay captures the same dynamic regarding how Obama's religion is viewed by people who find Gov. Palin's religious beliefs in and of themselves alarming:

Many critics stand ready to mock Palin's Christianity. Fair enough. Will they also mock Obama's and Biden's?

Christianity is a miracle religion. Absent belief in the miraculous, there is nothing left of Christianity worth the name.

Here is the story in a nutshell: Christ was both man and God. God took on human flesh and entered into the physical world to perform a mission. The mission was to save the fallen human race, and to do so Christ had to die and then rise from the dead. That is why Easter, not Christmas, is the greatest of Christian holidays. It celebrates the Resurrection, the central dogma of Christianity. This is not my just my opinion, it is orthodox Christian teaching. In Corinthians 15:17 Paul states that "if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain".

Obama has gone on record as stating that Christ is his Lord, that he prays to Jesus. I see three possibilities:

1. Obama was lying: he believes no such thing, but finds it politically expedient to claim he does.
2. Obama accepts as fact the Resurrection of Christ.
3. Obama is an idiot.

Obama is no idiot. So does he believe that a corpse dead on Friday came back to life on Sunday? And if so, does he accept as facts the rest of Christ's miracles? Prior to his death, Christ is said to have resurrected a corpse, made the blind see, walked on water, and turned water into wine. I can't see why anyone would believe in the Resurrection, and deny the rest. Why strain at gnats?

The theory that the earth is only 6000 years old appears to be pre-scientific nonsense. It contradicts known facts about the rates at which radioactive materials decay. By the same token, a corpse coming back to life violates the laws of thermodynamics, and walking on water violates the laws of gravity.

So far as I know Palin is not a Young Earther. But if she were, her belief would be no more at odds with science than is Obama's stated belief that Christ is Lord. I suspect those who mock Palin's belief without mocking Obama's do so because in their hearts they imagine that Obama does not actually believe. He just says what he has to say to attain power. And they're ok with that. They mock Palin because they imagine she means what she says.

H/T, via Ace. It's the same thing again. Those who find Obama's Christianity reassuring tell themselves that he believes. Those who find Christianity disturbing tell themselves that he doesn't really mean it. Willing suspension of disbelief.

*Obama campaign flacks attacking McCain for failing to "vet" a guy who only became an issue because Obama showed up in his yard.

*Ben Smith dug up his voter registration. (More here).

*The media dug up tax liens on him *

*Not only did reporters go after his licensing as a plumber, but now government officials are after his business.

*Lefty blogs publishing his home address and writing up attacks on him and digging into his family tree.

*Here's a NY Times article digging up more dirt on Joe than they've bothered to cobble together on Obama, and another here.

*Andrew Sullivan finds a new obsession with the plumber, reducing this man to a "hood ornament[]" (here, here, and here).

*Here is a roundup of the media frenzy. Remember, read all these and ask yourself when the last time was you saw a report on, say, Barack Obama's relationship with the Chicago political machine.

(As Ace notes, the Chicago-style ton of bricks dropped on Joe should help intimidate people who might actually come forward with stories from Obama's past he doesn't want told)

UPDATE: McCain defends ordinary Joe:

The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn't ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn't recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.

SECOND UPDATE: Brian Faughnan notes that the people attacking Joe used to claim to care about privacy. What a surprise. It's not shocking to find either side using double standards on this sort of thing, but as usual what's missing is some degree of perspective about what's even a relevant basis for invading this guy's private life - the whole point here is that he asked Obama a question, and Obama gave a revealing answer, and he winds up with goons trying to run him out of business and posting his address online and freaking out because he goes by his middle name.

In the Frost case Brian notes, I'd agree that some people went overboard - but the essential question was the assertion that the Frost family needed and deserved government assistance at their income level. Joe the Plumber's basic point wasn't even about his current income, but about what happened if he succeeded in making more money.

I generally despise this sort of politics by anecdote, precisely because it drags us into this sort of morass. But remember: the essential question here is what Obama said. It's rather telling the panicked lashing out at an ordinary citizen that has resulted even at a time when he's leading in the polls. And it doesn't bode well at all for the next person who asks Obama a question he doesn't like.

(1) No Taxes Hikes of Any Kind Below $250,000

Obama has made three unambiguous-sounding "read my lips" style promises about taxes and spending in this race. One of these he left himself no room to back away from:

If you are a family making less than $250,000 a year, my plan will not raise your taxes. Period. Not income tax, not payroll tax, not capital gains tax, not any of your taxes. And chances are you will get a tax cut.

I suppose the Clintonian wiggle room there is the "my plan," present tense, and those of us who are familiar with the Democrats' M.O., who remember Bill Clinton throwing his middle class tax cut under the bus barely weeks after being elected, and who (as the McCain camp has pointed out relentlessly) saw Obama vote for a party-line budget resolution that would have extended tax hikes much lower down the income ladder know that Obama is highly unliklely to keep this promise. But it has, in fact, been stated with such clarity that if elected, Obama will properly be found to have lied to the American people if he breaks it by raising any tax of any kind paid by anyone with an income below $250,000. George H.W. Bush can tell you how that worked out.

(2) Tax Cuts For 95% of...Who?

Here is Obama in the second debate: "I want to provide a tax cut for 95 percent of Americans, 95 percent."

Is that 95% of current federal taxpayers? 95% of all households? 95% of all Americans, including children? Phil Klein of the American Spectator has tried to get the Obama campaign to clarify who this is 95% of and what the plan actually consists of (what rates, if any, will go down, for example), and can't get an answer (this in contrast to, say, the Bush tax cut plan in 2000, which was famously detailed).

The Wall Street Journal, of course, has noted that a lot of his "tax cuts" will actually involve the federal government cutting checks to people who currently pay no federal income taxes:

All but the clean car credit would be "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer -- a federal check -- from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this "welfare," or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's genius is to call it a tax cut.

The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.

The total annual expenditures on refundable "tax credits" would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as "tax credits," the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.

The political left defends "refundability" on grounds that these payments help to offset the payroll tax. And that was at least plausible when the only major refundable credit was the earned-income tax credit. Taken together, however, these tax credit payments would exceed payroll levies for most low-income workers.

To any sane person, sending a check to someone who does not pay taxes is called "spending," not tax cuts - a policy of taxes and spending designed explicily for purposes not of financing the government's necessary operations but to "spread the wealth around," as Obama now-famously told Joe the Plumber, or "for purposes of fairness" as he told Charlie Gibson in the debate back in April.

Obama should be forced to come clean: 95% of who? Will he cut any tax rates, or just offer to cut a bunch of checks? If he won't clarify his promise, he can fairly be blamed for breaking another pledge if the percentage of current federal taxpayers whose tax liability doesn't go down under an Obama Administration ends up being, as most of us expect, vastly lower than 95%.

(3) Has Obama Abandoned His Promise of a Net Spending Cut? Where are the Loopholes?

Here's Obama in the second debate again:

[W]hat I've proposed, you'll hear Sen. McCain say, well, he's proposing a whole bunch of new spending, but actually I'm cutting more than I'm spending so that it will be a net spending cut.

Pretty unambiguous: he has promised the American people a net reduction in federal spending. Even if we assume that Obama (silently) excludes spending on existing entitlements from that calculation, it's another read-my-lips promise he can be held to, and that he is 100% certain to break if elected.

Now here is Obama in the third debate - watch carefully:

OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think it's important for the American public to understand that the $750 billion rescue package, if it's structured properly, and, as president, I will make sure it's structured properly, means that ultimately taxpayers get their money back, and that's important to understand.

But there is no doubt that we've been living beyond our means and we're going to have to make some adjustments.

Now, what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut. I haven't made a promise about...

SCHIEFFER: But you're going to have to cut some of these programs, certainly.

OBAMA: Absolutely. So let me get to that. What I want to emphasize, though, is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as- you-go. Every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches.

OBAMA: And some of the cuts, just to give you an example, we spend $15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies. It doesn't -- under the Medicare plan -- it doesn't help seniors get any better. It's not improving our health care system. It's just a giveaway.

We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work. And I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page, programs that don't work, we should cut. Programs that we need, we should make them work better.

Now, what is true is that Senator McCain and I have a difference in terms of the need to invest in America and the American people. I mentioned health care earlier.

If we make investments now so that people have coverage, that we are preventing diseases, that will save on Medicare and Medicaid in the future.

If we invest in a serious energy policy, that will save in the amount of money we're borrowing from China to send to Saudi Arabia.

If we invest now in our young people and their ability to go to college, that will allow them to drive this economy into the 21st century.

But what is absolutely true is that, once we get through this economic crisis and some of the specific proposals to get us out of this slump, that we're not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways.

And we're going to have to embrace a culture and an ethic of responsibility, all of us, corporations, the federal government, and individuals out there who may be living beyond their means.

Some of Obama's blogospheric supporters on the far left, like Matt Stoller and Firedoglake, think that line about "once we get through this economic crisis and some of the specific proposals to get us out of this slump" means that he'll suspend his "pay as you go"/"net spending cut" promise for as long as he can say we are working to get out of a slump. On the Right, Soren Dayton and Jon Henke agree with Stoller's reading. (Ezra Klein noted in 2007 that Obama promised YearlyKos that he would not treat many of his new spending programs as subject to "PayGo" rules - he may be creating a loophole for himself by calling them "investment," although he revealed none of that in the debates.)

Me, I don't see it; I think a natural reading of Obama's statement was that he was promising that the spending discipline he claims to be imposing would persist even after budgetary good times returned. But the media should press him to commit on this. Those of us who recall the porous "firewall" of the "peace dividend" debates of 1991-94 remember well how skilled Congressional Democrats are at coming up with "exceptions" to spending rules that allow them to spend money they promised not to spend.

On that note, Obama should answer two more questions. One, which I think his plan already answers, is that he's not going to count cutting his "spread the wealth" checks to non-taxpayers as spending. If you can hand out a trillion dollars in checks, your political need to "spend" is greatly alleviated.

The second is whether he's planning to support billions in additional spending pushed by his party's Congressional leadership on top of this year's budget, in special sessions after the election:

After consulting with Barack Obama, Democratic leaders are likely to call Congress back to work after the election in hopes of passing legislation that would include extended jobless benefits, money for food stamps and possibly a tax rebate, officials said Saturday.

The bill's total cost could reach $150 billion, these officials said.

The officials stressed that no final decisions have been made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt a formal announcement. House Democrats have announced plans for an economic forum on Monday "to help Congress develop an economic recovery plan that focuses on creating jobs and strengthening our economy."

Democrats said Obama's campaign has been involved in discussions on a possible stimulus package.

If Obama is planning to push $150 billion in new spending in November, will he insist on a net spending cut, or is this yet another loophole so he can tell the American people one thing and do something completely different?

Or will the press just focus on Joe the Plumber's record?

The first problem is self-evident: Obama, having entrusted money to Ayers and his radical theories and now being embarrassed by CAC/Ayers' funding of left-wing projects like "Afrocentric" education, wants to blame his partners on the foundation board. Not good enough.Obama's never been in charge of anything besides CAC and the Harvard Law Review, so maybe he needs to learn: when you are in charge, you are responsible for the decisions you make.

Second, Obama's trying to conflate the Annenberg Foundation, which provided $49 million in seed money for a grant proposal (partly written, yes, by Ayers as one of CAC's masterminds) with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which actually signed off on the distribution of those funds to Ayers-designed projects and had a much closer look at what was going on. FactCheck.org, which runs an extended and fairly tendentious apologia for Obama on this, notes that the Annenberg Foundation created by Walter Annenberg in 1989 "supports a wide variety of charitable causes - a total of 5,200 grants during its first 15 years of operation." The CAC was just one of those. The Foundation itself stresses that:

All participating sites in the Annenberg Challenge for School Reform were locally controlled and locally governed.

The Annenberg Foundation was not directly involved in the daily operations of any of the 18 challenge sites. This includes, but is not limited to: programming, staffing, or board composition.

Work related to programs, fundraising and development, research, and evaluation at individual Challenge sites during the grant period was undertaken through the local Challenge entities.

Which makes the parent foundation's affiliations (including FactCheck.org, among those thousands of recipients) and those of Walter Annenberg a red herring. If anything, the whole point of people like Obama is to make those folks believe they are giving money to something respectable. As Stanley Kurtz reminds us, this all is too commonly true of foundation work:

The Obama camp denies CAC's radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it's true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds "captured" by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC's story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg's personal politics don't change that one iota.

The only real relevant people here are Obama's partners on the board:

Founding members of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Board were:

Susan Crown, vice president, Henry Crown Company; Patricia Graham, president, The Spencer Foundation, and former dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Stanley Ikenberry, president-emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Handy Lindsey, executive director, Field Foundation; Barack Obama; Arnold Weber, former president, Northwestern University, and president, Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago; and Wanda White, executive director, Community Workshop on Economic Development.

Now, notice a few things about the board. First, when a board like that includes university presidents and the like and they elect a young civil rights lawyer and State Senate candidate chairman...who do you think is doing the work? Second, note the presence of the Crown family, major Obama donors and recipients of significant earmarks from Obama in his legislative career. Once again, all the Obama stories have common threads that tie them together.

In any event, the involvement of other people who should have known better does nothing to absolve Obama of his decision to fund Ayers' projects. Nothing at all.

Today the Obama campaign accidentally sent reporters the talking points it intends to press for tonight's debate:

"* This is John McCain's last chance to turn this race around and somehow convince the American people that his erratic response to this economic crisis doesn't disqualify him from being President.

"* Just this weekend the weekend, John McCain vowed to 'whip Obama's you-know-what' at the debate, and he's indicated that he'll be bringing up Bill Ayers to try to distract voters.

"* So we know that Senator McCain will come ready to attack Barack Obama and bring his dishonorable campaign tactics to the debate stage.

"Obama continues to lead on the economic crisis with a rescue plan for Main Street.

"Over the course of the campaign, Barack Obama has laid out a set of policies that will grow our middle class and strengthen our economy.

"But he knows we face an immediate economic emergency that requires urgent action – on top of the plans he's already laid out – to help workers and families and communities struggling right now.

"That's why Barack Obama is introducing a comprehensive four-part Rescue Plan for the Middle Class – to immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities, and help struggling homeowners.

"This is a plan that can and should be implemented immediately.

"Obama has shown steady leadership during this crisis and offered concrete solutions to move the country forward – and his Rescue Plan for the Middle Class builds on the plans to strengthen the economy and rebuild the middle class that he's laid out over the course of this campaign.

"Already in this campaign, he's unveiled plans to give 95 percent of workers and their families a tax cut, eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000, bring down the cost of health care for families and businesses; and create millions of new jobs by investing in the renewable energy sources.

"John McCain has been erratic and unsteady since this crisis began – staggering from position to position and trying to change the subject away from the economy by launching false character attacks."

H/T Moe

Now, let's look at some samples from the lefty blogs collected by yesterday's Blogometer under the headline "MCCAIN: Reinforcing The "Erratic" Meme?"

Other liberal bloggers are portraying the McCain camp as "erratic":

The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "It's almost as if they're trying to look erratic, unable to deal with the pressure of a crisis."

MyDD's Todd Beeton: "So, call me crazy but if the number one criticism about you is that you act erratically and it's sticking because, well, you're undeniably acting erratically, wouldn't it be wise to stop? To start acting with purpose, with some modicum of discipline? Wouldn't that just be Politics 101?"

AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "Let's just put this in perspective: The McCain campaign knows its being closely watched. Their repeated stunts, combined with the ugly negative attacks, have caused the McCain to drop precipitously in national and state polls. Yet, against this scrutiny, McCain and his campaign honchos only reinforce the idea that erratic behavior reigns. It's quite stunning. No wonder so many Republicans are fleeing from the McCain campaign."

Then we get John Podesta on what McCain needs to do tonight:

McCain needs to change the dynamic of this race, but his erratic responses to the economic crisis aren't the way to do it.

Want more? Have fun wading through the 6,896 posts over the last month tagging McCain "erratic."

A. Rootless Ambition

"He's always wanted to be President," Valerie Jarrett, who has been a family friend for years, ever since she hired Michelle Obama to work in Mayor Daley's office, says [of Obama]...."He didn't always admit it, but oh, absolutely. The first time he said it to me, he said, 'I just think I have some special qualities and wouldn't it be a shame to waste them.' I think it was during the early part of his U.S. senatorial campaign. He said, 'You know, I just think I have something.'"

-The New Yorker

Michelle's brother... recounted one of the first times [in the early 1990s] Michelle brought Barack to a party...

When Craig asked about his career plans, Barack replied, "I think I'd like to teach at some point in time, and maybe even run for public office." Craig assumed Barack wanted to run for a post like city alderman, but Barack let him know that his sights were set higher. "He said no, at some point he'd like to run for the U.S. Senate," Craig recalled. "And then he said, 'Possibly even run for president at some point.'

--Liza Mundy, "Michelle: A Biography"

(1) The Man From Nowhere

In Part I, I noted that Sarah Palin's integrity finds its foundation in her apolitical roots, her background, upbringing and family life as far outside of politics in general and national politics in particular as you can get. But with Barack Obama, the opposite is true: Obama really has no roots outside of politics and his political worldview, apparently few close friends outside of politics, no real hometown, and unlike John McCain (who was raised as a Navy brat) no real continuity as he moved from place to place. He had an itinerant upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia and a nomadic college career in Los Angeles and New York, and wrote - affectingly - in his 1995 memoir about his search for identity. "That whole first year seemed like one long lie," he wrote of his freshman year at Occidental College.

Obama's mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, after her short-lived marriages to Obama's father (a Harvard-trained Kenyan student of economics) and stepfather (an Indonesian student), worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia, even leaving Barack behind in Hawaii as a teen to return to Indonesia, while he attended an elite private school, and was raised by his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham; it was Stanley who had served in World War II. Obama's birth father Barack Obama Sr., with whom he had little contact, was a product of Kenyan socialism, albeit something of a skeptic of the Kenyan socialist project. * His stepfather, Lolo Soetero, who seems to have been a fairly lax Muslim, had apparently been sponsored to the U.S. on a student visa issued by the Sukarno regime, and had it revoked in 1967 when the regime fell (Sukarno was a quasi-Marxist leader somewhat typical of the Third World in the 1960s - he once received the "Lenin Prize" from the Soviet Union - but was deposed in 1967 and replaced by right-wing dictator Suharto), and when Obama was living in Indonesia, his stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company. Additional information from verifiable, non-crackpot sources about the political and social worldview of Obama's mother and stepfather is hard to come by; the Chicago Tribune's profile of her is probably the best we will get, while things like Spengler's inflammatory Asia Times profile (which I rely on here only for his educated speculation about Soetero's visa) rest on a lot of speculation with uncertain basis in fact. Indeed, liberal blogger Jeralyn Merritt has argued that even Obama's knowledge of his own family history seems to depend heavily on what his campaign staff tells him.

One thing we do know is that while various efforts have been made to read a lot into Obama's brushes with Islam growing up, especially his years in Indonesia, Obama himself had no real religious faith; he attended both Muslim and Catholic schools in his youth, apparently with disinterest in the religious instruction he was provided, but by his own admission had fallen away from faith of all kind by the time he encountered Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Obama wrote of his youthful experience with religion, "my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detatchment as well." Like something bitter people cling to, one might say.

As a teen, "Obama felt like an outsider even in Hawaii's racially diverse community, because the African American population in the Islands was, and remains, miniscule, creating in Obama a feeling of isolation." And there were other symptoms of how he was, at that point in time, still something of a lost soul:

"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years," he wrote. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though."...

In the book, Sen Obama recalls that he had "been headed" to the status of "junkie" or "pothead", which he describes as "the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man". He recalls smoking "reefer" in the backs of his friends' vans, dorm rooms and "on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school".

Amusingly, some friends from those days suggest that Obama may have exaggerated his drug use and alienation for effect: "He was known as a partier, as a guy looking for a good time, but not much more". But almost any account of Obama's early years finds him a young man not really sure where he belongs, and along the way he was imbibing some other unhealthy intellectual influences as well. Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father, his first memoir, about a major influence from his teen years, a man named Frank:

A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that his childhood mentor up to the age of 18 - a man he refers to only as "Frank" - was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his "subversive," "un-American activities."

The Obama campaign has confirmed this:

[T]he Obama campaign's attack on [Jerome] Corsi's book ... acknowledges on pages 9 and 10 of its report that the mysterious "Frank" in Obama's 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, is in fact the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member Frank Marshall Davis.

Davis would hang out and smoke pot with Obama's grandfather and wrote a sexual autobiography that included he and his wife seducing a 13-year-old girl he refers to, creepily enough, as "Anne". You can click the links for some sampling of Davis' racist and Marxist words of ...er, wisdom. More: * * *

Now, you can't hold a man responsible for the family he was born into, or for his grandfather's friends. Certainly it's impressive by any measure how far Obama has come from where he started - part of his point in writing about his cocaine use, like George W. Bush's drinking, is to show the road he chose to stop taking. But the best you can say about Obama's roots and where they place him is that he arrived as a college student in Los Angeles and later Manhattan without the sort of support network and firm grounding that most Americans take for granted. Even after he started moving up the ladder of academia and community organizing, Obama remained an outsider wherever he went. For a decade between 1979 and 1989, he lived in four large, liberal cities, a single young man thousands of miles from his family with no faith and no real ties to the communities he lived in. At Columbia, for example, he lived with wealthy, drug-using Pakistanis * and barely anyone remembers him. * * As Charles Krauthammer has noted, Obama's campaign has been decidedly short on personal testimonials from old friends.

Which raises the issue of what rushed in to fill the vaccum in Obama's life in the years between 1979 and 1989. It wasn't religion, it wasn't family, it wasn't community and it wasn't even money - it was political activism.

(2) The Activist

"[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn't want to be on one of those trains every day," said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. "The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions... that was scary to him."

-Quoted in David Mendell's Obama: From Promise to Power, p. 148-149

Given that Barack Obama doesn't have much in the way of accomplishments or biography - see the timeline of his career here - the tales told about him at the Democratic Convention focused heavily on his first real decision as an adult, to walk away from more lucrative job opportunities in the private sector to become a "community organizer" in Chicago for less money, followed by the same decision to forego life as a big-firm lawyer to work at a plaintiffs' firm doing civil rights work after law school. Certainly the basics of this story speak well of Obama's interest in things other than money, but the truth is more complicated, and reflects as much as anything the fact that Obama's early career was driven by his political ambitions - the same ambitions that would lead him over and over again in his brief career to make accomodations with so many unsavory people and projects.

As you can see from the line about the New Rochelle train, Obama never wanted a job in the private sector. As even the New York Times notes of Obama's time after graduating college, "In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found 'more conventional work for a year' to pay off his student loans."

Obama got into the community organizing field in New York with NYPIRG (Obama in 2004: "I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well"), and as Megan McArdle has explained, the PIRGs are basically Ponzi schemes financed by exploiting their own workers; it doesn't necessarily say good things that Obama was successful in this line of work. While this did indeed entail financial sacrifice compared to the private sector, as Jim Geraghty notes, Obama's salary as a community organizer, while hardly princely, wasn't even all that bad for a guy in his 20s with no dependents, no mortgage, and no real obligations:

[T]he man who hired Obama, Jerry Kellman, [is quoted] as saying that the $12,000 was Obama's "training salary" for the first few months. "After three or four months, he was up to 20,000, and after three years he was probably making $35,000 or so."

In 1985, the year Obama began as a community organizer, that $20,000 would be the equivalent of $39,431.04 in 2007. His salary when he left Chicago[] to attend Harvard [L]aw School in 1988 would be the equivalent of $63,093.21 in 2007.

As it turns out, "[t]he Chicago-based Woods Fund provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama. In turn, Obama would later serve on the Woods board" from 1993 to 2002; it was one of the boards Obama served on that brought him in contact with Bill Ayers, who was also on the Woods board. (In fact, in one of his community organizing roles, Obama served as Director of the Developing Communities Project from 1985 to 1988, part of a coalition of groups headed by Ayers at the time).

Obama, who did not even graduate with honors from Columbia, was nonetheless able to parlay his community organizing experience into the leg up he needed to get into Harvard Law School, with letters of recommendation from a left-wing Northwestern University professor and from Percy Sutton, a former Manhattan Borough President and 1977 contender for the Democratic nomination for New York City Mayor (Sutton has claimed in a TV interview that he did so at the insistence of "Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to radical Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal"):

"I was introduced to him by a friend who was raising money for him and the friends name was Dr. Khalid al Mansour from Texas. He is the principle adviser to one of the world's richest men. He told me about Obama. He wrote to me about him and his introduction was 'there is a young man that has applied to Harvard and I know that you have a few friends left there becasue you used to go up there to speak, would you please write a letter in support of him?'...I wrote a letter in support of him to my friends at Harvard saying to them I thought there was a genius that was going to be available and I sure hoped they would treat him kindly."

(Via here, and read here about the Sutton family spokesman's vague efforts to retract the interview *). Sutton, of course, was a respected mainstream political figure; less clear is how tightly the radical al-Mansour's other connections were plugged in at Harvard as of 1989 - Prince al-Waleed would later become a great benfactor of Harvard (he's the namesake of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard, established by a $20 million gift in 2005), and Saudi money was a longstanding fundraising priority of the Law School, which in 1991 established its Islamic Legal Studies Program, bolstered by the "King Fahd Chair for Islamic Shariah Studies [which] began with a $5 million dollar donation by the Saudi royal family in 1993."

In any event, by the time Obama left Chicago for law school, he had his sights set firmly on political office:

In their conversations, he described politics--and winning political office--as the most important step toward achieving change. And, instead of seeing Harold Washington as buffeted by forces beyond his control, he now aspired to be Washington. "He was fascinated by Mayor Washington," says Kruglik. "Harold Washington inspired him to think about becoming a politician." Kruglik says that Obama wanted to follow in the mayor's footsteps: Washington had gone to law school, later becoming a state senator, then a congressman, and finally Chicago's mayor. "He told me that he was thinking of running for mayor some day, " Kruglik says.

During law school, Obama "spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national training course taught by [left-wing theorist Saul] Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation." * (More on Alinsky and Obama's community organizer days here, and on the Alinsky's explicit advocacy of dissembling and moral relativism here). He spent his first summer after law school at a large law firm in Chicago, but Obama told the senior partner who hired him that he wasn't interested in coming back to work full time because "he wanted to go into politics." Instead, he went to work for a firm that got him directly involved in Chicago's power politics:

Obama was part of a team of lawyers representing black voters and aldermen that forced Chicago to redraw ward boundaries that the City Council drew up after the 1990 census. They said the boundaries were discriminatory.

After an appeals court ruled the map violated the federal Voting Rights Act, attorneys for both sides drew up a new set of ward boundaries.

Of course, even if it wasn't his primary motivator, Obama was going to need money to do the things he wanted to do. And that's where a stroke of outrageous good fortune came in: after the New York Times wrote up his election to head the Harvard Law Review in March 1990, a literary agent called him out of the blue and offered to get him a book deal. (You have to have some knowledge of the book business to know how bizarre it is for any non-famous person to get solicited to write a book with no manuscript, let alone a 28-year-old law student with no prior publications). Obama got a six figure book deal with a major publisher but was unable to complete the book. Undeterred, his agent landed him a second book deal with a $40,000 advance, and at some point he switched from the planned book on race relations to a memoir. Despite being given an office to work from at the University of Chicago, he still didn't finish the thing until he took time off to go back to Indonesia and write, finally having Dreams From My Father published in time to launch his run for office in 1995; it somehow got reviewed by both the New York Times and the Boston Globe.

(1) Rev. Wright, Fr. Pfleger & Racialism

The most notorious of Obama's associations is his spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the United Church of Christ. You can find samplings of why Rev. Wright's race-baiting, his crackpot anti-American conspiracy theories and his all-purpose loathing of this country have caused Obama so much justifiable grief at the following links * * * * *. Obama has written movingly of the impact that Wright's preaching had of shaking him from his agnosticism and leading him to Jesus, and I have no way of evaluating the sincerity of any of that, or for that matter criticizing the strange ways that men are brought to the Lord. But the overtly political nature of Wright's preaching was evident from the very beginning, starting when ""[a]s a young biracial man building a black identity, Obama found Wright's Afrocentrism appealing. The first time he visited the church, in 1985, he saw a 'Free South Africa' sign on the lawn." As he sat through years of Wright's fiery sermons, Obama could easily, at any time, have chosen to move on to a less divisive church (Protestants have no particular religious obligation to stay with any one preacher or congregation), but as the liberal magazine Salon explains, Obama had obvious political motives for coming to and staying with Rev. Wright:

[J]oining a black mega-church was also a quick way for a young man on the move on the South Side of Chicago to address some gaps in his resume.

In any American town, it's not uncommon for anyone launching a business enterprise that depends on name recognition and personal contacts to join the Lion's Club or the Rotary and one of the biggest churches on Main Street. In "Audacity of Hope," Obama is talking about networking when he describes what brought him to Wright's church in 1987.

He was a community organizer then, and one of the black ministers with whom he was consulting suggested that the work would go more smoothly if he joined a congregation. "It might help your mission," said the pastor, "if you had a church home ... It doesn't matter where, really." The pastor was talking about Obama's community organizing mission, but he was also giving him good advice about politics.

When Obama picked a "church home," he chose one that helped him with another weak spot in his biography. Before Obama joined Trinity United, Rev. Wright warned Obama that the church was viewed as "too radical ... Our emphasis on African history, on scholarship..." But Obama joined anyway. With that act, he had become significantly blacker -- and more like local voters. Part of the cultural divide between the half-Kenyan Hawaiian and his Chicago neighbors, most of them products of the Deep South's black diaspora, was bridged.

Obama's political motivations for sidling up to Wright are evident in a 1988 essay by Obama touting the need to organize black churches:

Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership, and-most important-values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago.

* * Indeed, far from being repelled by Wright's Manichean view of race relations, Obama himself sometimes took the posture of enforcer of strict racial solidarity in Chicago:

A Chicago Defender story of 1999 features a front-page picture of Obama beside the headline, "Obama: Illinois Black Caucus is broken." In the accompanying article, although Obama denies demanding that black legislators march in perfect lockstep, he expresses anger that black state senators have failed to unite for the purpose of placing a newly approved riverboat casino in a minority neighborhood. The failed casino vote, Obama argues, means that the black caucus "is broken and needs to unite for the common good of the African-American community." Obama continues, "The problem right now is that we don't have a unified agenda that's enforced back in the community and is clearly articulated. Everybody tends to be lone agents in these situations."

+++

When the 2000 census revealed dramatic growth in Chicago's Hispanic and Asian populations alongside a decline in the number of African Americans, the Illinois black caucus was alarmed at the prospect that the number of blacks in the Illinois General Assembly might decline. At that point, Obama stepped to the forefront of the effort to preserve as many black seats as possible. The Defender quotes Obama as saying that, "while everyone agrees that the Hispanic population has grown, they cannot expand by taking African-American seats." As in the casino dispute, Obama stressed black unity, pushing a plan that would modestly increase the white, Hispanic, and Asian population in what would continue to be the same number of safe black districts. As Obama put it: "An incumbent African-American legislator with a 90 percent district may feel good about his reelection chances, but we as a community would probably be better off if we had two African-American legislators with 60 percent each."

(UPDATE: Via Ed Morrissey, Stanley Kurtz and others look at how the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, under Obama's direction, spread funding around to "Afrocentric" educational programs that espoused many of Wright's racial ideas).

Obama has also come under fire for his ties to the Catholic priest Fr. Michael Pfleger, due to Fr. Pfleger's own racially incendiary remarks (more: * * *) from the pulpit of Rev. Wright's church. Fr. Pfleger, too, has a long rap sheet of extremism:

[H]e has welcomed the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan to preach in his church; he has hired prostitutes to worship there; he has been arrested for defacing billboards; and he once urged the crowd at an anti-gun rally to hunt down a gun store owner 'like a rat' and 'snuff' him.

Obama's alliance with Fr. Pfleger, "a longtime Obama friend," is similarly decades-long in duration and political in nature. Pfleger supported Obama in his primary battle with Bobby Rush in 2000. Among the many causes on which they worked together was a joint appearance in 2000 to protest the payday loan industry.

(2) Ayers & Dohrn and Alice Palmer

The hot issue of the moment is Obama's relationship with unrepentant terrorist and unreconstructed left-wing radical Bill Ayers and his wife and fellow Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dorhn, an alumna of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. I've discussed the nature of Ayers' and Dohrn's radicalism, Obama's ties to them, and the implausibility of Obama's claim to not have known who they were here, here, here, here, and here. (To add another example of Ayers' and Dohrn's decades-long national media press clipping file: Dohrn was profiled in the New York Times in 1993 *). Leaving aside for now the debate on exactly when and where Obama and his wife first met Ayers and Dohrn - among the evidence that he'd known him since the 1980s is the relationship I mentioned above between the organizations Obama and Ayers were running at the time - the short summary, from Stanley Kurtz:

From 1995 to 1999, [Obama] led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

To briefly summarize, CAC was largely Ayers' brainchild; Ayers' anti-American, left-wing beliefs haven't changed a whit since the Weather Underground days, and he now espouses the view that his radical left-wing ideas should be passed on to children through political indoctrination posing as education; and Obama, who headed the CAC's process for disbursing funds and who could not possibly have been unaware of Ayers' views on education, nonetheless funneled millions of dollars to educational projects under Ayers' direction in 1995. The core of the Ayers issue is not friendship but money, and Obama's judgment that a left-wing terrorist was an appropriate person to entrust with the education of children.

And that same year, 1995, Obama had what was essentially his coming-out party as a first-time candidate for public office - the State Senate seat to which he'd be elected the following year - at Ayers' and Dohrn's home, as his predecessor, Alice Palmer, announced that she was passing the torch to Obama:

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."

Obama and Palmer "were both there," he said.

+++

Dr. Young and another guest, Maria Warren, described it similarly: as an introduction to Hyde Park liberals of the handpicked successor to Palmer, a well-regarded figure on the left.

"When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn," Warren wrote on her blog in 2005. "They were launching him - introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."

* Obama's alliance with Ayers didn't end when he got into office, either. In 1997, Ayers' book on juvenile justice, which like everything else about Ayers was bursting with radical left-wing sentiments, got 'a rave review in The Chicago Tribune by Mr. Obama, who called it 'a searing and timely account.'" What did that book say, and how closely did Obama embrace Ayers' theories?

Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he'd like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper "structural problems of the system." Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the "normal" and the "deviant." The unfortunate result, says Ayers, is to leave the bulk of us feeling smugly superior to society's prisoners. Home detention, Ayers believes, might someday be able to replace the prison. Ayers also makes a point of comparing America's prison system to the mass-detention of a generation of young blacks under South African Apartheid. Ayers's tone may be different, but the echoes of Jeremiah Wright's anti-prison rants are plain.

Given his decision to recommend Ayers's book in the Tribune, it's fair to say that Obama is at least broadly sympathetic to this perspective. When Obama offers examples of ill-conceived legislation, he often points to building prisons: Instead of building another prison, why not expand health care entitlements? Biographer David Mendell cites Obama's irritation with fellow legislators who "grandstand" by passing tough-on-crime legislation, while letting bills designed to bring "structural change" languish. Debating Bobby Rush in 2000, Obama bragged that he had "consistently fought against the industrial prison complex." Obama's Hyde Park Herald column echoes these points.

And Ayers repaid the compliment in the book:

Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, "Minister" Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), "former mayor" Eugene Sawyer, "poets" Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and "writer" Barack Obama.

In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales.

Here are Ayers and Dohrn on national TV in 1998, reiterating how completely unrepentant they were and are:

In fact, Obama went on to collaborate closely with Ayers in 1997-98 on a joint push for "reform" of the juvenile justice system, including appearing on a panel with Ayers hosted by Michelle Obama at the University of Chicago, where Obama was then teaching and Michelle working. Ayers donated $200 to Obama's campaign in 2001, and Obama appeared on another panel with Ayers at a conference Dohrn spoke at as late as 2002.

More on Obama, Ayers, Dohrn and Ayers' and Dohrn's radicalism: * * * * And here's Obama's original effort to downplay the relationship.

At the meeting at Ayers & Dohrn's house, Obama was introduced by the woman who was then vacating the seat, Alice Palmer. * Obviously the blessing of the incumbent is a thing of great usefulness - what convinced Palmer that Obama was an ideological comrade? Consider who Alice Palmer is, and what that says as well about the district Obama was courting:

Ten years earlier she was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group.

Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's 1983 Prague Assembly, part of the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement....

In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an article for the Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily World, now the People's Weekly World. It detailed her experience attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how impressed she was by the Soviet system.

Palmer gushed at the "Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better education" and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets' most recent five-year plan, attributing its success to "central planning."...

(3) Rashid Khalidi, AAAN, and Ali Abunimah

Obama also had a longstanding relationship with Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi, among other Palestinian activists going back to a class Obama took with Edward Said at Columbia. Khalidi has acted as an adviser and spokesman for the PLO, which of course was long on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations for obvious reasons: "From 1976 to 1982, Mr. Khalidi was a director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA. Later he served on the PLO 'guidance committee' at the Madrid peace conference." * (Khalidi denies that the PLO ever formally employed him). Khalidi was, typically enough, "practically the best friend of Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers features Khalidi in some of his books about how to politicize the teaching for students....Bill Ayers publish[ed] Rashid Khalidi’s essay in [his] book of collected essays".

Khalidi's wife headed the Arab American Action Network, which received grants from the Woods Fund during Obama's and Khalidi's tenure on the Woods Fund's board, including $40,000 in 2001 and $70,000 in 2002. (More on AAAN, its vice president Ali Abunimah and his website Electronic Intifada, which frequently refer to Israel as an "apartheid" state, here: * * * * * * * * * *) And he, too, repaid the favor: "Khalidi, a former spokesman for Yasser Arafat, held a fundraiser for Obama in 2000 during his unsuccessful bid for Congress." For his part, Obama spoke warmly in 2003 about many meals shared at Khalidi's house.

The LA Times presents Khalidi as a "moderate" by Palestinian standards:

He is seen as a moderate in Palestinian circles, having decried suicide bombings against civilians as a "war crime" and criticized the conduct of Hamas and other Palestinian leaders. Still, many of Khalidi's opinions are troubling to pro-Israel activists, such as his defense of Palestinians' right to resist Israeli occupation and his critique of U.S. policy as biased toward Israel.

This would be more encouraging if not for the long history of dissembling for Western audiences practiced by the PLO and its spokespeople.

Khalidi is hardly Obama's only tie to people and groups who take a hardline pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli view. More recently at his side was his presidential campaign's former senior foreign policy adviser Samantha Power. (Note the video here). Another is Obama military adviser Merrill "Tony" McPeak. * This is how we end up with Palestinians in Gaza phone-banking for Obama * and kind words for Obama from Hamas * and Jesse Jackson last week telling a foreign audience "that, although 'Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades' remain strong, they'll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House". And MyDD.com quotes Abunimah having this to say about Obama's own efforts to cater to Palestinian anti-Israel sympathies in Chicago:

I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator -- when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time. I remember personally introducing him onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. And that's just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation.

* Certainly despite Obama's assurances today, his courage in standing up for Israel has never proven to be much of an obstacle to cozying up to those who mean it ill.

(4) The New Party

Obama wasn't content to give radicals, terrorists and racists his money, his name and his seat in a pew; he also went and joined the New Party, a far-left outfit that served as an umbrella coalition of Marxists and others too far to the left for the Democratic Party. * * Under the laws in effect at the time - changed by a 1997 Supreme Court decision - it was possible for candidates in Illinois to run on two party lines, and Obama sought out and received the New Party line endorsement - in fact, to do so, he had to follow New Party policy requiring all NP-endorsed candidates to sign a contract supporting the party's agenda. Obama was undoubtedly viewed and touted by the New Party as a member, and sought to leverage that membership to appeal to the NP base: "Barack Obama, victor in the 13th State Senate District, encouraged NPers to join in his task forces on Voter Education and Voter Registration." * As discussed below, the NP connection also cemented his relationship with ACORN.

The far Left didn't forget Obama's NP days after the party essentially faded from the scene; in 2000, the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America wrote warmly of him:

Barak Obama is serving only his second term in the Illinois State Senate so he might be fairly charged with ambition, but the same might have be said of Bobby Rush when he ran against Congressman Charles Hayes. Obama also has put in time at the grass roots, working for five years as a community organizer in Harlem and in Chicago. When Obama participated in a 1996 UofC YDS Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy.

+++

What does Obama really believe about all these people? Is the real Obama the deeds of yesterday, or the more soothing words of today, when he distances himself from so many of his old friends?

I don't actually pretend to know whether Barack Obama shares the beliefs of Bill Ayers; I only know that he was content to send millions of dollars Ayers' way to "educate" the children of Chicago and give a glowing review to Ayers' book. I don't actually pretend to know whether Barack Obama shares the beliefs of Rev. Wright; I only know that he was content to sit in Wright's pews for two decades, bring his young daughters to have their heads filled with Wright's ravings, donate to Wright's church, declare Wright to be his spiritual mentor and name his best-selling book after one of Wright's incendiary sermons. I don't actually pretend to know whether Barack Obama shares the beliefs of the New Party; I only know that he was content to put his name on their party line and sign a contract to support their platform. (For that matter, I don't even pretend to know for certain whether Barack Obama shares the sex education agenda of Planned Parenthood; I only know that he was content to push their agenda through the State Senate and never object to statutory language extending sex education all the way down to kindergarteners).

In short: maybe Obama isn't a dyed-in-the-wool radical left-wing culture warrior; maybe he was just too afraid to stop lending his moral and financial support to such people and stop currying their favor. Either way, he never stood against them in any way. And the pattern of his relationship with the extremists would be repeated.

ACORN's rap sheet for voter fraud alone is extensive. This is "an organization that has a "decade long history of voter fraud, embezzlement and misuses of taxpayer funds" that Consumer Rights League Chief Public Advocate, James Terry testified about last month to the House Judiciary." For example: flagrantly fraudulent voter registrations in Nevada; "5,000 ACORN registrants in St. Louis were sent letters by election officials asking the recipient to contact them. Fewer than 40 responded"; "In Kansas City, 15,000 ACORN registrations have been questioned and in November, 4 ACORN employees were indicted for fraud. Additionally ACORN officials have been indicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and there are on-going investigations in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Tennessee." * * * * * * * * * * * *

Obama could not be more closely tied to ACORN if he was an oak tree:

Meeting last November with the leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) - the nationwide network of left-wing community groups that taps government money for a host of causes - Obama declared: "I've been fighting alongside Acorn on issues you care about my entire career," including representing Acorn in a court case in Illinois. Acorn members apparently reciprocated by working hard to turn out voters for Obama's Illinois campaigns, according to a 2003 piece in the magazine Social Policy by a Chicago-area Acorn organizer. After the candidate's November appearance, Acorn's affiliated political action committee endorsed Obama for president.

*

* What he now admits to is having been their lawyer: "the Obama campaign has sought to distance the Senator from the radical organization, claiming Obama merely represented ACORN in a lawsuit enforcing the Illinois 'Motor Voter' law." * *

A sampling of Obama's ties to ACORN, and specifically to the aspect of ACORN - its voter registration drives - that are at the heart of its criminal activity:

Obama trained ACORN activists. A 1995 Chicago Reader article on Obama stated "Obama continues his work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons." Obama also ran Project Vote, known for widespread voter fraud, which Time magazine called "a non-partisan arm" of ACORN.

+++

During the Democrat primary, the Obama campaign paid Citizen Services Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, more than $800,000.

A payment that Obama's campaign somehow managed to misreport to the FEC. * Obama's "Fight the Smears" website likewise falsely denied his role in training ACORN activists until confronted by evidence contradicting his denials. *

Project Vote was, in fact, an important part of the groundwork for getting Obama ingratiated with Chicago Democrats barely a year after leaving law school:

In 1992 Obama took time off to direct Project Vote, the most successful grass-roots voter- registration campaign in recent city history. Credited with helping elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the U.S. Senate, the registration drive, aimed primarily at African-Americans, added an estimated 125,000 voters to the voter rolls

Conveniently enough, it appears that at one point, ACORN, Project Vote, and the New Party all listed as headquarters the same address in Brooklyn. Obama is, of course, ACORN's favorite politician:

[ACORN] Founder Toni Foulkes enthusiastically backed Obama's U.S. Senate run in 2004, declaring: "ACORN is active in experimenting with methods of increasing voter participation in our low and moderate income communities to virtually every election. But in some elections we get to have our cake and eat it too: work on nonpartisan voter registration and GOTV, which also turns out to benefit the candidate we hold dear [Obama]."

By Foulkes' own admission, ACORN's ties to Obama run straight through Obama's career in Illinois:

Foulkes claims that Acorn specifically sought out Obama's representation in the motor voter case, remembering Obama from the days when he worked with [former Chicago ACORN leader] Talbot. And while many reports speak of Obama's post-law school role organizing "Project VOTE" in 1992, Foulkes makes it clear that this project was undertaken in direct partnership with Acorn. Foulkes then stresses Obama's yearly service as a key figure in Acorn's leadership-training seminars.

At least a few news reports have briefly mentioned Obama's role in training Acorn's leaders, but none that I know of have said what Foulkes reports next: that Obama's long service with Acorn led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama's early political campaigns - his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000... With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago Acorn leaders, by the time of Obama's 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and Acorn were "old friends," says Foulkes.

Of course, Foulkes' article has since disappeared from the web.

And like Ayers - and sometimes through Ayers - ACORN was a recipient of money from Obama's tenure as a director of the charitable Woods Fund:

Chicago ACORN Received Grants Of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002), And $40,000 (2002) From The Woods Fund.

(1) It's Good To Have Friends

Obama's first run for public office was at age 34 in 1996, when Alice Palmer announced she was leaving her State Senate seat to run for Congress. As noted above, Palmer was one of Obama's many far-left allies. As it turned out, Palmer lost her bid for Congress (to Jesse Jackson Jr, now Obama's national campaign co-chair) and tried to come back and reclaim her job, but Obama stayed in the race. Unlike Sarah Palin's three hotly contested races against incumbents, however, Obama and his allies were able to use the legal machinery of the city avoid a contested campaign:

According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama operatives flooded into the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners on Jan. 2, 1996, to begin the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of Palmer and three other lesser-known contenders for her Illinois state Senate seat. They kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.

The Trib account attributes his success to the fact that "when he filed his challenge[] the city of Chicago had 'just completed a massive, routine purge of unqualified names that eliminated 15,871 people from the 13th District rolls.'" and his "competitors had 'relied on early 1995 polling sheets to verify the signatures.'" * Obama himself faced no such challenge.

See, here is where we have to take a step back and look at the realities of how corrupt urban political machines operate...because this sort of outrageous good fortune does not, in machine-controlled cities, ordinarily fall into the lap of candidates who present any threat to the machine. Obama's opponents all just happened to get shoved off the ballot, leaving him standing unopposed? (Freddoso, at p. 5 & 246 and n. 17, cites 1994 & 1995 press accounts in the Tribune and the Sun-Times indicating that Mayor Daley was worried about Palmer running against him for Mayor, and thus his interests were served by her defeat).

This would not the last time things like this just happened to Obama's opponents, while Obama himself slid by on the greased skids. It would certainly seem as if Barack Obama has important friends who want him in high places.

There's also Obama's 2004 run for the U.S. Senate, a race in which he was generally regarded as something of a longshot (as you may recall - Freddoso cites polls showing this at p. 47 - a little more than three weeks before the March 16, 2004 primary, Obama was in a second-place tie with 17% of the vote). The favorite was Blair Hull, a multi-millionaire who spent $29 million on his campaign (Hull was the subject of a sympathetic Atlantic profile in January 2004 by liberal writer Joshua Green comparing him to Jon Corzine and not even mentioning Obama). But Hull's campaign unraveled when the Chicago Tribune pressured Hull to release his divorce records, showing a record of menacing his ex-wife including the filing of an order of protection. Now, the Trib was just doing its job as a newspaper - but how did the Trib find out where to look? After all, unsealing divorce records isn't routine - John Kerry was running for president that year and successfully resisted calls to unseal his divorce papers, without facing much pressure from the big news organizations to do so.

Well, we can make an educated guess and then some: Obama campaign chief David Axelrod had previously interviewed to work for Hull, and Freddoso notes (p. 47-48) that in the process he'd learned about some of Hull's marital history, although he protests to this day he didn't tell anybody. As the NY Times notes, "[t]he Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story." Axelrod himself is a former Tribune reporter. It's good to have friends, isn't it?

Winning the nomination for what was then a Republican-held seat meant Obama would be expected to face off against Jack Ryan, a wealthy and charismatic former investment banker and subject of a famously glowing "is he too good to be true" November 2003 profile by George Will. But Ryan's campaign, too, imploded when the Tribune persuaded a California judge to unseal Ryan's divorce records, revealing his actress wife's testimony about him pressing her to attend sex clubs. (The sympathetic judge was a Gray Davis-appointed Democrat). Again, it was nice for Obama that he had friends, and he was instead able to face off against Alan Keyes in a walkover election. (One cannot miss the irony here of Obama today complaining loudly about any discussion of his own past after using sex scandals to KO his prior opponents).

Of course, speaking of powerful and sinister friends, the fact that Obama had those well-financed opponents at one time enabled him to use a loophole in the campaign finance laws to accept $60,000 in contributions in that campaign from left-wing billionaire George Soros and his family:

Obama ... is different from most Democrats because of his willingness to embrace the controversial Soros. Shortly after Soros equated the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Obama joined him for a New York fund-raiser June 7.

The event, held at Soros' home, boosted Obama's campaign at a time he was still facing a challenge from Republican Jack Ryan....

+++

Little has been made of his connection to Soros, although it is quite unique. Not only did George Soros donate to Obama's campaign, but four other family members - Jennifer, sons Jonathan and Robert and wife Susan - did as well.

Because of a special provision campaign finance laws, the Soroses were able to give a collective $60,000 to Obama during his primary challenge.

* Then there's the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the smoking gun of Obama's ties to Bill Ayers - documents detailing Obama's and Ayers' role in the CAC were held at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but Stanley Kurtz faced a lengthy and frustrating stonewall before he was finally able to get a look at them. * (Kurtz also faced intimidation when he took to local radio in Chicago to talk about his research *). Because the one thing Obama's friends in Chicago don't want is a close look at his record.

(2) Mr. Jones and Me

You have undoubtedly already heard plenty about Obama's ties to Wright and Ayers and to Tony Rezko, who I discuss below. But probably the single most important relationship in Obama's rise, and the one that tells us the most about Obama, is with Emil Jones. As The New Republic's Ryan Lizza notes, when he arrived in Springfield in 1997, "Obama sought out Jones in the legislature and let him know he was eager to work with him" despite having portrayed Jones in Obama's first book as an "old ward heeler." Jones' background before he was a State Senator? "His career included 30 years on the city payroll, 20 with the Sewer Department, where he retired as an inspector in 1993. He denied wrongdoing when in 1997 the city released federal subpoenas in a ghost-payrolling investigation that included requests for records regarding his employment. He was never charged." The Chicago Tribune calls Jones "a transparent, old-school advocate of governance as the management of spoils" and notes that in 2002, "after Jones helped engineer the delivery of $4.5 million in taxpayer-funded grants to the City Colleges of Chicago, it was revealed that $300,000 of that money made its way to a firm run by his relatives."

Obama accomplished little during his first six years as a State Senator, as a backbench member of the minority party:

Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama's seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative ­achievements.

Jones became the State Senate President when the Democrats took the majority in 2003, and basically created most of Obama's legislative record by adding Obama's name on other people's bills. As Jones once said (apparently at Obama's instigation), "I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator":

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen," State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

"I don't consider it bill jacking," Hendon told me. "But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book."

During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama's stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law - including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.

It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics - and he couldn't have done it without Jones.

+++

Jones further helped raise Obama's profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news headlines.

(See also Freddoso pp. 27-33. Taking credit for other people's legislative work is a pattern Obama has continued in Washington). What did Jones get out of the relationship?

So how has Obama repaid Jones?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones's Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I'll never forget what he said:

"Some call it pork; I call it steak."

Even the New York Times noticed Obama's patronage of Jones:

Mr. Obama secured several million dollars for a project at Chicago State University. Emil Jones Jr., the president of the Illinois State Senate and an early and powerful political benefactor of Mr. Obama's, has been a dogged champion of Chicago State, and one of Senator Obama's closest friends.

Freddoso notes at p. 32 & n. 24-25 (citing Obama's own website and this report) that Obama requested $11 million in earmarks for Chicago State, that Chicago State has named a building after Jones and his wife, and that since 2001, Jones has received about $55,000 in contributions from Chicago State's trustees, foundation directors and administrators.

What kind of patron is Emil Jones? Freddoso, again, notes (citations at at pp. 28-29 & nn. 5-10 of his book), a variety of questionable projects in which Jones got jobs and funding for his wife, son and stepson:

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last July that his son, Emil Jones III, does not have a college degree, but obtained an unadvertised $57,000 job with the Illinois Department of Commerce. The hire was made shortly after Senator Jones agreed to back Gov. Rod Blagojevich's (D.) budget plan. The younger Jones is expected to succeed his father in his senate seat.

Jones's stepson, John Sterling, owns a technology firm called Synch-Solutions, which received a contract for $700,000 of work for the state budget office in 2007. In that same year, the Chicago Sun-Times found that the company had "a $3.5 million contract from the Chicago Aviation Department, a $1.2 million contract from the cash-strapped Chicago Transit Authority and another $1.2 million from the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority . . . [and] a separate $3 million subcontract through Chicago's public schools."

In 2005, Governor Blagojevich rescinded the requirement that the director of mental health at the state's Department of Human Services be a medical doctor. This allowed Jones's wife, Lorrie, to take the position, with a salary of $186,000 - an $80,000 raise over her previous salary.

* While Jones' backing of Obama's legislative resume focused on 2003, Freddoso, among others, cites Obama biographer David Mendell to say that on the Illinois ethics reform bill that passed the State Senate in 1998 by a 52-4 vote, "former Rep. Abner Mikva convinced Jones to let Obama handle the legislation. Sen. Dick Klemm (D.) was removed as chief cosponsor and replaced by Obama on May 22, 1998 - the very day the bill passed." * * * But Obama can take all the credit he wants for that one, when you consider how it led to the final payback for Emil Jones:

Before championing a big legislative pay increase, Illinois Senate President Emil Jones provided himself with tens of thousands of dollars in interest-free loans from his campaign fund.

Under Illinois' relatively loose campaign-finance laws, there's nothing illegal about politicians dipping into their campaign funds that way. But it's highly unusual.

Since 1989, the South Side Democrat has taken out $120,528 in personal loans from his political fund and repaid $96,900 of that amount -- leaving nearly $25,000 unaccounted for.

Just last year, Jones withdrew $5,800 from his fund in 20 separate loans of $200 or $300 each between July and December.

In October alone, he had eight disbursements of $300 apiece over a 23-day period.

Last week, Jones sparked criticism when he proclaimed, "I need a pay raise." That was in support of a pending 12 percent legislative pay raise set to take effect unless legislators took steps to block it. Jones stands to see his salary rise from $91,824 to $102,547.

A government watchdog group questioned whether Jones is using his campaign for personal expenses rather than political ones, under a loophole in a 1998 law that was supposed to ban the personal use of campaign funds.

"It absolutely looks like a slush fund," says Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. "He is living under a whole set of rules that no one else in the public is."

Jones' camp declined repeated requests from the Chicago Sun-Times for comment on how he has spent the money from his interest-free loans. A top aide would say only that some of the money was spent on gasoline. Campaign records don't appear to show what the loans were for. Nor is there anything in the public record stating the terms of the loans.

As chairman of his political fund, Jones decides the loan terms -- and whether the loans ever need to be repaid.

"It's the kind of open-ended float you would not get if you went to a commercial bank and asked for a loan," says Kent Redfield, a University of Illinois at Springfield political scientist who studied Jones' records for Canary's group. "It's 'other people's money.' [Campaign contributors] don't give you money to help you out with your lifestyle. They give you money to help you out with your campaign. If you rely on your fund to augment your lifestyle, that's a conflict of interest."

* It gets worse: not only was Jones, under the Obama "ethics" bill, able to borrow money from his campaign contributions, he is allowed to keep half a million dollars of it as a golden parachute following his retirement, which was announced in August:

Part of the price for that victory was leaving a major loophole in the law. While new legislators were barred from using campaign money for personal use, those already in office could keep using the campaign money they already had for anything they wanted - Cadillacs, college tuition, whatever.

For instance, Senate President Emil Jones - who helped Obama reach the U.S. Senate - could walk away with as much as $578,000 when he retires next year. He can use that for political purposes or simply spend it as personal income, as long as he pays taxes on it.

* Typically enough, Jones is bequeathing his State Senate seat to his 30-year-old son, who will replace him on the ballot.

You want an illustration of the influence Obama could have exerted for reform if he'd wanted to? Jones spent months bottling up ethics reform legislation in the State Senate, reform with more teeth than the flaccid bill passed by Obama:

Designed as a response to the "pay-to-play politics" that have flourished under Gov. Blagojevich, the plan would bar firms with more than $50,000 in state contracts from donating to the officeholder in charge of the deals.

But the governor entirely rewrote the plan, stripping out that language and putting it in an executive order. In its place, he inserted provisions into the original legislation to deal with how lawmakers award themselves pay raises and to bar the practice by some state officeholders of holding outside, non-elected government jobs.

+++

On Wednesday, the Illinois House rejected Blagojevich's rewrite, 110-3. Under the state Constitution, the Senate has "15 calendar days" to follow suit, or the plan as originally written will die.

Just think of what Obama might have accomplished in Illinois if he'd made more calls like that.

(3) Married To The Machine

When Obama married Michelle Robinson in 1991, he was literally marrying into the city's Democratic machine:

[H]er father, Frasier Robinson, spent some time as a maintenance worker for Chicago's Department of Water Management.

However, he was a good deal more than the labourer that many seem to imagine.

Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle's father was a volunteer organiser for the city's Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago's water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 - 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.

Shortly before the Obamas were married, Michelle went and got a job at the heart of the Chicago machine:

In 1991, she wrote to Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Jarrett...offered her a job in the mayor's office. But before Michelle would accept, she asked that Jarrett have dinner with her and Barack.

Barack was worried, according to his biographer, David Mendell, that Michelle might be too straightforward and outspoken to survive in a political setting. He fretted, too, that if she was going to enter the realm of Chicago politics, she needed a mentor, someone to look out for her.

"My fiance wants to know who is going to be looking out for me and making sure that I thrive," Jarrett recalled Michelle saying. After the meal, Jarrett told the Chicago Tribune, she asked, "Well, did I pass the test?" Barack smiled and said she did.

When Michelle was hired by the Daley administration, she was an assistant to the mayor, making about $60,000 a year. But Jarrett was promoted to head the Department of Planning and Development, and took Michelle with her. Michelle's new job was "economic development coordinator," which city records describe as "developing strategies and negotiating business agreements to promote and stimulate economic growth within the City of Chicago."

From Mayor Daley's office, with the connection to the very well-connected Jarrett firmly established, Michelle went on to head the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit community organization, from 1993 until 1996, and served on its board until 2001; Barack Obama was a founding member of the board of Public Allies in 1992 *, and would go on to send them taxpayer money:

Senator Obama has trained several classes of Allies in community organizing, spoken at Public Allies Chicago events, and helped Senator Durbin secure an appropriation from the Department of Justice that successfully helped us better recruit and retain young men of color for our Chicago program and learn practices we are applying nationally.

This wasn't the only intersection between the power of Obama and his friends to secure funding and Michelle's career:

The Chicago-based Muntu Dance Theatre received a $4.5 million grant to help pay for a $10 million cultural center.

Obama's mentor in Springfield, state Sen. Emil Jones (D-Chicago), sponsored the grant. And at the time $2.25 million of the grant was disbursed, Obama's wife, Michelle, sat on the non-profit dance group's board.

Obama said in the interview that at the time of the award in 2003 his wife wasn't a board member, though tax returns of the charity indicate she sat on the board in 2002 and 2003.

(See also Freddoso p. 31). Notably, the theater's website now lists Emil Jones as "Honorary Campaign Chair" of the "Campaign for the Muntu Performing Arts Center."

In 1996, when Barack Obama was elected to the State Senate, his wife moved to a job at the University of Chicago. In 2002, she moved over from the University to its Hospital, where she "developed the University's first office of community service" and "quickly built up programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity and minority contracting." Then in 2004, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate; shortly thereafter, Michelle was given a promotion and a pay raise that more than doubled her salary "from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005." Her new duties would include "all programs and initiatives that involve the relationship between the Hospitals and the community...[and] management of the Hospitals' business diversity program." In short, she had yet again a perfect job for deciding who would and would not find favor in the community and local business with a powerful institution - and one that itself sought favor with her influential husband. In 2006, Obama tried to return the favor, requesting a $1 million earmark for his wife's employer to build a new pavillion (the earmark did not ultimately get passed).

(4) I'm Barack Obama, and I Approve This Machine

There are a number of ways for an honest politician to get in the way of a crooked machine, or of waste or fraud in the government. She can resign in protest, as Sarah Palin did in Alaska. He can hold hearings smoking out members of his own party, as John McCain has done in the Senate. She can back candidates in primary battles against the establishment, as Palin has also done in Alaska. He can bring national attention to self-interested wastes of taxpayer money, as McCain has also done in the Senate. You will look high and low in his record for Obama doing any of these things.

In fact, Obama has repeatedly either sat out opportunities to support reform in Chicago or affirmatively supported the machine. By January 2007, the Justice Department and the Chicago press had laid bare the corruption of the administration of Michelle's old boss Mayor Daley, including the May 2006 convictions of Robert Sorich, Timothy McCarthy, two of Mayor Daley's most senior aides, and two sanitation officials for what the New York Times described at the time as running "City Hall's legendary patronage machine" :

Prosecutors said Mr. Sorich and Mr. McCarthy had concocted "blessed lists" of preselected winners for certain jobs and promotions based on political work or union sponsorship. The scheme involved sham interviews, falsified ratings forms and the destruction of files to cover it up, they said.

* * * (See also Freddoso, pp. 20-26, discussing the broader pattern of bribery, shakedowns, corruption in city employment and contracting, you name it). Yet Daley, preparing for his 2007 re-election bid, had one voice spinning furiously to direct attention away from the rampant corruption: the man Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet calls "Mayor Daley's key adviser" - David Axelrod, better known now nationally as the guiding strategist and campaign manager for Obama's presidential campaign. (The NY Times: "'David Axelrod's mostly been visible in Chicago in the last decade as Daley's public relations strategist and the guy who goes on television to defend Daley from charges of corruption,' Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who is now chairman of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.") Freddoso (p. 23 & n. 72) cites a 2005 Philadelphia Inquirer article in which Axelrod declared, a la Mario Cuomo denying the existence of the Mafia, that "The so-called 'machine' doesn't exist anymore."

As Freddoso recounts (p. 26), while Daley's position remained strong, he faced two black opponents in the 2007 primary, so an endorsement from the popular Obama would help remove any remaining obstacles to re-election. * Moreover, as NPR noted at the time, before those weaker challengers stepped up, there had been "talk that the corruption issue would lead to some big-name Democrat challenging him this year (Congressmen Jesse Jackson Jr. and/or Luis Gutierrez had been mentioned)" - and Jackson, as we know, is a key Obama ally. But unlike Sean Parnell's Palin-backed challenge to Don Young in Alaska, Obama apparently didn't persuade Jackson to run, and may not even have tried. Instead, Obama endorsed Daley, and Daley endorsed Obama for president. One hand washes the other.

Notably, Obama's one serious intra-party battle in Chicago, his primary challenge to Congressman Bobby Rush in 2000, followed on the heels of Rush challenging Mayor Daley in the primary in 1999 *. David Ignatius of the Washington Post says that Obama was "[p]rodded by the Daley machine" into that race.

The second egregious example cited by Freddoso (here and at pp. 6-19) is the Stroger machine. I'll let the Huffington Post explain:

In 2006, the Cook County Board President, John Stroger, faced near-daily chronicling of the incompetence, scandal, and patronage under his administration. These revelations included not only the typical employment of family members and friends, but more disturbingly what one Chicago newspaper referred to as a "catalogue of horrors" at a County hospital and what another uncovered at the Juvenile Detention Center where staff encouraged fights among the youth in "the gladiator room". Although normally untouchable, challenging Stroger was a formidable reform candidate, Forrest Claypool, who had been endorsed by every major paper in Chicago. This 'machine versus reform' race provided Obama with a seemingly tailored opportunity to demonstrate his new brand of politics and yet, although Claypool was a senior advisor to him during his Senate race, Obama chose not antagonize the machine and remained silent throughout the campaign, even after Stroger suffered a debilitating stroke a week before the election. Following Stroger's victory (52% to 48%), local committeemen selected Stroger's son, Todd, to replace him on the general election ballot, and despite general voter outrage over this cynical act of nepotism, Obama immediately embraced Todd Stroger, calling him a "a good progressive Democrat" who will "lead us into a new era of Cook County government." To no one's surprise, since winning the general election, Todd Stroger has hired a plethora of family members and friends, while slashing essential positions and services, including nurses and law enforcement officials, and proposing massive tax increases. When asked about the situation at the County under Todd Stroger, Obama said he was not following it, something he apparently has the luxury to ignore.

* * (See Obama's letter supporting Todd Stroger here). Remember Todd Stroger next time someone asks you what Obama's definition of "progressive" is. And note once again the contrast between Obama's embrace of Todd Stroger and Palin's endorsement of a primary challenger to Lisa Murkowski. Why did Obama sit out the primary and back Todd Stroger in the general? Maybe because Obama doesn't like to rock the boat with powerful machines (How powerful are the Strogers in Chicago? Cook County Hospital is now named John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital) Maybe because Obama's close friends were also Stroger's - besides Stroger's alliance with Mayor Daley, Tony "Rezko had served as John Stroger's finance chairman and raised $150,000 for him (Stroger put Rezko's wife on the county payroll)." Or maybe because the Strogers are black and Forrest Claypool is white. No matter how you slice it, Obama put his stamp of approval on Stroger control of Cook County.

But wait! The hits keep on coming. The Tribune again:

In the 2006 Democratic primary... Obama endorsed first-time candidate Alexi Giannoulias for state treasurer despite reports about loans Giannoulias' family-owned Broadway Bank made to crime figures. Records show Giannoulias and his family had given more than $10,000 to Obama's campaign, which banked at Broadway.

Giannoulias spoke for Obama at the 2008 Convention. Bad decision? It is rumored that Tony Rezko is now talking to the feds about Giannoulias and his family (Ed Morrissey collects those reports and more background on Giannoulias here).

Freddoso also notes, at p. 19-20, Obama's 2007 endorsement of Dorothy Tillman, a corrupt, race-baiting Alderman who once brandished a gun at a city council meeting - the Chicago Tribune noted that when Obama endorsed her, Tillman "was then under fire for her stewardship of the scandal-plagued Harold Washington Cultural Center, where contracts benefited members of her family" - what mattered was that she had endorsed Obama in 2004. *

Then there's Obama's 2004 endorsement of his poker buddy State Senator Larry Walsh, a guy Obama liked so much he put thousands of Obama volunteers to work campaigning for Walsh. Walsh is now a lobbyist, and Obama has requested $6 million in earmarks for his client. And now, Walsh is under FBI investigation. (As it happens, Walsh was also tied to a Rezko construction project).

Freddoso cites this Ryan Lizza piece quoting an Obama ally:

[Obama] recognizes that Daley is a powerful man and to have him as an ally is important. While he was a state senator here and moving around in Chicago, he made sure to minimize the direct confrontational approach to people of influence and policymakers and civic leaders.

Barack Obama take on the people who run the machine? Not a chance. He'd have to stop endorsing them first.

(5) Rezko and Friends

Yet another of Obama's closest and earliest political supporters is Tony Rezko, who was convicted in June in federal court in Chicago of corrupting the government of Illinois.

[In 1999, E.J.] Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reelection. "They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest," Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself.

...[Tony] Rezko's rise in Illinois was intertwined with Obama's....he had tried to recruit Obama to work for him. Chicago had been at the forefront of an urban policy to lure developers into low-income neighborhoods with tax credits, and Rezko was an early beneficiary of the program. Miner's law firm was eager to do the legal work on the tax-credit deals, which seemed consistent with the firm's over-all civil-rights mission. A residual benefit was that the new developers became major donors to aldermen, state senators, and other South Side politicians who represented the poor neighborhoods in which Rezko and others operated. "Our relationship deepened when I started my first political campaign for the State Senate," Obama said earlier this year, in an interview with Chicago reporters.

Rezko was one of the people Obama consulted when he considered running to replace Palmer, and Rezko eventually raised about ten per cent of Obama's funds for that first campaign. As a state senator, Obama became an advocate of the tax-credit program. "That's an example of a smart policy," he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 1997....Obama and Rezko's friendship grew stronger. They dined together regularly and even, on at least one occasion, retreated to Rezko's vacation home, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

-The New Yorker

Following the M.O. he explained to Dionne, Barack Obama went out of his way to do favors for Rezko, writing to federal and state officials to get Rezko a lucrative contract to build senior citizen housing:

The deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama's former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama's state Senate district.

Obama's letters, written nearly nine years ago, for the first time show the Democratic presidential hopeful did a political favor for Rezko - a longtime friend, campaign fund-raiser and client of the law firm where Obama worked - who was indicted last fall on federal charges that accuse him of demanding kickbacks from companies seeking state business under Gov. Blagojevich.

The letters appear to contradict a statement last December from Obama, who told the Chicago Tribune that, in all the years he's known Rezko, "I've never done any favors for him."

Among the direct benefits to Obama in return, from his alliance with Rezko? Well, Rezko was in the business of demanding state jobs for people he favored, sending Gov. Blagojevich (who was identified in the indictment of Rezko as "Public Official A" under Rezko's corrupt influence) a list of 39 people he wanted jobs given to - including "two people who appear to have Obama links and a third who's now an Obama presidential campaign staffer." A very valuable thing to have in politics, a man who will arrange jobs for your campaign staff between campaigns.

Obama also got significant campaign contributions from Rezko: "Over the years, Rezko, Mahru, their wives and businesses have given more than $50,000 to Obama's campaign funds, records show. And Rezko has helped raise millions more." Rezko's corruption also extended into Iraq; federal prosecutors have argued that Rezko paid a $1.5 million bribe to get a contract in Iraq, which naturally involved yet another kickback donation to Obama. (Rezko's corrupt Iraq connections included still seedier and more ominous figures including a Saddam-linked billionaire, although efforts to tie the Iraqi connections to Obama have been speculative at best). To say nothing of a $10,000 contribution in 2004 funded by a recipient of a $250,000 kickback from a corrupt Rezko deal, from a donor whose son was then awarded an internship in Obama's U.S. Senate office.

Rezko, in fact, himself offered Obama a job straight out of law school in 1991:

He once told the Chicago Tribune that he had briefly considered becoming a developer of affordable housing. But after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he turned down a job with Tony Rezko's development company, Rezmar, choosing instead to work at the civil rights law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, then led by Allison Davis.

Rezko went on to be Obama's original, founding and most significant fundraiser:

When Obama opened his campaign for state Senate in 1995, Rezko's companies gave Obama $2,000 on the first day of fund-raising. Save for a $500 contribution from another lawyer, Obama didn't raise another penny for six weeks. Rezko had essentially seeded the start of Obama's political career.

Rezko's projects were not so beneficial to the not-so-well-connected citizens who lived in them, and his predations victimized Obama's own constituents who were left to live in decrepit housing - and other close Obama allies were similarly involved in developing substandard housing projects:

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.

Allison Davis, a major fund-raiser for Obama's US Senate campaign and a former lead partner at Obama's former law firm. Davis, a developer, was involved in the creation of Grove Parc and has used government subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,500 units in Chicago, including a North Side building cited by city inspectors last year after chronic plumbing failures resulted in raw sewage spilling into several apartments.

...Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations.

Butler and Davis did not respond to messages. Rezko is in prison; his lawyer did not respond to inquiries.

+++

Over the next nine years [1989-98], Rezmar used more than $87 million in government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000 apartments in 30 Chicago buildings. Companies run by the partners also managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.

Rezmar collected millions in development fees but fell behind on mortgage payments almost immediately. On its first project, the city government agreed to reduce the company's monthly payments from almost $3,000 to less than $500.

By the time Obama entered the state Senate in 1997, the buildings were beginning to deteriorate. In January 1997, the city sued Rezmar for failing to provide adequate heat in a South Side building in the middle of an unusually cold winter. It was one of more than two dozen housing-complaint suits filed by the city against Rezmar for violations at its properties.

People who lived in some of the Rezmar buildings say trash was not picked up and maintenance problems were ignored. Roofs leaked, windows whistled, insects moved in.

Where was Obama?

Eleven of Rezmar's buildings were located in the district represented by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his district. So was Jones's building with rats in the walls and Frizzell's building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area represented by Obama.

But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in Rezmar's buildings.

After Rezko's assistance in Obama's home purchase became a campaign issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration of Rezmar's buildings never came to his attention. He said he would have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known.

Other local politicians say they knew of the problems.

* Doug Ross has a great photo essay on Obama's blind eye towards Rezko's abuses. You can read the Obama campaign's decidedly lawyerly responses here (Sample: "Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as matter of routine. Further questions about their condition should be addressed to the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority]. It is our understanding that, according to CHA, the buildings owned by Rezmar were maintained in good condition and good standing." Because, you know, the Chicago government is always diligent and trustworthy where guys like Rezko are concerned.)

Obama, while on the board of the charitable Woods Fund, steered $1 million to Davis. He was, of course, not just a low-income housing developer but also the boss who had given Obama a job out of law school:

Obama began serving on the Woods Fund board in 1993, the same year he was hired as an associate lawyer with Davis' small Chicago law firm, Davis Miner Barnhill. Obama kept working there until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

The grant to Davis is intertwined with Obama's effort to steer taxpayer money to Rezko:

As a developer, Davis' partners have included Tony Rezko, the now-indicted political fund-raiser who has been among Obama's biggest political supporters.

A few months after Davis left the law firm, Obama won his first political office -- a seat in the Illinois Senate. His campaign contributors included Rezko and Davis.

Two years later, Obama wrote to city and state officials, urging them to give money to New Kenwood LLC, a company that Davis and Rezko formed to build an apartment building for low-income seniors at 48th and Cottage Grove.

Davis and Rezko were building that project in 2000 when Davis approached the Woods Fund, seeking its investment in future projects.

Consider what Obama got out of working for Davis' firm. In 2007, during the primaries, Obama cracked at John Edwards' expense that his preference for making change rather than money was "why I didn't become a trial lawyer." But of course Obama was, technically, employed by a trial-lawyer firm, and participated in class action filings against big corporations. But in so many ways, the job seems to have been little more than a sinecure for an aspiring politician - hence the time off to run a voter-registration drive to help a Democrat get elected to the US Senate, hence the time off to go to Indonesia to finish his book, hence keeping him on the part-time payroll while in the State Senate, hence Obama's secrecy about what particular clients he represented.

As for Rezko, he too was no ordinary donor or bundler for Obama; it was Rezko whose help was necessary to help Obama buy his home, the place where his wife sleeps and his children play with their toys:

Two years ago, Obama bought a mansion on the South Side, in the Kenwood neighborhood, from a doctor. On the same day, Rezko's wife, Rita Rezko, bought the vacant lot next door from the same seller. The doctor had listed the properties for sale together. He sold the house to Obama for $300,000 below the asking price. The doctor got his asking price on the lot from Rezko's wife.

Last year, Rita Rezko sold a strip of that vacant lot to Obama for $104,500 -- a deal Obama later apologized for, acknowledging that people might think he got a favor from Rezko. Obama called the episode "boneheaded'' and a "mistake.''

* In fact, the adjacent property fairly clearly was not of any independent use to Rezko. Basically, Rezko's wife's purchase of the lot had no purpose other than to subsidize Obama's mansion. A payoff that hits, literally, close to home for Obama.

Patrick Fitzgerald's prosecutorial net has been closing of late around Rezko and his corrupt circle. Gov. Blagojevich has admitted that he's been interviewed multiple times by federal investigators. (Naturally, Obama endorsed Blagojevich's re-election in 2006). Rezko is now talking to federal prosecutors, and federal investigators apparently now think they have enough to indict Gov. Blagojevich himself. * "[F]ederal agents are preparing charges of tax fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice against the governor... involving alleged trading of jobs for five-figure campaign donations" and Blagojevich's wife receiving "$200,000 in real estate commissions - some on deals done with the convicted Tony Rezko [that] allegedly coincided with the award of state contracts by her husband's administration" Even some Illinois Democrats have had talk of impeaching Blagojevich. *

As Rudy Giuliani put it, if Obama never found any corruption to battle in Chicago or in the Illinois statehouse, it's because "he's just not observant."

(1) Pork and Earmarks

As I noted in Part I of this series, one of the major controversies of the last several years in American politics has been pork barrel spending, and specifically "earmarks" - legislative directions that money be routed to particular projects. Earmarks are not an enormous part of the budget - in the last debate, Obama dismissed $18 billion as being basically chump change - but they contribute to governmental bloat, and more problematically the reasons why politicians like directing money to benefit particular people often get them in ethical or legal trouble.

As I also discussed in Part I, on the most notorious pork project in recent years, Obama voted against Tom Coburn's effort to strip funding from the "Bridge to Nowhere" and send it to victims of Hurricane Katrina, presumably out of fear that such a vote would bring down retaliation on his own pork barrel. That said, Obama does deserve some credit on one corner of Coburn's Porkbusters campaign: when Coburn needed a Democratic sponsor in 2006, Obama stepped up and co-sponsored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, a/k/a the Coburn-Obama bill, capping off the Porkbusters crusade for earmark transparency by creating an internet database of federal spending requests; as I wrote at the time:

H. Res. 1000 and the Coburn-Obama bills don't cut a dime by themselves, but anybody who knows Washington can tell you that changing the procedures is half the battle; by providing increased public and media oversight over earmarks and pork-barrel spending - as well as simply a better mechanism for Members to see what they are voting on and at whose behest - the rule and the bill together provide a first step towards getting the pork problem under at least the beginnings of control.

While the indefatigable Coburn carried the laboring oar on the bill - as he did in the battle against the Bridge to Nowhere - Obama certainly deserves some credit for co-sponsoring it, a move that was not entirely popular in the Senate or within his own caucus. Of course, the main opposition at the time was Old Bull GOP Senators like Ted Stevens and Trent Lott, not exactly Obama's best buddies. In any event, Obama's record on the spending itself is nonetheless poor.

For his Senate career, Obama has requested nearly $1 billion in earmarked spending all by himself, "$931.3-million... nearly a million dollars for every [working] day that Obama's been in the United States Senate." Obama repeatedly voted against Coburn's initiatives to rein in pork and earmarks, including an effort to re-route bike path funding to bridge safety after the bridge collapse in Minnesota. Looking at the watchdog groups that follow this stuff (these are conservative groups, but they don't hesitate to take on Republicans who go astray on these issues), Citizens Against Government Waste gave Obama a lifetime rating of 22 out of 100, and the Club for Growth rated him a 33 out of 100 for 2007. And the earmarking was already a habit from his State Senate days, as "Obama doled out more than $3.6 million in state grants in just the last half of his state legislative career, records show...Records from 1997 to 2000 weren't available." Another report states that "Obama awarded about $6 million for everything from literacy programs and park improvements to drill team uniforms and jazz appreciation events."

When you turn to specific cases, Obama's record doesn't get prettier:

+In 2001, Obama was desperate for cash after maxing out his credit cards to cover debts from his unsuccessful run for Congress. Enter the kind of donor who seems to come out of the woodwork whenever Obama needs help:

Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell Jr. paid Obama an $8,000-a-month retainer to give legal advice to his growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange. It allowed Obama to supplement his $58,000 part-time state Senate salary for over a year with regular payments from Blackwell's firm that eventually totaled $112,000.

A few months after receiving his final payment from EKI, Obama sent a request on state Senate letterhead urging Illinois officials to provide a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin.

Killerspin specializes in table tennis, running tournaments nationwide and selling its own line of equipment and apparel and DVD recordings of the competitions. With support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, the company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its tournaments.

Yes, that's right: taxpayer money for ping-pong tournaments. All for the greater good of retiring Obama's campaign debts. How critical was the money from Blackwell to Obama's financial well-being?

Obama's tax returns show that he made no money from his law practice in 2000, the year of his unsuccessful run for a congressional seat. But that changed in 2001, when Obama reported $98,158 income for providing legal services. Of that, $80,000 was from Blackwell's company.

+Obama rewarded Fr. Pfleger with a $225,000.00 earmark for programs at Pfleger's church when Obama was a State Senator, and "Pfleger gave Obama's campaign $1,500 between 1995 and 2001, including $200 in April 2001, about three months after Obama announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs."

+Obama managed $200,000 for "a venture capital fund linked to the Rev. Jesse Jackson" and his Rainbow/PUSH organization.

+"Englewood got $100,000 for its botanical garden even though it was outside of his state Senate district. Obama needed votes from the neighborhood when he ran for Congress - but after he lost, he reneged on a promise to complete the project. Nothing but a plywood gazebo and a field of weeds sits on the garden plot now."

+In one case, Obama basically bought off an organization founded by a guy who had run against him three years earlier:

In 2001...Obama steered $75,000 to a South Side charity called FORUM Inc., which promised to help churches and community groups get wired to the Internet. Records show five FORUM employees, including one who had declared bankruptcy, had donated $1,000 apiece to Obama's state Senate campaign.

As the grant dollars were being disbursed to FORUM, the Illinois attorney general filed a civil lawsuit accusing the charity's founder of engaging in an unrelated kickback scheme. Just days after the suit was filed, Obama quietly returned the $5,000 in donations.

+Even some of the more reputable-sounding earmarks have something in them for Obama's friends:

His campaign's list said the senator had secured $1.3 million of an $8 million request in 2006 for a high-explosive technology program for the Army's Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The list said the program was overseen by General Dynamics.

One of Mr. Obama's top supporters, James S. Crown, serves on the board of General Dynamics, a military contractor. Mr. Crown is a member of Mr. Obama's national finance committee.

Mr. Obama also secured $750,000 of a $3 million request for renovation of a space center named for Mr. Crown's grandfather, Henry Crown, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

And there's more

Senator Obama's ties to the Crowns run deeper than one corporate earmark. Paula and Lester Crown are also both directors of the Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, an organization for which Senator Obama has requested a total of $7 million in earmarks since 2006. The first was a request for $4 million in 2006 to fund the Children's Memorial Medical Center's Electronic Medical Record Project, and the second was a request for $3 million in 2008 to build an intensive care unit. All told, one third of the directors at CMH, including the Crowns, have donated $95,124 to Barack Obama’s senate campaign, and $119,137 to his presidential campaign. These include Director Vicki Heyman, who along with her husband is a prominent Democratic fundraiser and bundler for the Obama campaign. In total, bundlers on the CMH board and their relatives, the Crowns included, have raised and pledged a total of at least $1.15 million for Obama for America. To top it all off, James Crown and his wife Paula are both bundlers for the presidential campaign, and are members of his National Finance Committee. James Crown was also on Barack Obama's 2004 campaign finance committee, and is currently co-chair of his Illinois finance committee.

+As McCain has noted, Obama in 2008 managed to snag more than $3 million in federal dollars for a projector for a planetarium in Chicago, after requesting $300,000 for the same project in 2006. How'd they get his attention? "The Chairman and two of the Vice Chairman of the Adler Planetarium Board of Trustees raised a total of almost $250,000 for Sen. Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign. The Adler Planetarium was probably pleasantly surprised when they found that their earmark increased by $2.7 million dollars, in other words, by a factor of ten." *

+"As a state senator, Democrat Barack Obama awarded $75,000 in government grants to a Chicago social service organization led by a rabbi who is also his wife's cousin, records show."

(2) Spending

In contrast to the tough and unpopular line-item veto decisions made by Sarah Palin even in good budgetary times in Alaska, Obama's spending record in Illinois shows a man incapable of saying "no" to domestic spending, even stealing a famous 1999 line from George W. Bush (I noted this previously here):

In a 2007 speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), Obama touted his Illinois legislative experience and challenged members of Sharpton's group to find a candidate with a better record of supporting the issues they cared about. ...Intrigued by Obama's challenge to Sharpton's group, Randolph Burnside, a professor of political science, and Kami Whitehurst, a doctoral candidate, both at the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, decided to put Obama's Illinois record to the test. The two scholars made a study of bills sponsored and cosponsored by Obama during his Illinois State Senate career.

Published in the Journal of Black Studies, the results are striking. Burnside and Whitehurst produced two bar graphs, one representing bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, arranged by subject, and a second displaying bills Obama joined as a cosponsor. In the chart depicting bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, the bar for "social welfare" legislation towers over every other category. In the chart of Obama's cosponsored bills, social welfare legislation continues to far exceed all other categories, although now crime-related bills are visibly present in second place, with regulation and tax bills close behind. According to Burnside and Whitehurst, other than social welfare and a bit of government regulation, "Obama devoted very little time to most policy areas."

This brings us to what is perhaps the most striking result of our tour through Obama's Springfield days. Conventional wisdom has it that John McCain holds a political advantage over Obama on war and foreign policy issues, while Obama is favored to handle the economy. Yet Obama's economic experience is largely limited to social welfare spending. Indeed, precisely because of his penchant for spending, Obama's fingerprints are all over Illinois's burgeoning fiscal crisis.

The Illinois state budget has been in an ever-widening crisis since 2001. In an April 2007 report, a committee of top Chicago business leaders warned that the state was "headed toward fiscal implosion." Illinois's unfunded pension debt is the highest in the nation, while Illinois is sixth in the nation in per capita tax-supported debt. Yet the Illinois General Assembly-now controlled by Obama's Democratic allies-churns out at will exactly the sort of spending programs Obama pushed for, with only partial success, under the Republicans. The result is a fast-growing gap between revenues and expenditures (unimpeded by the statutory requirement of a balanced budget), rising fears of fiscal meltdown, finger-pointing, and political gridlock.

A watershed moment in Illinois's fiscal decline came in 2002, when crashing receipts and Democratic reluctance to enact spending cuts forced Republican governor George Ryan to call a special legislative session. While Ryan railed at legislators for refusing to rein in an out-of-control budget, the Chicago Tribune spoke ominously of an "all-consuming state budget crisis." Unwilling to cut back on social welfare spending, Obama's chief partner and political mentor, senate Democratic leader Emil Jones, came up with the idea of borrowing against the proceeds of a windfall tobacco lawsuit settlement due to the state.

This idea sent the editorial pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune into a tizzy. Editorialists hammered cut-averse legislators for "chickening out," for making use of "tricked-up numbers," for a "cowardly abdication of responsibility," and for sacrificing the state's bond rating to "short-term political gains." As critics repeatedly pointed out, borrowing against a onetime tobacco settlement-instead of balancing the budget with regular revenues-would be a recipe for long-term fiscal disaster.

What was Obama doing while all this was going on? He was promoting the tobacco securitization plan in his Hyde Park Herald column, railing against the governor in the Defender for balancing the budget "on the back of the poor," and voting to override cuts in treasured programs like bilingual education. Actually, far from "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor," the governor had trimmed evenly across all the state's most expensive programs. In the end, Ryan did force a number of cuts, yet the resistance of Obama and his allies took a toll. When, just a year later, Democrats added control of the governorship and state senate to their existing control of the house, they revealed that the state deficit had reached $5 billion-far larger than most had feared. Since then it's been a swift downhill tumble toward fiscal implosion for Illinois.

Obama hasn't been better in Washington - to pick one egregious example, he voted for the appalling farm bill. Obama remains a major supporter of the ethanol boondoggle (see Freddoso pp. 92-93) - the issue on which every major presidential candidate but John McCain has kowtowed in order to compete in the Iowa caucus - and perhaps not coincidentally, Obama is very closely tied to the ethanol industry, and "briefly provoked a controversy by flying at subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation's largest ethanol producer and is based in his home state." (Now it turns out that even his vaunted "95%" tax cut plan consists largely not of tax cuts but of disguised social welfare spending, by cutting checks to people who currently pay no taxes.)

(3) Housing

You are probably familiar by now with Obama's role in joining with Senate Democrats to resist needed reforms of the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the role that played in the current housing crisis, as well as Obama's status as the largest annual recipient of Fannie/Freddie campaign cash, his tabbing of one Fannie CEO to head his veep vetting process and another's role (if you believe him) as an Obama economic advisor. *

Some may view this as somehow an odd coincidence, that Obama was so especially popular with these enterprises. But if you have read this far, you've undoubtedly noticed how many of Obama's shady associations and grubby favors have involved housing interests. Obama's in this all the way. For example, Obama's old friends at ACORN likewise have their hands in the subprime debacle:

ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC) was beyond knee-deep in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failures which have riveted our economy. Promoting an ACORN housing development in Texas on its website in 2006, ACORN boasted "in addition to providing access to AHP grants, ACORN's lending partners provide low cost, easier to qualify for mortgage loans."

* Or consider this April 1995 Chicago Sun-Times description of ACORN's pitch to home buyers at a time when Obama was pushing his foundations to expand funding for ACORN: "You've got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don't despair: You can still buy a house." The Stanley Kurtz article has much more on ACORN's specific efforts to influence Fannie and Freddie to loosen credit standards for subprime housing loans, including this:

This sweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae's chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period [1993-95] when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today's crisis. During these years, Obama's Chicago ACORN ally, Madeline Talbott, was at the forefront of participation in those pilot programs, and her activities were consistently supported by Obama through both foundation funding and personal leadership training for her top organizers.

Finally, in June of 1995, President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary Cisneros announced the administration's comprehensive new strategy for raising home-ownership in America to an all-time high. Representatives from ACORN were guests of honor at the ceremony.

And of course, Obama in private practice participated in litigation against a major national bank to force them to extend more loans to minorities (I have no doubt that the borrowers he represented were not prime borrowers or the bank would have been much happier for their business). *

(4) Cycles of Money

As should be clear from the discussion of his ties to radicals, Obama has also benefitted from the support of those to whom he directed private funds entrusted to him. During his time on the Woods Fund board, he spread cash around to many community organizations, and lo and behold:

Dozens of the board members and officials from these organizations in turn would donate money, in many instances up to the legal limit, for Obama's Senate and Presidential races between 2004 and 2008.

For example the Woods Fund between 1999 and 2002 granted $60,000 to BPPPI. Board member and executives donated at least $16,950 to Obama's political campaigns. The Woods Fund granted the Center of Neighborhood Technology $150,000 between 1999 and 2002. Obama received over $24,000 in campaign donations from its officials. And in turn Obama made sure to seek earmarks on their behalf once he reached the U.S. Senate.

(5) Racial Favoritism

Obama in Chicago was likewise a strong proponent of using strict race-based quotas and set-asides to steer government contracting along racial lines, a practice that catered to the narrowest and most provincial interests of his constituents:

In 2004, a U.S. District Court disallowed the ordinance under which Chicago required the use of at least 25 percent minority business enterprises and 5 percent women's business enterprises on city-funded projects. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Obama and Jesse Jackson were among the prominent voices calling for a black leadership summit to plot strategy for a restoration of Chicago's construction quotas. Obama and his allies succeeded in bringing back race-based contracting.

+Obama pledged during the primaries not to pay "street money" to get out the vote in places like Philadelphia, but will be paying it for the general election.

+Obama claims not to take money from lobbyists, but he's basically playing word games:

[H]e takes money from lobbyists' spouses and holds fundraisers at the offices of law firms that lobby Congress. He won't touch money from PACs or lobbyists representing big oil and drug companies, but he happily accepts huge amounts of money from executives at those companies and many others. In fact, he's relying on two oil company executives to raise $50,000 apiece for his campaign.

Obama may like voters to think he'd cross the street rather than deal with a lobbyist, but nine of his campaign staffers are former lobbyists, and some of his informal advisers are current lobbyists.

Slate has a long list of the many exceptions to Obama's porous "no lobbyist" policies. * *

+Obama broke his pledge to McCain to stay within the public financing system. *

+Obama pledged to oppose spending by independent "527" groups on his behalf, but reversed course as such groups have been ramping up to support him.

+Obama abandoned his pledge not to run negative ads.

+Obama promised in 2004 to serve out his full Senate term without running for president in 2008. *

+Jake Tapper has noted that Obama's recent push to talk about McCain's involvement in the "Keating Five" scandal in the 1980s contradicts Obama's assertion earlier in the campaign that the Keating Five story was "not germane to the presidency." (This, while calling in Keating Five member John Glenn to stump for Obama in Ohio).

Obama has also been in hot water lately for doing nothing to prevent potentially illegal campaign donations, including possibly from foreign sources. Now, I'm not much of a starry-eyed idealist about this sort of thing, so I won't pretend for your benefit to be scandalized by Obama acting exactly like a conventional politician on a bunch of political-process issues. But once again, Obama's repeated abandonment of his prior promises on these sorts of issues reminds us yet again how malleable Obama is when it comes to any principle that stands in the way of his political self-interest.

G. Barack Obama, Man of Principle?

(1) Keep Left to Avoid The Traffic

As John McCain has now noted multiple times in their debates with no response from Senator Obama, Obama has never bucked his own party or its major interest groups in any significant way on any significant issue. Now, I'm a great believer in taking principled stands and having a coherent philosophy; the mere fact of being ideologically consistent is not necessarily in and of itself a character flaw. In fact, in a politician who is willing to take difficult stands on principle it can be positive proof of integrity.

But in Obama's case, his unwillingness to confront his own party and supporters on the issues raises two questions about his character. The first is that his career has insulated him from ever having to take a tough position and hold it under fire; until the current general election, he has never faced a contested election against a Republican or faced any real push-back from the Right (previously the only candidate to test him from his right was Hillary Clinton...think about that one a while). We have little enough evidence that Obama's positions are, or are not, deeply held convictions he would hold to at any political peril - like so much about him, they are untested. What we do know is that Obama's flurry of flip-flops this summer, most notoriously his craven capitulation on the FISA bill he had pledged to draw a line in the sand on, combined with his continuing effort in the debates to recast himself as a tax-cutter, spending-cutter and foreign policy hawk and his outright obfuscation of his position on the Born-Alive Infant Protection bill in Illinois, suggests that Obama's not actually all that willing to openly defend controversial positions.

Second, it is positively contradictory for Obama's supporters to argue that (1) his extensive ties to left-wing radicals were some sort of disingenuous camoflauge, and at the same time that (2) his rigidly left-wing voting record in public office is the mark of sincere high principle. Maybe Obama has a hardline left-wing record and far-left friends because that's who he really is, and maybe he has both because that's who he wanted to be to his constituents - but it's not plausible to separate the two.

(2) Iraqophobia

In the absence of any battles against his own side or even any principled risks taken for his own side, most odes to Obama's judgment, character and principles begin and end with his opposition to the Iraq War - his 2002 war speech and his 2007-08 primary campaign as the sole principled anti-war candidate:

In a September 26, 2007, debate at Dartmouth College, Obama congratulated himself for "telling the truth to the American people even when it's tough, which I did in 2002, standing up against this war at a time where it was very unpopular. And I was risking my political career, because I was in the middle of a U.S. Senate race."

A theme he repeated at Saddleback in August. Again, the reality is different:

Obama's best shot at the [2004] Democratic [Senate] nomination involved consolidating a coalition of lakefront liberals and African Americans. "He knew, and I knew, that the liberal progressives were key in any Democratic primary," says Dan Shomon, Obama's then-campaign manager...though it may have been unpopular to oppose the war in Washington, that was not the case among liberals in Chicago--among the first cities to pass an antiwar resolution. (Obama also had an interest in pleasing Saltzman [the organizer of the 2002 rally]. The spunky grandmother was an important local ally who has since raised more than $50,000 for his campaign.)

Nor was opposing the war likely to threaten Obama in a general election. Illinois is a reliably blue state, carried easily by Al Gore and John Kerry. The state's only Democratic senator at the time, Dick Durbin (as well as eight of Illinois's nine Democrats in the House), ultimately opposed the Iraq resolution. Moreover, Obama was a long-shot U.S. Senate candidate likely to lose and remain in his liberal Hyde Park State Senate district, probably among the nation's least pro-war enclaves.

Obama's biographer recounts the same details. The Nation quoted Obama in 2003 underlining why the African-American constituents that formed the core of his base were not inclined to support the war:

In the African-American community -- which is paid scant attention by national media -- anecdotal evidence and polling suggest there is heightened concern about the administration's credibility and the wisdom of this war. According to a new Gallup Poll, 68 percent of African-Americans now oppose the war.

"Blacks are not willing to feel obliged to support the president's agenda," explains Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama. "They are much more likely to feel that (Bush) is engaging in disruptive policies at home and using the war as a means of shielding himself from criticism on his domestic agenda."

And his 2002 speech pandered to that view, even pressing some decidedly anti-Semitic notes. Of course, after giving that one speech, Obama basically disappeared from the war debate without a trace; if you were listing the nation's loudest voices against the war in 2002 and 2003, you'd run through thousands of names before you reached Obama. From 2004 through the fall of 2006, Obama was essentially grudgingly in support of finishing the job in Iraq, and refused even to say flatly that he'd have voted against the war, telling the Chicago Tribune in July 2004, "[t]here's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." * As he pivoted to the general election in 2004, before Ryan flamed out, Obama denied that he'd ever called for withdrawal from Iraq. Only in January 2007, after the Democrats proved they could win Congressional elections with anti-war candidates and just weeks before launching his primary campaign, did Obama come out as a full-throated anti-warrior. In short, his Iraq position may never have encompassed a complete flip-flop, but it has surely tacked repeatedly with the political winds, and provides us no evidence of any particular principle or integrity on Obama's part.

H. Who Obama Isn't

Less than a month from the general election, we can say who Barack Obama isn't, but we still don't really know who he is. To be sure, Obama is to all appearances affable, a good speechmaker and a good family man, but when we look beyond talk to what the man has done, we find an awful lot not to like in such a short and parochial career.

Three times now in the debates, John McCain has challenged Obama to name an example of standing up to the vested interests on his own side or the leadership of his own party. Three times, Obama has failed to respond. Those of us who have studied his career know that that's because there is nothing he can say (the best David Axelrod could come up with was a Russ Feingold bill that passed the Senate 96-2). We can't know what Obama truly believes, and we haven't seen what it would take to get him to stand his ground under fire. We only know that time and again he's taken the path of least resistance with people who really needed someone to say "no" to them, and reaped the rewards of their favor.

A President Obama would be faced with many challenges and crises and tests, not a one of which he has ever passed. He would have the ability to appoint scores of people to federal executive, judicial and administrative agency jobs - what kind of people would he appoint to positions of responsibility? He would have control over vast quantities of federal spending - how would he spend it, how would he restrain spending, who would his spending and regulatory decisions benefit? Would he stand up to sleaze, to powerful vested interests that support his party, to ideological extremists? Can he be trusted to operate these vast powers when we know that a compliant Democratic Congress led by the likes of Charlie Rangel and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers and Chris Dodd will have no motivation to provide meaningful oversight? Everything in his record tells us that he cannot. Obama supporters who tell you otherwise are simply wishcasting their own desires and ignoring his actual record. Because Barack Obama has no record of integrity. Only words, and people who badly want to believe them.

In Part III: McCain's battles; Biden's long tradition of existence in the Senate.

Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends."

This stuff has been out there in plain sight, yet still Obama denies it:

As recently as March 2008, the Los Angeles Times also made reference to Barack Obama's involvement with ACORN:

"At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff." (LA Times, March 2, 2008)

It was also reported contemporaneously by the left-wing Chicago press:

A 1995 Chicago Reader article on Obama stated "Obama continues his work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons."

During the 2008 Democrat primary, the Obama campaign paid Citizen Services Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, more than $800,000, a payment that Obama's campaign somehow managed to misreport to the FEC

As of yet, we can only speculate about why Obama is lying about his involvement with ACORN, what other aspects of that relationship he has failed to disclose, and what other things have been conveniently "disappeared" from his Chicago past.

* - See the following on ACORN's pervasive involvement in voter fraud: * * * * * * * * * *

I think you have to look at my record and you have to look at his. Then you have to look at our proposals for our economy, not $860 billion in new spending, but for the kinds of reforms that keep people in their jobs, get middle-income Americans working again, and getting our economy moving again.

+++

So let's not raise anybody's taxes, my friends, and make it be very clear to you I am not in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy. I am in favor of leaving the tax rates alone and reducing the tax burden on middle-income Americans by doubling your tax exemption for every child from $3,500 to $7,000.

+++

When he ran for the United States Senate from Illinois, he said he would have a middle-income tax cut. You know he came to the Senate and never once proposed legislation to do that?

That's right: on three occasions, McCain used the term "middle income" to describe Americans whose incomes are in the middle of the spectrum. Apparently, Senator McCain doesn't think in terms of dividing Americans by "class" or running to represent only one such class against others; he simply looks at income groupings to discuss how his plans will affect people at different income levels. He doesn't think of himself, being a wealthy man, as being in a different class of people than everybody else. In terms of language, the difference is subtle, and for most of us the terms are interchangeable...what is telling is how indignant Senator Obama is that McCain would not think in terms of class.

Style

As we have seen before, these two show the hallmarks of their professional training. Obama's a lawyer and an academic, and he prefers to leave no point unrebutted; McCain's a fighter pilot, so he prefers to be aggressive and throw his opponent off rythm. He's clearly the more belligerent debater. Also, McCain showed up looking to debate Obama, because he's running against Obama; Obama showed up looking to debate Bush, because he's running against Bush. Thus, Obama would often launch harsh, negative attacks against Bush and mention McCain as an afterthought, whereas McCain more consistently went directly after Obama's integrity, his accomplishments, and his promises. McCain prowled around the stage and left Obama literally complaining about keeping up with him - not the dynamic you'd expect given their ages - whereas Obama stuck more to the traditional Democratic script in focusing on emoting to the crowd (McCain was more interested in channeling the audience's anger).

(BTW, the townhall debates tend to favor the Democrats, since they tend to involve a lot of people asking for personal government solutions to their problems, although Bush excelled at the town hall in 2004 against Kerry, who was stiffer and less comfortable talking about the social issues that came up. If Palin ever runs at the top of the ticket, though, I could see her doing well in that format. McCain, of course, has traditionally excelled at town halls but in more wide-ranging formats).

Obama looked much more forlorn this time when McCain was talking, much less able to stand at his podium and smile. Undoubtedly that was partly due to the lack of podiums and partly due to the aggressiveness of McCain's early attacks, especially on the Fannie/Freddie stuff (when McCain mentioned cronyism he pointed at Obama). Obama also stammered more, though he's still doing better at this than earlier in the race, not trying to ad lib without a net.

Probably the highlight of the evening was McCain shaking hands with the Chief Petty Officer...you could tell, visibly, that McCain's voice dropped to a different range and he got more comfortable and more serious when talking about national security.

Substance

It's hard to add more to the foreign policy side of this debate, which largely and in some cases verbatim repeated the first debate (other than Obama saying "If we could have intervened effectively in the Holocaust, who among us would say that we had a moral obligation not to go in?" - hmmm, maybe we should have sent troops to Europe in the 1940s to stop Hitler...) The big opening Obama created that McCain hit but never quite exploited was the fact that Obama's willing to consider going in to countries with military force for humanitarian purposes, like Clinton or Woodrow Wilson, but he lacks the willingness to stay until the job is done. That is the real lesson of the debate about the surge in Iraq (McCain again successfully called out Obama's inability to admit error on that one, drawing no response). Which of course is why McCain opposed interventions in the first place in places like Lebanon and Somalia where we didn't have the willingness to take sides, stay and fight to the finish.

Other than McCain's new plan to buy up and renegotiate mortgages (which is rather more government than I can ever get comfortable with), probably the weakest point of the night for McCain, and the one where Obama really did give a better answer, was on priorities; even when I backed McCain in 2000, I thought George W. Bush did a better job of realistically setting and ranking priorities. Obama took the Bush path in that sense tonight, and I do tip my hat to him for that. (Although you will note that he basically all but dropped entitlements off the list)

On the Fannie/Freddie issue McCain roared out of the gate well, but he could probably have used to hit that one a second time, since he really does need to hammer home his theme on that point. Unfortunately, that sort of sustained negative assault is hard to carry in the townhall format. McCain also kept up his theme of looking beyond the rhetoric to the record...Obama also never responded to McCain pointing out that Obama's never taken on his own party, since there's nothing he could say.

We did get a number of sharp contrasts tonight. On GSE reform, McCain supported legislation; Obama wrote some letters. McCain sees health care as a responsibility and favors choice and a national market, and wants to decouple health care from employemnt, Obama sees it as a right, prefers state mandates on the contents of plans, and won't answer McCain's questions about the penalties for non-participation. McCain wants a spending freeze and to take a hatchet to the budget; Obama is proposing massive new spending (he claims he'll offset the many billions in new spending with cuts in...oh, nobody really believes that) and prefers a scalpel. I think a lot of voters would like to see somebody take a hatchet to the budget for once. Obama wants to stress energy conservation, McCain more drilling and nuclear. Obama wants a "Volunteer Corps" and WPA-style highway projects as jobs programs.

Obama was clearly hugely relieved that there were no questions about Bill Ayers, as his campaign's panicked tone whenever they deal with the issue suggests concern that he's genuinely vulnerable on that point.

Both gave solid closings, McCain's was better but different.

Verdict

Naturally, it's always hard to evaluate these things free of your own views as a partisan, and hard as well to avoid dwelling on the additional things that could have been said. Clearly, this was a strong performance by McCain and an OK one by Obama. Probably, given the dynamics of the race, Obama is happier with that outcome.

In a 2007 speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), Obama touted his Illinois legislative experience and challenged members of Sharpton's group to find a candidate with a better record of supporting the issues they cared about... Intrigued by Obama's challenge to Sharpton's group, Randolph Burnside, a professor of political science, and Kami Whitehurst, a doctoral candidate, both at the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, decided to put Obama's Illinois record to the test. The two scholars made a study of bills sponsored and cosponsored by Obama during his Illinois State Senate career.

Published in the Journal of Black Studies, the results are striking. Burnside and Whitehurst produced two bar graphs, one representing bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, arranged by subject, and a second displaying bills Obama joined as a cosponsor. In the chart depicting bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, the bar for "social welfare" legislation towers over every other category. In the chart of Obama's cosponsored bills, social welfare legislation continues to far exceed all other categories, although now crime-related bills are visibly present in second place, with regulation and tax bills close behind. According to Burnside and Whitehurst, other than social welfare and a bit of government regulation, "Obama devoted very little time to most policy areas."

This brings us to what is perhaps the most striking result of our tour through Obama's Springfield days. Conventional wisdom has it that John McCain holds a political advantage over Obama on war and foreign policy issues, while Obama is favored to handle the economy. Yet Obama's economic experience is largely limited to social welfare spending. Indeed, precisely because of his penchant for spending, Obama's fingerprints are all over Illinois's burgeoning fiscal crisis.

The Illinois state budget has been in an ever-widening crisis since 2001. In an April 2007 report, a committee of top Chicago business leaders warned that the state was "headed toward fiscal implosion." Illinois's unfunded pension debt is the highest in the nation, while Illinois is sixth in the nation in per capita tax-supported debt. Yet the Illinois General Assembly-now controlled by Obama's Democratic allies-churns out at will exactly the sort of spending programs Obama pushed for, with only partial success, under the Republicans. The result is a fast-growing gap between revenues and expenditures (unimpeded by the statutory requirement of a balanced budget), rising fears of fiscal meltdown, finger-pointing, and political gridlock.

And here is how Obama responded to the fiscal mess he had helped create:

A watershed moment in Illinois's fiscal decline came in 2002, when crashing receipts and Democratic reluctance to enact spending cuts forced Republican governor George Ryan to call a special legislative session. While Ryan railed at legislators for refusing to rein in an out-of-control budget, the Chicago Tribune spoke ominously of an "all-consuming state budget crisis." Unwilling to cut back on social welfare spending, Obama's chief partner and political mentor, senate Democratic leader Emil Jones, came up with the idea of borrowing against the proceeds of a windfall tobacco lawsuit settlement due to the state.

This idea sent the editorial pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune into a tizzy. Editorialists hammered cut-averse legislators for "chickening out," for making use of "tricked-up numbers," for a "cowardly abdication of responsibility," and for sacrificing the state's bond rating to "short-term political gains." As critics repeatedly pointed out, borrowing against a onetime tobacco settlement-instead of balancing the budget with regular revenues-would be a recipe for long-term fiscal disaster.

What was Obama doing while all this was going on? He was promoting the tobacco securitization plan in his Hyde Park Herald column, railing against the governor in the Defender for balancing the budget "on the back of the poor," and voting to override cuts in treasured programs like bilingual education. Actually, far from "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor," the governor had trimmed evenly across all the state's most expensive programs. In the end, Ryan did force a number of cuts, yet the resistance of Obama and his allies took a toll. When, just a year later, Democrats added control of the governorship and state senate to their existing control of the house, they revealed that the state deficit had reached $5 billion-far larger than most had feared. Since then it's been a swift downhill tumble toward fiscal implosion for Illinois. Now ruling, the Democrats have continued their profligate ways, pushing the state's budget woes to new heights.

This was why as recently as last spring, Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich was pushing the largest tax increase in Illinois history, which proved too much even for Obama's former colleagues. If there's one thing Obama is absolutely not prepared to do, it's cut spending in tough budgetary times.

So when did Obama learn that Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a founding member of the militant Weather Underground in the 1960s?

"It was sometime after their first meetings, you know, he became aware of that,'' David Axelrod, Obama's chief campaign strategist, said on board the Obama campaign plane on a flight from Asheville, N.C., to here for tonight's debate. "I don't know the exact moment."

Obama just was not familiar with the name when he first met him?

"Yeah,'' Axelrod said. "I mean the fact is, like a lot of people who, you know, didn't live through that era, particularly who didn't live through that era in Chicago, it just wasn't, I mean, when he came to Chicago, Ayers was advising Mayor Daley on school reform issues and that was his profile was that he was an expert on education issues."

Did Obama know of Ayers' history before or after the event, a small reception for Obama's state Senate campaign in 1995 at Ayers' home?

"My understanding was that he, when he went there, he did not know, so I would say after,'' Axelrod said -- confirming that he has asked Obama about this. "Yes, yeah."

"No one is suggesting that he never knew,'' Axelrod notes of Obama, who has since repudiated Ayers' protest tactics. "I mean that's not, we weren't offering that."

Of course, it was always laughable for Obama to claim that he, a guy who went to a Stokely Carmicheal lecture in college, was represented in Congress by a former Black Panther, and immersed himself in college in "neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy" and wrote in 1995 of wanting an edgier brand of friends than "so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated," would have no idea who Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn really were.

As always with these guys, Obama supporters like Paul Begala are pushing McCain's ties to a guy they claim is the equivalent of Ayers, John Singlaub, who is...wait for it......"a decorated retired Army major general with a background in special operations and intelligence." Well, that does, in fact, tell us just as much about who McCain hangs with as Ayers does for Obama, doesn't it? Could you pick a more perfect example, short of when they were blasting McCain for associating with Bud Day, America's most highly decorated living veteran?

The gist of the charge against Singlaub seems to be that his organization was criticized for becoming a gathering place for anti-Semitic cranks and the like, but even the Politico piece admits that "Singlaub eventually won some praise from the anti-defamation group for working to purge those elements from the league." Other than that it's an attempt to refight the Iran-Contra brouhaha. Nice try.

A hilarious example of press bias against Palin occurred last Friday on "The Diane Rehm Show," a production of Washington's WAMU-FM. The exchange between hostess Rehm, caller Tom of Norwich, Vt., and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne begins at about 46:10 of the "10:00 News Roundup":

Tom: I just wonder why not more has been made of the statement by Palin during the debate last night that "Maliki and the Talabani"--this is a quote from the transcript--"also in working with us are knowing again that we are getting closer and closer to the point of victory." The Talibani obviously are our absolute enemy and have been since 9/11; Maliki, our central ally in Iraq. This to me is a tremendous blunder, revealing a very superficial familiarity with these sorts of terms.

Rehm: Thanks for calling, Tom. . . . E.J.?

Dionne: I think that "superficial" is absolutely the right word for the knowledge or the lack of knowledge Palin showed yesterday. I'm glad the caller raised that one, and I suspect there is going to be a scouring of that transcript for exactly that sort of gaffe. That has echoes of some of the stuff she said to Katie Couric.

If you look at the debate transcript, however, you will see that the reference is not to "the Talabani" but to Talabani--as in Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq.

(It was also obvious if you were actually watching the debate). You know, the other night I laughed when Joe Biden called Bosnians "Bosniaks," but before I wrote something making fun of him for this, I did a little Googling and it turned out that this was actually not one of Biden's many misstatements in the debate (most notoriously his fantasyland account of a mythical US/French offensive to drive Hezbollah out of Lebanon) - Biden's spent a fair amount of time dealing with Bosnians, and it turns out that that's actually what they call themselves. I don't always get things right here, but you know, I don't get paid to do this, and it still occurred to me to check that one before mocking Biden.

Whereas Dionne gets paid to be a pundit and to do things like sneer at Gov. Palin's ignorance of foreign affairs ... as evidenced by the fact that she knows who the President of Iraq is, and Dionne plainly does not. Remind me again what value the Washington Post gets out of employing him instead of running a rotation of bloggers who would work for peanuts?

Relatedly, apparently Matt Yglesias' Harvard education did not extend to the ability to spot satire, and not even very good satire at that (sorry Matt, you should have gone to the Law School). I don't think I have ever in my life seen so many people make such utter fools of themselves in their rush to prove how much they hate a Vice Presidential candidate.

Obama was perfectly aware of Ayers' radical views, since he read and publically endorsed, without qualification, Ayers' book on juvenile crime. That book is quite radical, expressing doubts about whether we ought to have a prison system at all, comparing America to South Africa’s apartheid system, and contemptuously dismissing the idea of the United States as a kind or just country. Shane mentions the book endorsement, yet says nothing about the book’s actual content. Nor does Shane mention the panel about Ayers' book, on which Obama spoke as part of a joint Ayers-Obama effort to sink the 1998 Illinois juvenile crime bill.

Kurtz notes a tellingly Clintonian qualifier:

On the one hand, toward the end of the piece we read: "Since 2002, there is little public evidence of their relationship." And it’s no wonder, says Shane, since Ayers was caught expressing no regret for his own past terrorism in an article published on September 11, 2001. Yet earlier in Shane's article we learn that, according to Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt, Obama and Ayers "have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005." Very interesting. Obama's own spokesman has just left open the possibility that there has indeed been phone and e-mail contact between the two men between 2002 and 2004, well after Ayers’ infamous conduct on 9/11.

A small detail taken in isolation, but yet another example of the kind of thing the media might have followed up on, if they were not sending all their available investigative resources to Alaska.

On the surface, Sarah Palin's career path looks much like Barack Obama's: both spent around a decade laboring in the vineyards of local politics before seeing their careers abruptly go up like a rocket all the way to the center of the national political stage. But look closer, and you will see all the difference in the world in the choices they made to get there.

I. Sarah Palin: The Whistleblower Who Took The Statehouse

I should add up front, as you'll see from all the Hat Tip links below, that I am very heavily indebted to Beldar for all the work he's done on Palin's career in Alaska. Additional supporting links marked with an asterisk.

A. The PTA Mom

Sarah Palin is, let's face it, an unlikely force for political change. In contrast to Obama, Palin didn't start off with two Ivy League degrees, a surplus of idealism, and an armload of theories about political and social organization; she seems hardly to have considered a career in politics at all. In high school, she was a jock, earning early plaudits as the point guard on an underdog state championship basketball team, playing the championship game with a stress fracture in her ankle. * * Her husband says she was shy in high school and not someone he would have pictured having a political career. She seems to have been an indifferent college student, more interested in sports than studies, and worked after college as a sportscaster before marrying, having children and helping out her husband's commercial fishing business (another example of the toughness that would serve her well in politics: continuing to help Todd on his fishing boat after breaking several of her fingers). Her entree into politics was the PTA, and from there the City Council in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, a fast-growing suburb of a few thousand people near the state's largest city, Anchorage. A lifelong Republican but not previously a political activist, she was elected to the City Council in 1992 after getting involved in a citizens' watch group that wanted Wasilla to have its own police force, ousting an incumbent, as she did in all of her significant races:

She did so by going door to door to campaign, pulling a red wagon with her son Track in the back. She ran her campaign out of her kitchen... Within weeks of her election, she'd taken on another councilman who had a city contract for garbage pickup that favored his own company.

Why do I mention Palin's apolitical roots? Because they help explain three things about her that become important later. One, how she's been able to stay grounded to have a normal, non-political person's reactions to the kinds of things politicians get inured to seeing. Two, why her views on reform, corruption and waste were not a pre-designed program but the evolving product of those reactions kicking in over time in response to things she observed first-hand. And three, how she was able to make the most important decision of her political career - to walk away from it all on principle with the significant chance that she was ending her career in politics.

B. Mayor of Wasilla

In 1996, Palin was elected Mayor of Wasilla, ousting the incumbent mayor, who had previously supported her. As Beldar explains, citing Palin's biographer Kaylene Johnson:

[Mayor] Stein had ignored the sentiments of Wasilla residents who'd approved term limits in 1994, and he continued to take advantage of a loophole exempting incumbents (he'd been mayor since 1987). Palin had originally crossed Stein by voting against a pay increase for the mayor's position shortly after she was first elected as a city councilman in 1992; accordingly, in 1996, she campaigned against him with a promise that she would start trimming the city budget by taking a voluntary pay cut as mayor (Which in fact she did.). She also promised to reduce property taxes. (Which in fact she did.) And she promised to promote new economic development that would increase the local tax base and permit higher levels of city services. (Which, again, she did.)

This was not the last time she would face a tough campaign against more experienced opponents. But while the 1996 race bore the early hallmarks of Palin's fiscal conservatism - as she battled to avoid expanding the city's budget - she was still a conventional Alaska Republican, supported by the state GOP establishment. Palin's success in Wasilla marked her as a leader among her peers, helping get her "elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors."

Alaska, of course, has a major addiction to federal pork-barrel spending; for years it has led the nation in per-capita federal dollars, and still does. Alaskans will tell you that there are reasons for this, not least the fact that the federal government owns so much of the land in the state. Then-Mayor Palin was no exception to this process; like many local officials, and perhaps more successfully than most, she sought to relieve the tax burdens of her own constituents by lobbying the federal government for funds for Wasilla, in 2000 even retaining a Washington lobbyist - the former chief of staff to Republican U.S. Senator Ted Stevens and law partner of Stevens' son Ben - to represent the town. Unsurprisingly, this brought home the bacon, over $6 million in fiscal year 2002.

It was during Palin's two three-year terms as Mayor of Wasilla that she began a long practice, which I noted here and which Ed Morrissey discusses here based on New York Times and Washington Post profiles, of firing lots of people, basically anyone who cost too much, didn't get on board with the things she was trying to accomplish, was publicly insubordinate to her leadership, or was a holdover from prior administrations. As I've noted before, one of the principal obstacles to real change in any public-sector job is the inertia of entrenched incumbents; sacking them is a good way to get bad press and stir up lawsuits and trumped-up investigations, but it's also evidence of the unsentimentality and independent streak that any genuine reformer needs.

Term-limited out of running again for Mayor, Palin in 2002 ran for the Lieutenant Governorship, but when long-time Republican U.S. Senator Frank Murkowski entered the Governor's race, other more experienced and better-known candidates shifted into the Lt. Gov. field, and Palin was defeated in a crowded 5-way primary. She nonetheless impressed observers as a coming star by posting a strong second despite being badly outspent by 3 opponents.

C. The Oil and Gas Commission

Following her loss in the Lieutenant Governor's race, Palin was out of a job, and as promising but unemployed politicians often do, she accepted an appointment from the powers that controlled her state party. In February 2003, she was tabbed by Murkowski to chair the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, a regulatory body with jurisdiction over the state's most important industries:

The commission and its 21 staff members usually labor in obscurity unless they are responding to a serious oil-well accident or violation. Founded in territorial days and modeled after commissions in other oil states, the AOGCC is a regulatory board charged with protecting public resources when oil or gas is developed. The AOGCC has three basic functions: to ensure that producing oil and gas fields achieve maximum recovery; to ensure that wells are safely constructed and operated; and to protect groundwater when oil and gas wells pass through aquifers or when drilling wastes are legally disposed underground.

The job was a plum patronage position, paying $118,000 a year, doubling her salary as Mayor and for the first time making her the family's chief breadwinner. The Anchorage Daily News has a lengthy and extensive description of the events that followed, as Palin uncovered significant ethical improprieties at the AOGCC, focusing on Alaska State GOP Chairman Randy Ruedrich, who the ADN noted had "played a major role in Gov. Frank Murkowski's election":

[S]he focused on ethical lapses by fellow Commissioner Randy Ruedrich, who was also (and unfortunately still is) the statewide GOP chairman. Ruedrich was refusing to complete and file disclosure reports that would have detailed his personal dealings with energy-related companies. When Ruedrich ignored her complaints, she went to the state attorney-general, Gregg Renkes. When Renkes ignored her (and threatened her with prosecution if she became a public whistle-blower), she went to the GOP governor who'd appointed her, Frank Murkowski. Murkowski was then, of course, one of the troika of Grand Poobahs of Alaskan GOP politics, along with Congressman Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens.

When Murkowski ignored her too, however, Palin resigned.

Think about that again. Palin wasn't independently wealthy, although her family is now well off; her husband made good money as a commercial fisherman and working in the oil fields, but with four children to raise, their status as a two-income family was undoubtedly financially important to them. Yet she was walking away from a plum job with a six-figure salary that had given her a more than 60% pay raise from her job as Mayor. Palin herself had worked only in politics since leaving her sportscasting job some 16 years earlier, and by picking up a crusade against the state's most powerful political figures, she stood an extremely good chance of burying her promising political future for good. But she was willing to walk away from all of that at age 40 to do the right thing. If you can picture Barack Obama doing that, you have a very vivid imagination.

As the ADN article explains, her investigation involved a fair amount of sleuthing by Palin, including a review of Ruedrich's computer files after he quit the AOGCC. There were a variety of ethical issues involved, including matters tied up in a number of criminal investigations, multiple conflicts of interest, failure to file required disclosure forms, and use of AOGCC time, facilities and resources to conduct Ruedrich's partisan activities with the GOP. While some of these issues may seem minor in isolation, they obviously added up. Palin's resignation in January 2004 eventually freed her to go public:

[W]hen Ruedrich settled state ethics charges June 22 by paying a record $12,000 civil fine and admitting wrongdoing, Palin said she finally felt some measure of vindication for bucking Ruedrich and members of her party. Over the months leading up to the settlement, Ruedrich had been saying the accusations were overblown, while other Republicans, including Murkowski, complained Ruedrich was unfairly targeted, primarily by the news media.

Originally muzzled by the confidentiality provisions of the state ethics law and unable to explain publicly what she had tried to do about Ruedrich, Palin found herself attacked from both sides: Ruedrich's opponents accused her of complicity with him, and his allies said she was providing ammunition for Democrats. She quit the commission in frustration on Jan. 16, months before the state's secret investigation and its formal charges became public.

And her dogged determination made her further enemies but resulted in ultimate vindication:

She wrote a famous op-ed for the state's largest newspaper ...And ...continu[ed] to direct public attention to the scandal.

She was helped along by criminal investigations that have since ended up with indictments and convictions of several public officials. Renkes was forced to resign as attorney-general. Reudrich ended up agreeing to pay a substantial fine for his ethics violations - not just the noncompliance with the disclosure forms, but substantive violations based on too-close ties with and favors from VECO, the drilling contractor that's been at the center of most of the Alaskan ethics scandals - and to quit the Commission.

Palin was unsparing even on the man who had appointed her:

After slamming Murkowski for "hiring his own counsel, paid for by the state, to investigate his long-time friend, confidant, and campaign manager [Renkes]," Sarah concluded by writing, "Despite those in Juneau who think otherwise, it's healthy for democracy to ask questions. And I'll bet there are hockey moms and housewives all across this great state who agree."

The result was a thorough burning of her bridges with the state party:

By that time, Palin was an outcast. The state Republican Party in May had just reconfirmed its support for Ruedrich, after party leaders assured the central committee that charges against him had been overblown by the media. Even Murkowski had voiced support for Ruedrich, calling him a "survivor."

One of Palin's Mat-Su mentors, district Republican chief Roy Burkhart of Willow, still thinks she went too far. When Palin came to him for advice, he said in a recent interview, he said she should pass along the evidence, which appeared serious enough.

"The impression I got was she didn't want to do it," said Burkhart. "But the evidence was there, and it was going to be worse if she didn't do it."

And she wasn't afraid to cross party lines to take a stand on ethics:

In 2005, she continued to take on the Republican establishment by joining Eric Croft, a Democrat, in lodging an ethics complaint against Renkes, who was not only attorney general but also a long-time adviser and campaign manager for Murkowski. The governor reprimanded Renkes and said the case was closed. It wasn't. Renkes resigned a few weeks later, and Palin was again hailed as a hero.

D. Taking Down Murkowski

Murkowski, meanwhile, was in the process of alienating the Alaskan public with a variety of high-handed and self-interested moves that came to symbolize the way in which the Alaska GOP establishment treated federal and state office as their personal property. One of the more egregious examples was his appointment of his daughter Lisa to fill out his term in the Senate. Palin considered running against Lisa Murkowski in 2004, but decided not to in deference to her son Track's reluctance at the time to endure a statewide campaign, although she did deepen her rift with the Murkowskis by endorsing one of Lisa Murkowski's primary opponents. Yet Palin's name ended up getting misused on Murkowski's behalf:

A measure of Palin's growing political stature came in the closing weeks of Lisa Murkowski's campaign against Tony Knowles. Voters started getting recorded messages from a chirpy woman saying, "Hello, this is Sarah," and urging their support for Murkowski and the Republican team. The calls were paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Palin sent out e-mails telling people it wasn't her. When she heard the recording, she told a reporter, "She sounds chipper and annoyingly nasal, so I realize now why people think she's me. Ugh."

By 2006, Palin was ready to take on Gov. Murkowski himself, and despite entering the race as a serious underdog, and even with the third candidate in the race out-fundraising her by 3-to-1 margin, wound up scoring 51% of the primary vote (Murkowski finished third with just 19%). Palin made clear she would be cleaning house:

On the night she won the party nomination, she asked for Ruedrich to step down as Republican chairman -- he declined -- and also called for the resignation of national committeeman Sen. Ben Stevens.

Moving on to the general election, David Dittman, "a consultant to Palin's 2006 campaign," observes that Palin was "[o]utraised by her well-known Democratic opponent [former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles] .... Dittman noted, "She didn't have the support of the party. She did not have the support of labor unions, environmentalists, the oil industry. She did it all by herself." Knowles was no makeweight opponent; running in a year when Democrats swamped Republicans in one traditional GOP stronghold after another, Knowles had been a two-term governor who only left the office in 2002 due to term limits and ran on a platform of superior experience, and Palin also faced a third-party campaign by Andrew Halcro, formerly a Republican state legislator. Palin's lead in the polls dropped as low as two points just days before the election (*), but ended up winning 48-41.

E. Governor of Alaska

Palin was sworn in as Governor on December 4, 2006. In the nearly two years she has been in the office, she's made strides on multiple fronts to combat waste and clean house, becoming in the process the most popular of the nation's 50 governors. The job's not done, and like anybody with a record of actually governing, Palin has her critics on this or that issue. But her record on issues of public integrity and wasteful spending is one to be proud of on issues large and small.

(1) The Perks

Just as with the pay cut she took as Mayor of Wasilla, Palin chose to start at the top with her budget cuts in Alaska. Gov. Murkowski had infuriated voters and the State Legislature by insisting on buying a $2.6 million jet; Palin campaigned against the plane and famously put it up for sale on eBay, although the eventual sale required hiring an aircraft broker so as to try to limit the losses inflicted on the state by Murkowski's folly. Palin cut $45,000 in costs by eliminating the day-to-day services of the gourmet chef at the Governor's Mansion, arguing that she and her family could cook for themselves (although the chef was apparently still under contract with the state for official receptions). Palin also cut her per diem reimbursements by the state by 80% from her predecessor, declining to claim all the expenses she could legally have had reimbursed.

(2) Adventures In The Pork Barrel and The Bridge To Nowhere

In the past few years, there's been a growing public outcry over wasteful pork-barrel spending in general and "earmarks" in particular - i.e., riders to federal appropriations bills that direct that money be spent on particular projects. Technically, earmarks don't necessarily increase the amount of spending in a bill, but of course the expectation of being able to insert earmarks (sometimes with little public disclosure and debate, and often for projects favored by people with financial interests in them) inevitably inflates the amount of money appropriators are inclined to start off with in a bill, which is why John McCain (among others) has described them as a "gateway drug" to overspending. The online "porkbusters" coalition was formed to help pre-existing efforts by McCain and Senator Tom Coburn to highlight particularly abusive projects.

The most notorious earmark in recent memory was a bridge connecting the town of Ketchikan, Alaska to nearby Gravina Island, which has only 50 residents and is presently connected to the mainland by ferry. The bridge was dubbed "the Bridge to Nowhere," and McCain and Coburn, among others, made it nationally famous.

Gov. Palin was not one of the early heroes of this battle, and in fact continued to support the bridge as a candidate. But her ultimate decision in office to pull the plug on the bridge subjected her to criticism from the state's Congressional powers and other proponents of the bridge, while making her an instant hero to the many people who had fought against the project for years. At the time, everyone understood what Gov. Palin had done. It's entirely proper for her to take credit for that decision, and no amount of revisionist history can change those facts. Least of all from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who supported the bridge out of a craven desire to protect their own pork projects.

a. The Bridge to Nowhere

The McCain campaign produced, belatedly, a detailed fact sheet with a chronology of the bridge dispute here, and if you are familiar with the saga, it checks out. Wikipedia, as usual, has an uneven and slanted account but one with a lot of useful links to primary sources.

The way transportation bills work in general is to distribute funds by state, and earmarks in the bill then direct funds to particular projects. The original controversy over the bridge earmark was in 2005, when the transportation bill included a $223 million earmark for the bridge, supported by Senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski, Gov. Murkowski, and Congressman Don Young, who at the time chaired the House Transportation Committee. Gov. Murkowski's wife, in fact, owned land on Gravina Island that would go up in value if the bridge was built. Coburn brought the controversy to a head with a bill to strip the earmark and the funds from the bill and redirect the money to rebuild a bridge in New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Ted Stevens gave a melodramatic speech threatening to quit the Senate if the bridge was defunded, and he and Young essentially threatened to retaliate against other Senators' pork projects in their own states; as Kos put it at the time, "the reason senators would vote against these amendments is because if any of them pass, it puts every single pork project in their own states in danger." In the end, Coburn got only 15 votes (McCain was absent, but supported the Coburn amendment) - Barack Obama and Joe Biden both voted "no." * Kos accurately summed up the vote thus:

Simply unconscionable. Those who voted against these amendments have zero credibility on issues of fiscal responsibility. Zero.

Obama and Biden also voted to support the final transportation bill that included the bridge earmark, but it was eventually stripped out in negotiations with the House in response to the outcry. (You can go here for Deroy Murdock's PowerPoint presentation on Obama's and Biden's role). That left the decision on how to fund the bridge up to Alaska's governor, subject to some limitations on how much of the transportation money could be allocated to the project. Gov. Murkowski set aside either $91 million or $113 million, depending on which sources you cite, but as of the end of 2005 there wasn't enough federal money for the project to be built, and cost estimates were starting to rise to over $300 million.

Enter Sarah Palin, then a private citizen and candidate for Alaska Governor. Of course, the core of the pork barrel/earmark problem is people in Washington trying to buy support back home with taxpayer money; Governors and candidates for Governor don't create earmarks, and Mayors in particular rather understandably like to agitate on behalf of their narrow parochial issues. Even today, Palin notes that her decision to kill the bridge was largely motivated by a desire first and foremost to protect state taxpayers:

After taking office and examining the project closely, realizing the Feds were not going to fund it as Alaskans had assumed was the case, I cancelled the project...Alaskans will have to prioritize for the Knik Arm Crossing if it is truly a top state priority because Congress won't fund it either.

That said, those of us who find the pork/earmark dynamic appalling understand that state/local politicians who support federal pork barrel spending are part of the problem, and those who resist are part of the solution; so her views on the matter are certainly relevant.

Now during her campaign, Palin did two things. One, which is entirely understandable although something she's reversed herself on when addressing a national audience, is to object to the rhetorical device of calling it a "bridge to nowhere," which naturally irked the residents of the Ketchikan area. Hence, her photo op with the "Nowhere" T-shirt and criticism of "spinmeisters".

And second, she supported the bridge project itself. See, e.g., here, here, here and here.

Palin entered office in December 2006 with the federal funds in hand but discretion whether to use them on the Ketchikan Bridge or less wasteful projects, as a result of the funds being provided without being earmarked. And from then on, as her budget team reviewed the project in the context of competing priorities, she began casting a more skeptical eye, building up to her killing of the project. 11 days into her term, she proposed her first budget which included no additional funds for the "Bridge to Nowhere" saying, "We need to make wise, sensible choices." State funds would have been needed because the federal dollars were not enough to keep up with the escalating cost estimates for the bridge.

In February 2007, National Review noted that the bridge's cost estimate had reached $395 million and that opponents were encouraged by Palin's hesitancy to fund the out-of-control project:

"This projected increase [in the bridge's cost] comes at a time when the governor has asked for all agencies to reduce spending by 10 percent," a spokesman for the governor tells National Review Online. Needless to say, building a half-billion-dollar bridge between a town of 8,000 and an island of 50 is not on her list of state transportation priorities.

+++

That leaves the Alaska DOT stuck between the local officials who want the bridge and a governor who hasn't set aside any money for it. Add a congressional delegation unable to bring home the bacon like it used to and it's no surprise that morale at the department has cratered. According to the AP, Gov. Palin's transition team discovered a department in which obtaining "federal earmarks in congressional appropriations trump all other priorities... and the state suffers as a result." The team's advice? Alaska needs to go on a diet from federal dollars and focus on "developing a state-funded transportation and maintenance program."

* The necessary state money was not included in the state budget in May, and the DOT put the project on hold in August. Finally, on September 21, 2007, Palin officially killed the bridge project, although her statement was couched in conciliatory terms:

"Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398 million bridge is not the answer," Gov. Sarah Palin said in a prepared statement.

She directed the state transportation department to find the most "fiscally responsible" alternative for access to the airport.

+++

Palin on Friday said the Ketchikan project was $329 million short of full funding.

"It's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island," Palin said.

"Much of the public's attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here. But we need to focus on what we can do, rather than fight over what has happened," she said.

The DOT will prepare a list of projects across the state where the $36 million in federal funds that was set aside for Gravina Island could be used.

Palin's decision instantly split those who had followed the saga, but nobody had any doubt who killed the bridge. ABC News reported on September 21, 2007:

Friday, the state of Alaska officially sank the Bridge to Nowhere. Governor Sarah Palin, also a Republican, said "Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport." "But," she said, the bridge "is not the answer." Palin has told state transportation officials to look for the most "fiscally responsible" alternative.

The McCain press release collects some of the immediate commentary:

September 22: Rep. Kyle Johansen, R-Ketchikan: "For somebody who touts process and transparency in getting projects done, I'm disappointed and taken aback ... We worked 30 years to get funding for this priority project."

September 24: "Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today celebrated a major victory over one of the most infamous pork barrel projects in recent history, the 'Bridge To Nowhere.'"

September 26: Anchorage Daily News Editorial: "Gov. Sarah Palin won few friends there with her decision to drop plans for the bridge, but she made the right call."

September 27: U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-AK, criticized Gov. Palin for killing the bridge and described their relationship as "a little frosty."

Sen. Stevens on Palin's decision: "(It) may well jeopardize further funding by the Congress of any bridges in Alaska, which I think is a dangerous precedent."

September 30: Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka: "Improving access to Gravina Island has been an economic priority for the community of Ketchikan, the state of Alaska and our congressional delegation for over 30 years. I'm shocked that the governor would ignore the significant energy, work and financial resources already invested in the project."

September 30: Lois Epstein, head of the Alaska Transportation Priorities Project, a watchdog group that monitors public transportation projects, praised Palin's action: "The move ensures that this controversial bridge will not be built."

Instapundit, who had given his megaphone to the Porkbusters crusade, wrote on September 22, 2007 of Palin's Vice Presidential prospects that "I certainly like her action on the Bridge to Nowhere" Alaska Democrats campaigning against Ted Stevens continued to credit Palin for stopping the bridge until she was tabbed as McCain's running mate. And here's Newsweek in October 2007:

In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Palin said it's time for Alaska to "grow up" and end its reliance on pork-barrel spending. Shortly after taking office, Palin canceled funding for the "Bridge to Nowhere," a $330 million project that Stevens helped champion in Congress. The bridge, which would have linked the town of Ketchikan to an island airport, had come to symbolize Alaska's dependence on federal handouts. Rather than relying on such largesse, says Palin, she wants to prove Alaska can pay its own way, developing its huge energy wealth in ways that are "politically and environmentally clean."

Writing during the election, Jim DeMint, himself a former earmarker who has sworn them off, credits Palin with killing the bridge, as does Tom Coburn himself.

It should be noted that Palin's action didn't only save money for state taxpayers. State transportation needs and requests are not a one-time thing; as noted in some of the quotes above, projects like the Ketchikan bridge send state politicians back to the federal well year after year. By eliminating the bridge and routing the money to other transportation projects, Palin saved federal taxpayers in two ways. First, she took more projects off the list for future requests to Uncle Sam. And second, she insured that - unlike famous long-running "Big Dig" type projects elsewhere in the nation - she wouldn't be coming back to future Congresses to cover additional cost overruns. By being a good fiscal steward to the people of Alaska, she also helped save money for the nation as a whole.

Talk, in politics, is cheap. When it came time for Palin to make decisions, she, and only she, finally killed the "Bridge to Nowhere." Had the funds remained earmarked, as Obama and Biden voted to keep them, she would not have had that option (that's what happened to the highway that was to connect to the bridge). Palin's is the courage and integrity we need.

b. Palin, Pork and Spending

Put in its larger context, Palin's killing of the Bridge to Nowhere is part of the broader picture of her effort to wean Alaska off its dependence on federal pork barrel spending in general and earmarking in particular. From the Anchorage Daily News, a description of how that has brought her yet again into conflict with the powers that be in the Alaska GOP:

Palin has increasingly distanced herself from earmarking since she made her first trip to Washington D.C. to lobby Congress for money in 2000. And over the past year, it has been the leading source of tension between Palin and the state's three-member congressional delegation.

Last year, when Palin announced the state was abandoning plans for the so-called "bridge to nowhere" in Southeast Alaska, she was met with what could kindly be described as a frosty reception from the delegation.

Her move embarrassed Stevens and Young -- Stevens even complained publicly this spring that "the issue of earmarks and the way they handled the bridge money" made it challenging for him, Young and fellow Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski to ask for any special federal set-asides for Alaska.

"It is a difficult thing to get over right now, the feeling that we don't represent Alaska because Alaska doesn't want earmarks," Stevens said in an interview at the time.

H/T This is hardly a cold-turkey approach, but the numbers demonstrate that she has been making headway:

For the 2007 federal budget year, the administration of former Gov. Frank Murkowski submitted 63 earmark requests totaling $350 million, Palin's staff said. That slid to 52 earmarks valued at $256 million in Palin's first year. This year, the governor's office asked the delegation to help them land 31 earmarks valued at $197 million.

...Palin recognized that Alaska's coffers were overflowing with revenue from oil profits and it was almost unseemly for the state to press so aggressively for federal money, said John Katz, who heads Gov. Palin's Washington, D.C., office. In December of 2007, Palin's budget director put out a memo urging state officials who were assembling their department spending plans to reserve earmarks for compelling needs only, in an effort to "enhance the state's credibility."

"When she took office, we talked about the state's reliance on federal earmarks and she made it clear for several reasons she wanted to significantly cut back on that reliance," Katz said.

(2008 requests here, h/t).

The battle to cut back on earmarking is also part and parcel of a broader effort by Palin to bring some fiscal sanity to Alaska. Palin took a buzzsaw to the budget in her first year, including numerous line-item vetos of items inserted by the GOP-controlled legislature: "The cuts, the Anchorage Daily News said, 'may be the biggest single-year line-item veto total in state history.'" In 2008, she used line item vetoes to strip $268 million in wasteful pet projects from the state's budget. (H/T) * Her nearly half a billion dollars in vetoes over two years "were deeply unpopular with legislators of both parties."

As is often the case with efforts to cut the budget, Palin's hatchet hasn't cut down every last tree; for example, she "cut funds for 40 sports-related projects around Alaska, saying sports was not an essential government service," but found $630,000 in the 2007 budget for the Wasilla sports complex that had been one of her main accomplishments as Mayor, arguing that it would serve an additional public function as the town's emergency shelter in case of an earthquake, forest fire or other disaster. And of course, there have been a flood of stories complaining about this or that program she cut or capped the growth of. But as I always say, you don't have a budget until you have said "no" to everyone at least once. Palin has definitely shown that she is willing to say "no" to protect the taxpayer.

(3) Big Oil & Gas

When you talk about powerful interests in Alaska, there's nobody bigger than the oil and gas companies. Palin, of course, has been a huge advocate of more oil and gas production in Alaska and nationwide, and often refers to the oil and gas companies as the state's partners (in a sense they are literally business partners), but she's also shown in office that far from being a puppet of these industries, she's willing and even eager to drive a hard bargain with them on behalf of the taxpayer and limit the influence of any one particular company.

A prime example of this was her renegotiation of the state's severance tax, a tax imposed on oil and gas companies by the state that owns the land they drill on. This is different from taxes on corporate activity generally, and is basically a matter of the state acting like a market participant to drive a hard bargain; Palin raised the base tax from 22.5% to 25%, and made a point of renegotiating in public, arguing that the tax had been previously set behind closed doors between Murkowski and industry lobbyists. USA Today notes that the oil companies were not happy with the new fees:

Oil executives said the law amounted to a $6 billion tax increase this year and criticized it ...They said it would cost jobs and reduce investment in exploration.

From the same article:

Palin got tough with major oil producers in other ways, too. She moved to revoke ExxonMobil's license to develop oil and natural gas at Point Thomson on the North Slope, arguing the company had sat for too long on the site without developing the reserves. ExxonMobil says it will begin drilling this winter, but the state says the plans are inadequate.

As even the New York Times described this battle:

One of her most significant accomplishments as governor was passing a major tax increase on state oil production, angering oil companies but raising billions of dollars in new revenue. She said the oil companies had previously bribed legislators to keep the taxes low. She subsequently championed legislation that would give some of that money back to Alaskans: Soon, every Alaskan will receive a $1,200 check.

Then there's the pipeline project intended to develop Alaska's vast natural gas reserves, which "had been a top economic goal for the state for nearly two decades" - Gov. Murkowski had never delivered on his promise to get the pipeline deal done, but "had offered the major firms exclusive contracts to build the pipeline and had agreed to freeze oil taxes for 30 years and natural gas taxes for up to 45 years." Palin, having run against Murkowski's coziness with the three main producers, decided to open the process to formal bids, a move that didn't go over well with them:

The three major North Slope producers - BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil - have panned Ms. Palin's approach as too restrictive, and say they prefer to negotiate a deal directly as they did with her predecessor, Frank Murkowski.

Eventually, this January, Gov. Palin settled on TransCanada, a Canadian company. The $26 billion project is "what analysts say could be the largest private capital project in U.S. history." The deal required her to call a special session of the state legislature, signing the bill on August 27. Once again, Palin had asserted her independence from the state's largest vested interests, and in so doing broke a longstanding policy logjam. It still faces challenges, as the disgruntled Big Three are threatening to build a rival pipeline:

The Palin administration now stands in a nerve-racking faceoff with the multibillion-dollar oil industry interests that have for 40 years been the bedrock of the state's politics and economy. Who blinks first -- Palin, or companies like BP Alaska, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil -- will determine who controls transport of Alaska's massive untapped gas resources and future tax revenues for a state dependent on petroleum revenues for 85% of its budget.

Most analysts are predicting that it won't be Palin who yields.

"She has been more adversarial with the producers than any previous governor," said Democratic state Rep. Mike Doogan, whom Palin courted -- with cupcakes -- to power her oil program through the Legislature this year.

(4) Putting Her Own Stamp On State Government

As Fred Barnes noted last year:

Political analysts in Alaska refer to the "body count" of Palin's rivals. "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah," says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign. It includes Ruedrich, Renkes, Murkowski, gubernatorial contenders John Binkley and Andrew Halcro, the three big oil companies in Alaska, and a section of the Daily News called "Voice of the Times," which was highly critical of Palin and is now defunct.

Palin sent the message from the very beginning who was in charge:

Days after she was sworn in as governor, Sarah Palin began to clean house at the department of natural resources, firing and demoting several top officials and eventually appointing a new director at the agency that oversees the energy companies that provide the state with 85% of its revenue.

The shake-up was an early sign that this newly elected Republican governor was not like any of her predecessors -- she was determined not to cave in to the energy industry, the state's lifeblood.

More examples? Her firing of an aide who had a messy affair and covered it up; her sacking of the entire state Creamery Board in a dispute over $600,000 in state funding. Palin's been unafraid to make waves, removing people who stood in the way of her policies and working to change the ethical climate.

One of Palin's major priorities in her 2006 campaign was ethics reform, and in July 2007 she signed a new ethics bill that took a number of steps forward in requiring disclosures and limiting sources of compensation for public officials. The new law had bipartisan support behind the new Governor's leadership, including a State Senator who is now a prominent Obama supporter:

State Sen. Hollis French, D-Anchorage, said the law closes several loopholes and includes a ban on outside compensation for official acts. It also bans legislators from accepting campaign contributions as bribes.

"It's my further hope that by signing this bill we will close a shameful chapter in Alaska's history," French said during the signing of the bill at the Alaska Public Offices Commission in Anchorage.

Now, the ethics reform bill, under the circumstances, is more an example of bipartisan leadership than of courage or independence, as it did not exactly incite a groundswell of opposition, and some people even wanted it to go further. But Palin has also shown her willingness to put pressure on, or cut ties entirely with, powerful people in her own party as she seeks to remake the Alaska GOP into a cleaner organization.

For example, Palin has injected herself into the state's Congressional races. She cut ads for her Lieutenant Governor, Sean Parnell, in his primary challenge to Don Young, a race that was so close it took weeks to resolve it despite Young's status as a hugely entrenched incumbent. As Matt Moon explains, Palin's backing was one of the reasons why Parnell entered the race with a huge advantage, and his loss was largely the result of being out-campaigned by Young, which doesn't change the fact that Palin made a significant effort to throw her personal prestige behind removing one of the icons of corruption in her own state party. We'll get in Part II to how this stacks up to Obama, but of course the short answer is that he never tried anything remotely comparable.

Palin's often been cold-blooded about cutting off former friends and allies who had ethical troubles, as even a hostile Salon profile notes:

Alaska state Rep. Victor Kohring, another key Palin supporter during her political rise in Mat-Su Valley, found this out after he became a victim of the FBI's oil corruption sting operation. Kohring, who used to accompany Palin on her campaign jaunts, angrily points out that he was abandoned by his fellow Christian conservative before he even went to trial. The former Alaska legislator, who now resides in the Taft minimum security prison outside Bakersfield, Calif., communicated his views of Palin through his friend, Fred James. Kohring, said James, feels "betrayed" by Palin.

I've discussed above some of her specific breaks with Ted Stevens; for another example, in 2007 she again demanded the resignation of his son Ben from his role as Alaska's representative on the Republican National Committee. Granted, despite their many battles, Palin hasn't entirely cut ties with Stevens, who after all remains the state's senior senator:

Palin, an anti-corruption crusader in Alaska, had called on Stevens to be open about the issues behind the investigation. But she also held a joint news conference with him in July, before he was indicted, to make clear she had not abandoned him politically.

Stevens had been helpful to Palin during her run for governor, swooping in with a last moment endorsement. And the two filmed a campaign commercial together to highlight Stevens's endorsement of Palin during the 2006 race.

At last check, Palin was pointedly declining to either support or oppose Stevens or Don Young in the general election: "Ted Stevens trial started a couple days ago. We'll see where that goes." Not precisely a hard line, but after Palin's multiple feuds with Stevens and her backing of the primary challenge against Young, she's already gone about as far as you can expect any Governor to go to make clear to the voting public her disapproval of the methods of the leaders of her own party's Congressional delegation in her own state.

All of these moves, of course, have made her enemies. This post is long enough already without delving into the whole Tasergate/Troopergate investigation, but to focus on the relevant point for these purposes, the investigation was touched off when Palin sacked Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, who broke openly with Palin over her efforts to cut his agency's budget:

* 12/9/07: Monegan holds a press conference with Hollis French to push his own budget plan.

* 1/29/08: Palin's staffers have to rework their procedures to keep Monegan from bypassing normal channels for budget requests.

* February 2008: Monegan publicly releases a letter he wrote to Palin supporting a project she vetoed.

* June 26, 2008: Monegan bypassed the governor's office entirely and contacted Alaska's Congressional delegation to gain funding for a project.

This is all of a piece with Palin's willingness to butt heads to get control of the budget, to the advantage of the taxpayer. Hollis French, the Democratic State Senator and prominent Obama supporter, is effectively controlling the investigation, which was designed to release its report five days before the election and which would be essentially guaranteed to do zero political damage to Palin if it was released at any other time (you can tell this by comparing how much time Palin's critics spend discussing the investigation's procedures as opposed to its underlying facts). Anyone remotely familiar with the history of political reform can tell you that this sort of vendetta is exactly the risk you run when you try to bring about genuine change in the public sector, and why so many politicians shy away from necessary confrontations that create enemies of people like Monegan. The investigation is just another badge of Palin's fearlessness.

As we look back over the last four years in national politics, this much is certain: we needed more people like Sarah Palin in Washington.

In Part II: How Barack Obama climbed up the greasy pole of Chicago machine politics without upsetting any applecarts.

(1) Congress Is Run By Cowards

As I said, the votes of House Republicans are in practical terms utterly meaningless. We have seen over the years innumerable occasions of both Democratic and Republican majorities in the House blithely bulldozing the powerless minority. But given the unpopularity of the Paulson plan at large and with the Democrats' base, to say nothing of the role of Congressional Democrats in creating this mess, Nancy Pelosi simply lacks the courage to have her caucus take ownership of the plan and vote for it. She is frozen by her fear. She cannot lead, and she will not lead. And nobody's even asking Barack Obama to step in and provide the leadership that is absent.

In normal times, her cowardice could be highlighted and run against. But today, if Congress is to act, the minority must take the wheel and lead. It's no answer to say the bailout is unpopular. Sometimes, the people need leadership, not followership; that's why voters elected leaders in the first place. If McCain and the House Republicans lead, the deal will get done. If they don't, it won't. It's that simple.

And the leadership squabble in the House GOP is precisely why we need McCain to lean on people. To understand John Boehner's posture you have to remember that

(1) Boehner's job as head of his caucus is in deep trouble anyway for reasons that predate this crisis.

(2) Pretty much everyone who is gunning for said job is against the bailout, and loudly so.

(3) They have a majority of the caucus behind them.

(4) If Boehner wants to keep his job he is not gonna get ahead of his caucus.

In other words, somebody needs to rally the GOP caucus, and it won't be its leader. You know how sometimes in children's books and cartoons and comic books, you have a character who has some really bizarre and sometimes irritating talent or superpower, and all of a sudden circumstances arise in which that character's unique talents are suddenly needed to save the world? That's where we are today. John McCain's signature talent as a legislator is his ability to get horrendous bipartisan legislation passed. Today, the nation needs some horrendous bipartisan legislation. It's time for McCain to get the House Republicans to follow him where their best political and policy judgment and their constituents are all telling them not to go.

(2) Psychology Trumps Policy

The point where I have reluctantly parted company with the Paulson plan's critics throughout this debate is the difference between looking at this as an issue of policy and looking at it as an issue of psychology. The primary importance of a deal, almost any deal, is its immediate effect on investor confidence, to prevent things like massive bank failures, a run on the money market funds and a freeze of the commercial paper markets, which would collapse the stock market and lead to Very Bad Things. Even if this might be the healthiest solution in the longest run, we are at the point of a potentially massive short-term system failure with huge real-world consequences for millions of Americans. Preventing that Worst Case Scenario by propping up investor confidence won't prevent a recession, but is nonetheless a critically important goal of national policy. Bear in mind that as the U.S. goes, so goes the world; you may recall that 1933 ushered in some developments with rather adverse consequences for our national security. In other words, the actual merits of a deal may be far less important than doing something quickly that reassures the markets. There's an old military saying that a bad solution today is sometimes better than a good one a week from now; or, as Chesterton put it, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly. Speed matters more than getting it right; and we can always push for additional pro-growth measures and scaling back of the worst add-ons later if the Democrats insist on larding the bill up with goodies. All the policy arguments in the world can't stop a herd of frightened investors from stampeding off a cliff, and will do us no good at the bottom.

(3) The Market Will Arrive Too Late To Help

The RSC and other proposals are premised on the idea that pro-growth policies can bring nervous private capital out from hiding. It's not gonna happen in time to prevent a meltdown, because people who invested in mortgage-backed securities before and ended up losing their shirts are just not going to ride in on a shiny white unicorn and start doing the same thing all over again, no matter how many tax incentives you give them, especially when so many of them are out of free cash right now. That may not be a rational answer but it's a realistic one: fear is a powerful emotion, and it can run wild for a long time before it exhausts itself.

And that means government needs to step in. Not because the market can't figure out the right prices for the MBS and related debt securities at issue, but because nobody who has enough money to invest to make the market liquid again is able to let go of the fear. Government does not invest wisely, and I have no illusions that it will do a great job of pricing the assets Paulson wants to buy. Yes, the Paulson plan is a blunt instrument that will undoubtedly proceed the way ham-handed government solutions always do. But the simple fact that government can mobilize a huge amount of cash quickly means it can fix the situation, for pretty much precisely the same reason why government can build armies and go to the moon. Government works best when what is needed is simply the unique economy of scale and the coercive power to move with great speed it brings to the table.

If you don't believe me, I suggest you spend the weekend hitting up investors for $700 billion to start your own hedge fund to invest solely in underperforming mortgage-backed securities. You may find it harder than you think.

Let me give you a rudimentary explanation of why rapid government action will work - not perfectly, but well enough to unfreeze the joints of the financial system. As anyone who has ever played Monopoly understands, the economics of the price of everything on the board changes when everybody is out of cash and in hock up to their eyeballs. But parachute one new player in who is flush, or better yet has a limitless line of credit, and that player can make serious profits in a hurry and at least temporarily keep the others on the board from going under when they hit street repairs or the luxury tax.

Paulson plans to buy up MBS (which I'm using here as shorthand) at some price that is maybe around the current market price, give or take, but in highly illiquid markets. And even if this means that the sellers of MBS are realizing their losses ASAP by selling at a steep discount, cashing out those losses and taking the charge to the balance sheet up front, that still has value that no private entity has the scale to provide on such short notice.

Let's say you are a bank. You hold $400 million face amount of MBS. Market price, to the extent there's one at all, appears to be $25, so your portfolio is worth $100 million on paper.

But you don't have $100 million cash; you have zero cash and what may or may not be $100 million worth of MBS. The paper price, however, is useless unless you can actually find a buyer at that price. If you try to sell, given how thin the market is (so few buyers that any significant increase in sales will imbalance supply and demand), the price could go down. If you and every other bank who is in the same hole tries to sell at once with no new buyers, it could go waaaaaaaay down. And really nobody out there has enough private free capital to buy it all.

Suddenly Uncle Hank comes in with his bottomless debit card and says, you know what? I bet if I buy you out at $25 I can make a profit. And to extend or perhaps mix the Monopoly analogy, Hank buys out some of the inventory of everybody else on the board too. He buys Boardwalk for $150. He buys the railroads for $40 a piece, all four of them. He buys the orange set with the three hotels for $600. And in the end - getting us back to the MBS world - he'll make a profit on some of those when they pay at maturity at $100 or $70 or $45, lose his shirt on others, and maybe earn an average return of maybe $30, so he stands a good chance of making a profit simply because he was the only guy who could afford to take advantage of good buying opportunities at such an enormous scale. Uncle Hank hasn't outsmarted the market, he was just the only guy who could afford the risk.

But even if the taxpayer doesn't make a profit, the system will be able to function again without the uncertainty of having the balance sheet tied up in illiquid assets. Because your bank now has $100 million in cash, and can get out of the business of freaking out about your MBS portfolio and trying to figure out how much of the rest of your investments have to be called in to keep a cushion in case the bank next door holds a fire sale and the price drops to $10. Bingo - you can now go back to lending money.

The private sector can do this - but not with nearly this kind of speed. Which, when you consider why that's not happening, brings us back to our original point about this being a fundamentally psychological crisis - a mental recession, if you will, but one that's no less real for being mental. The government can bear larger risk and thus proceed without the fear that keeps private capital sidelined after a traumatic experience.

(4) Life Is Not Fair

If the markets go blooey over the lack of a deal, the fact that the bailout had been unpopular will not save the lack of a bailout from being even more unpopular. And Republicans will get the blame - because the media's already blaming the House GOP, because our guy is in the White House and will get tagged as the new Hoover, because all the political contributions to Democrats in the world, and all the explanations of how bad public policy was at fault, can't break the Republicans=rich people=free market=Wall Street link in the public mind. And with just five weeks until the elections, that will mean that economic disaster is followed by electoral disaster and quite possibly the end of the free market as we know it at the hands of the winners of that election.

Republicans can grouse about this but we know in our hearts it is true. Failure to act will be political suicide for the GOP. So in the end, it's not only about putting the nation first, but saving the party's political hide as well. It's time for the minority to lead.

As I noted yesterday, nobody really wants to support the bailout, but the White House and many in both parties on Capitol Hill feel it's necessary, and will back it if and only if a consensus bipartisan deal can be put together. John McCain, of course, has made a career in Washington of being the man in the middle who holds the key to precisely such sorts of bipartisan compromises.

The Democrats' Congressional leadership has zigzagged repeatedly on whether they want or need that help in building a consensus. Wednesday morning, we were hearing that Harry Reid was alternately begging for McCain's help and claiming he already had it to press Republicans unhappy with the deal into supporting it:

Media reports indicate congressional Democrats and Republicans alike are anxiously looking to Sen. John McCain for cues on his stance on the financial bailout package. Stories suggest the GOP nominee's stance on the legislation could prove decisive to its passage. ABC World News, for example, reported McCain "may hold the fate of the $700 billion bailout proposal in his hands. Even with Vice President Dick Cheney lobbying hard for the bill today, top congressional Republicans say if McCain does not support the bill, it will likely die" and "Democratic leaders have told the White House a deal without McCain on board will mean no sale. They say they fear McCain will, quote, 'demagogue' the bill and Democrats on the campaign trail." Roll Call adds, "According to a Democratic aide familiar with the discussions," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Treasury Secretary Paulson "this week that 'if McCain didn't come out for this thing and come out for it quickly, it was going to begin bleeding Republican votes.' Democrats 'have a very real concern that opposition [from McCain] is going to drive away potential Republican votes,' this aide said."

However, there are conflicting signs in the media on the level of McCain's support for the package. The AP reported McCain "hinted he might vote against" the bill yesterday, calling the price tag "staggering." However, The Hill reports Reid "announced" that McCain would support the package, saying last night, "I got some good news in the last hour or so ... it appears that Sen. McCain is going to come out for this."

More here.

McCain at this point was in the midst of negotiating with Obama a bland joint statement of the need for bipartisan consensus, without saying what it was they wanted consensus on. McCain had, shortly before the announcement of the Paulson plan last week, released his own bailout framework on Thursday the 19th (see here and here), which appeared to lean more in the direction of loans to shaky companies rather than purchases of their inventory, but hadn't firmly committed himself on the deal still being worked out between the White House and the Hill Democrats. But then Reid's call for help was echoed by a summons by Paulson, relayed through Lindsey Graham, that McCain's aid was needed:

Paulson then called, according to my sources, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is very close to John McCain, and told him: you've got to get the people in the McCain campaign, you've got to convince John McCain to give these Republicans some political cover. If you don't do that, this whole bailout plan is going to fail. So that's how, McCain, apparently, became involved.

That's the point at which McCain decided to "suspend" his campaign and return to Washington, even arguing that Friday night's debate in Mississippi should be postponed so as not to interfere with the negotiations in DC. After Obama refused to follow suit, Hill Democrats hastily scrambled to downplay McCain's importance. Barney Frank sneered that "McCain is Andy Kaufman in his Mighty Mouse costume - 'Here I Come to Save the Day,'" while Reid reversed course and said that neither McCain nor Obama would be helpful:

[I]t would not be helpful at this time to have them come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation's economy. If that changes, we will call upon them. We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.

Eventually President Bush invited both McCain and Obama to a joint meeting with both parties' Congressional leadership at the White House. The Democrats' insistence on McCain's unimportance didn't last any longer than Reid's original statement. Congressional Quarterly today reported that

McCain's unilateral decision to break off his campaign and return to Washington to push for action on a rescue plan scrambled the political world Wednesday but by Thursday was seen by some Democrats as a way to potentially help line up Republicans behind the final proposal.

Reid himself announced:

With the economic news only getting worse each day, I call on the President, Senator McCain and Congressional Republicans to join us to quickly get this done for American families.

In other words, Reid recognizes the basic reality: McCain is a player in this debate and needs to be a part of any resolution.

But what about Obama? In contrast to McCain's plan, Obama had released lists of general principles on the crisis, but no detailed plan. Obama told the press Wednesday that

what I've told the leadership in Congress is that, if I can be helpful, then I am prepared to be anywhere, anytime.

Neither Reid nor Pelosi has called for Obama to do anything; there has been no groundswell among Hill Democrats for Obama to get involved, and so far as I can tell, nobody is much discussing whether the plan being worked out does or does not satisfy Obama's "principles" or whether Obama's ultimate support or opposition will affect how they vote. And Beldar explains why that silence says everything about what Obama's own colleagues think of his usefulness in a crisis:

What's already abundantly clear in this crisis...without the need for any hindsight, is that Barack Obama has failed to lead.

Indeed, when the crisis engulfed them, those who've had the best first-hand opportunity since January 2005 to watch him try to do his job - his fellow senators, even the leaders of his own party who mouth the words about him being "the next President of the United States" and the hope of a new generation - didn't call a halt to everything and send out a plea for his personal presence in Washington. Their actions and in particular, this inaction, shows that they know in their hearts that Obama is no real leader. They know he's simply a well-cut, slick, but empty suit onto which the trappings of leadership have been projected. And when it comes to putting their own careers, their own modest places in history, on the line, they certainly didn't look to him for guidance.

The only reason for Obama's abrupt 180-degree pivot today was to provide his campaign and his party with a fig leaf: Now they can pretend that both his and McCain's presence and participation in Washington were essential to the striking of any deal. To do otherwise would be to cede the election to McCain outright.

Nevertheless: Except for the sole purpose of maintaining his campaign's dignity, Barack Obama is today the single most dispensable member of Congress.

Oh, well. At least they will get their gold coins with Obama's likeness on them. That's undoubtedly worth more than his leadership or his ideas.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Such a debate might actually be a good thing for the nation: people are concerned about whether Obama or Palin, both novices in the area of national security and in their first terms in major political office, are ready to be Commander-in-Chief, Obama on Day One, Palin if anything ever happened to McCain. That readiness issue is one of the core uncertainties in a campaign where neither side has really yet closed the deal with enough undecided voters to win. As a matter of political strategy, the answer to that question seems to come down to two things: whether or not McCain thinks Palin is ready after just a few weeks of prep to go toe-to-toe with Obama on national security two days from now, and whether McCain thinks it's crucial to have the McCain-Obama debate on national security so McCain can expose Obama's glib blandishments in detail on the issue.

Let's walk through the decision tree of what happens if McCain sends Palin to Oxford to represent the campaign. Sending surrogates to campaign events is standard enough practice, but of course sending your subordinate to meet the other guy's #1 is regarded throughout the worlds of politics, international affairs, and business as fairly insulting, and usually ends up with a cancelled meeting. Obama would probably refuse to debate her, but then again he might not, and McCain has to make the call not knowing for certain what Obama would do, and considering the risks and rewards of both.

Option One: Obama debates Palin.

Potential upsides for McCain:

1. Expectations would be extremely low, especially if she's dropped into the debate on barely more than a day's notice - Palin's limited exposure to the media has re-created the circumstances before her Convention speech, in which she's being caricatured as totally ignorant and has a huge upside if she comes off well. We know from obervers of the 2006 Alaska Governor's race that Palin is an experienced and skilled debater, although of course you can't debate well if you aren't 100% up to speed on the subject matter. By contrast, while Obama is well-practiced at BS-ing his way through national security issues he plainly doesn't understand, he's actually not a very good debater away from his TelePrompter, where he tends to stammer a lot. If she's adequately prepared to stand toe to toe with the man universally hailed as the most golden-tongued speaker in the business, she wins just by not getting killed, and could devastate his campaign if she actually comes out his equal or better.

2. Palin has the element of surprise - Joe Biden's been preparing to debate Palin, Obama hasn't.

3. This would be a colossal television event, far more intensely watched than your usual political debate. Recall the huge ratings for Palin's Convention speech.

4. Obama can get awfully snippy when confronted and clearly doesn't respect Palin at all. He's already got a potentially bad rep for being dismissive of her, of Hillary, and of female reporters. The potential for him to aggravate the situation by sneering at her is high.

5. Obama's stature necessarily drops by talking to McCain's understudy.

Potential downsides:

1. Palin is, after all, a foreign policy novice, and unlike Obama this would be her first debate on these issues. She could easily come off poorly, and accelerate doubts about her.

2. Obama often says things about national security that can be easily dismantled by anyone versed in the issues, but that Palin, even if well-prepped on her own points, might not take him apart on if she's focused on hitting her own marks. McCain won't miss the chance to pounce if Obama again thinks Afghans speak Arabic or calls for a worldwide ban on fissile materials.

3. Nobody's thinking about national security this week. McCain would rather have this debate closer to the election when the Wall Street crisis is in the rearview mirror a bit.

Option Two: Obama refuses to debate Palin

Potential upsides for McCain:

1. After weeks of pushing the story that Palin is afraid of reporters, the media has to report that she was willing to face off against Obama and he was afraid of her.

2. Obama faces the possibility that he comes off as thinking debating Palin is beneath him, which plays into the issues above as well as more general problems with the image of him as simultaneously arrogant, full of himself and glass-jawed.

3. The media has prepped like crazy for Friday. They have hotel reservations in Mississippi. They won't be happy if there is no debate.

Downsides:

Honestly, I don't see one. The Obama camp would spin this as a gimmick, but everything that happens in campaigns is a gimmick. They would argue that McCain's afraid to debate Obama (he is apparently playing this now as "McCain can't multitask") but everybody already knows McCain's ready to be Commander-in-Chief, and all Obama does then is lower expectations for McCain entering the last two debates. The only loss is if Obama then argues that he doesn't need any debates at all on national security and refuses to reschedule a third debate, but that is unlikely to go well for him.

Conclusion: If McCain thinks Palin is adequately prepped for a national security debate with Obama and there's not too much downside to letting Obama evade a national security debate with McCain, sending Palin to represent McCain at the Oxford debate could actually be yet another bold, maverick move in a campaign that's pulled off a few of them. And if Obama, as I think he would, refuses to debate her, there's almost no downside to doing it.

Now, as reporters and commentators go, Aimbinder is one of the more fair-minded ones, but he's basically saying out loud here what the media has long been saying with its silence on many of the key aspects of Obama's background. The subtext of his questions is that the burden is on Kurtz and Kurtz alone, as a conservative journalist/pundit, to come up with the answers to these questions before the Ayers story merits anybody's attention.

Because Aimbinder's a reporter. If he wants answers, he can go get them himself.

As I noted earlier today and as readers of the conservative blogosphere know well, Kurtz has been rowing upstream for months now against a concerted effort by the Chicago machine to stonewall discovery of Obama's and Ayers' roles in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Reporters like Aimbinder and mainstream media outlets could have launched their own investigations; they could have put a daily drumbeat of pressure on Obama and his allies to release the records so we could have more answers to those questions. They didn't; instead, they sit back and wait for conservatives to deliver them a fully developed story in all imaginable detail, and shoot the messenger when the stonewall leaves gaps in the story.

Contrast this to the approach taken repeatedly to stories about Palin, as I showed in the case of her views on evolution, sex education, and book banning, or as Jim Geraghty now details here and here regarding payment for rape kits - the media is all too happy to repeat the top-line, 30-second-viral-ad charge against Palin, and then move on before there is time for the facts to come out. A vast number of these have been debunked (another prominent example was the false claim that she'd belonged to the Alaska Independence Party), yet they keep on coming too fast for the media to be bothered sifting the truth out; as long as somebody's willing to say it, it gets dumped into the national bloodstream. The level of detail and rigor required before stories about Obama can get printed or investigated gets stood on its head - report after report goes straight to the most damaging possible conclusion, and leaves it to the conservative media to get the facts relevant to stories the mainstream media's already reported. Charles Martin explains where the lefty blogs then pick this up. (H/T). The media only seems to take this approach to stories about Obama when it comes to flatly declaring McCain ads about him untrue without bothering to review the facts.

With Obama, the media bemoans the wickedness of spreading false stories about him. With Palin, the media has as often as not been the source.

And what do we get instead on Obama from leading organs like the New York Times? Yuval Levin has a hilarious post listing some of the Times articles the Obama/Times people point to as examples of the hard-hitting reportage the NYT has done on Obama:

-In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice [New York Times, 1/28/07]

-Charisma and a Search for Self In Obama's Hawaii Childhood [New York Times, 3/17/07]

-After 2000 Loss, Obama Built Donor Network From Roots Up [New York Times, 4/3/07]

-In Illinois, Obama Proved Pragmatic and Shrewd. [New York Times, 7/30/07]

-Loyal Network Backs Obama After His Help. [New York Times, 10/1/07]

-Obama Looks to Lessons From Chicago in His National Education Plan [New York Times, 9/10/08]

Will the mainstream media report stories that are bad news for Sen. Obama? Of course they will, but they won't do the legwork unless compelled to do so by someone handing over a finished story on a silver platter. Just imagine how different the coverage of Gov. Palin would be if the same approach was taken to her.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.

And of Obama's involvement in the activities of a group whose board he chaired:

Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit....Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

Kurtz's conclusion:

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle.

Kurtz makes some references in the article to the Obama camp's pushback, and discusses it (including reprinting the Obama campaign's full response) here, including completing the connection of the dots in Obama's involvement in setting up and funding Ayers' activities:

In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama's formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to "delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals." All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.

Bear in mind the timeline - this is precisely the time at which Obama was launching his political career (including a meeting at Ayers' home), signing a contract to support the platform of the Marxist New Party, representing ACORN as its lawyer, and receiving the support and active participation, in return, of ACORN and similar of left-wing groups as ground troops in his campaigns. Tom Maguire looks at how far back Obama's relationship with Ayers goes. I continue to be amazed that any civilized person could associate with this terrorist, much less allocate money to give him a role in educating children. But then, recall the words of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, writing in 2000:

Barak Obama is serving only his second term in the Illinois State Senate so he might be fairly charged with ambition, but the same might have be said of Bobby Rush when he ran against Congressman Charles Hayes. Obama also has put in time at the grass roots, working for five years as a community organizer in Harlem and in Chicago. When Obama participated in a 1996 UofC YDS Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy.

And of course, besides funding Ayers, Obama once in office was essentially letting groups like Planned Parenthood essentially write sex education bills - not a group as overtly outside the mainstream as Ayers, but consistent with Obama's overall Illinois record as a hard-core left-wing culture warrior looking to empower the whole menagerie of left-wing interest groups (headed by other "community organizers" just like Obama himself) with funding and sway over government. Kurtz, who has followed similar stories for years, explains how all of this is symptomatic of the broader left-wing cultural and educational program:

[T]he story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds "captured" by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC's story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky....

Of course, you don't go to a group like the Annenberg Challenge with an explicit promise to promote left-wing radicalism, and you don't pick Bill Ayers as the front man to deal with the donors. You pick someone smoother, less of a known commodity...you pick Barack Obama. In 1995, it was Obama's job to put a pleasant, respectable face on a fundamentally left-wing project.

Not much has changed since then, has it?

*Newt Gingrich, who is always worth reading even when he's wrong (and when Newt is wrong, he's often spectacularly wrong), has some very good questions about the big bailout, the $700 billion, no-strings-attached, no-oversight debit card being handed off to Treasury to create what blackhedd calls the First National Bad Bank of the United States. Blackhedd has his own questions and cautions about doing nothing here (more from McArdle on how close we came last week to a complete unraveling). I was on a call with McCain's economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin last week and from what I can tell, McCain appears to be pushing a solution that doesn't involve Uncle Sam actually buying the underlying investments, although his proposal is likely to be moot once some version of Paulson's plan gets passed into law. There's no Obama proposal on the table to compare that to. Here is McCain today on the Paulson plan:

I think it is clear that Congress must act and must act quickly. I laid out my plan and my priorities last Friday. I spoke to Secretary Paulson over the weekend, and I've been looking at the plan the administration has put forth. I urge Congress to study this proposal carefully as they consider the remedy for this crisis.

As for me, I am greatly concerned that the plan gives a single individual the unprecedented power to spend $1 trillion - trillion - dollars without any meaningful accountability. Never before in the history of our nation has so much power and money been concentrated in the hands of one person. This arrangement makes me deeply uncomfortable. When we are talking about a trillion dollars of taxpayer money "trust me" just isn't good enough.

We will not solve a problem caused by poor oversight with a plan that has no oversight. Part of the reason we are facing this crisis is an antiquated regulatory system of uncoordinated agencies that haven't been doing the job.

I believe we need a high level oversight board to impose accountability and establish concrete criteria for who gets help and who does not. They must ensure that throughout this crisis, the government is a careful steward of the taxpayer's dollars. The oversight board should be bipartisan and have qualified citizens who have no agenda but the protection of taxpayers and the financial markets. People like: Warren Buffet, who supports my opponent, Governor Romney, who supports me, or Mayor Bloomberg, an independent.

*From a political perspective, Ruffini thinks Hill Republicans should take a hard line against the $700 billion bailout. The word I'm hearing is that the deal is being negotiated mainly between the Administration and House Democrats, and the GOP on the Hill is playing wait and see depending on what emerges, especially on the crucial issue of how much stuff the Democrats try to tack on. The 28% approval rating for the $700 billion bailout is not encouraging to anybody on the Hill who is contemplating supporting it.

*Kevin Hasset of AEI offers a good nutshell summary of the view, increasingly popular on the Right, of how Senate Democrats fed the flames by defeating a McCain-sponsored reform in 2005. McCain goes hard after Obama on the same line of reasoning. The Obama camp's counter-effort against Rick Davis is not much of a response, given that nobody can finish the sentence of "and that's why McCain...."

*Maguire is skeptical of efforts to blame mark-to-market accounting. Which side of that debate you are on depends on whether you think the current market prices are realistic, or whether they represent a 1-2 punch of illiquidity and irrational panic. If the latter, it makes more sense to suspend or ditch mark-to-market. Reasonable minds can and do differ on this. Relatedly, whether the underlying redemption value of the debt securities at issue is or isn't greater than current market value will go a long way to determine whether that $700 billion outlay by the Treasury actually ends up turning a profit, which is far from inconceivable.

*NR on Gramm-Leach-Bliley, including Ramesh's question about whether the bill's critics actually want to repeal any particular provisions thereof. More here in the same vein from Megan McArdle.

*Of course, whenever you feel good about McCain, he goes and does something like recommend Andrew Cuomo for SEC Chair. There are more than a few reasons why McCain could scarcely have chosen a worse example for his bipartisanship shtick.

As I noted last week, the good things about McCain in a situation like this are that he's not prone to panic or freeze up in a crisis and that, having faith in the American economic system, he's likely to choose less draconian and counterproductive solutions in the long run than Obama. Nobody saw the whole current crisis coming, but as noted above McCain does get some credit for foreseeing and trying to head off parts of the problem. The bad news is stuff like this Cuomo nonsense, which I think he does just to butter up the mainstream Beltway press. Unfortunately, the current political climate makes it impossible for anybody who truly understands the problem to get elected, but other than Reagan I'm not sure we've had a president in modern times who really understood the economy, and the high-finance stuff was over Reagan's head too. The core advantage McCain has over Obama is that there are, in Reagan's memorable phrase, fewer things McCain knows that are not true.

*Obama's answer to the collapse of the housing market: "rebuild" one of the nation's fastest-growing cities!

*Now this, this is calm, mature governance, I tell ya.

UPDATE: The Blogometer rounds up blog reactions to the bailout, which represents the death of the free market, of fiscal conservatism, and/or of liberalism, depending who you listen to. The Club For Growth lines up against it.

I. The Obama Immigration Ad

The latest, hottest example, debunked here by Jake Tapper, with context provided here by Rush Limbaugh regarding his own statements quoted in the ad. In a nutshell, the Spanish language ad argues that Limbaugh is hateful and demeaning towards Mexicans and that McCain agrees with Limbaugh on immigration.

On the Limbaugh stuff, the ad is literally true in the narrowest sense - they quote actual sentence fragments uttered by Limbaugh - but as he notes, take them so wildly out of context as to be seriously false. But of course, Rush isn't the candidate, McCain is, so that's my main concern. Tapper walks through some of the attenuated efforts by the Obama to defend the factual accuracy of the ad, but its overall theme, which it supports with nothing in the ad, is that McCain is indistinguishable from border hawks like Rush on immigration issues. Which is so absurdly laughable and insulting to the listener's intelligence you hardly know where to start ... it's like running an ad against Joe Lieberman that says he takes his marching orders on foreign policy from Ted Kennedy. I mean, Rush was at the center of a coordinated effort by right-wing talk shows to block McCain's nomination in late January, and disagreement with McCain's more liberal immigration policies was the #1 reason for that. Everybody who pays even the remotest attention to politics knows this.

What it is symptomatic of, on the Obama side, is McSame Syndrome: the absolute refusal, in the face of any and all evidence, of Democrats and liberals to acknowledge that John McCain is not identical in all particulars to George W. Bush and other conservative Republicans. I explained on Monday why Obama's strategy has trapped him in this narrative, which he simply can't abandon even when it leads him to the absurd end of making McCain, of all people, out to be some sort of anti-immigrant extremist. Joe Biden's criticism of McCain for opposing embryonic stem cell research, which McCain has consistently supported, is another example of the same phenomenon. (See here for more of the same on McCain's regulatory record).

II. The McCain Sex Ed Ad

One of the major sources of hyperventilation against McCain is an ad he ran that, at the end of a litany of Obama's lack of accomplishments on education, accused Obama of supporting a bill that would teach sex education to kids as young as kindergarteners.

There's no question at this point that the ad was, in fact, literally accurate. Byron York walks through the bill's language and legislative history here, and shows fairly clearly that the effect of the bill was, in fact, to take existing rules about sex education for kids in the 6th grade and older and lower the age to kindergarten:

Illinois' existing law required the teaching of sex education and AIDS prevention in grades six through twelve. The old law read:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades 6 through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention, transmission and spread of AIDS.

Senate Bill 99 struck out grade six, changing it to kindergarten, in addition to making a few other changes in wording. It read:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.

York also talks to a sponsor of the bill who basically admits that the language of the bill was, in fact, related to the purpose of the bill, and that Barack Obama's claim that the bill was really only aimed at teaching young children when to report inappropriate touching was not accurate:

When I asked Martinez the rationale for changing grade six to kindergarten, she said that groups like Planned Parenthood and the Cook County Department of Health - both major contributors to the bill - "were finding that there were children younger than the sixth grade that were being inappropriately touched or molested." When I asked about the elimination of references to marriage and the contraception passages, Martinez said that the changes were "based on some of the information we got from Planned Parenthood."

After we discussed other aspects of the bill, I told Martinez that reading the bill, I just didn't see it as being exclusively, or even mostly, about inappropriate touching. "I didn't see it that way, either," Martinez said. "It's just more information about a whole variety of things that have to go into a sex education class, the things that are outdated that you want to amend with things that are much more current."

So, I asked, you didn't see it specifically as being about inappropriate touching?

"Absolutely not."

As York summarizes the results of doing actual reporting on the bill:

Obama's explanation for his vote has been accepted by nearly all commentators. And perhaps that is indeed why he voted for Senate Bill 99, although we don't know for sure. But we do know that the bill itself was much more than that. The fact is, the bill's intention was to mandate that issues like contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases be included in sex-education classes for children before the sixth grade, and as early as kindergarten. Obama's defenders may howl, but the bill is what it is.

So, McCain's ad is literally accurate: he fairly described what Obama actually voted for. But is it a fair ad that gets at an essential truth? My initial reaction to the ad was that despite the factual accuracy it pushed the envelope a bit too far in this regard: Obama probably wasn't aware of the import of the actual language of the bill, one could legitimately have misunderstandings about what would be construed as "age appropriate" sex education at that age, he thought he was just voting for education about inappropriate touching, and the objectionable provisions were pulled before being passed into law. In essence, legislative negligence, but not any sort of deliberate effort to push teaching about sex on little kids.

But then...well, first of all, on the one hand we have the actual language of the bill, and all we have for the opposite narrative is Obama's after-the-fact rationalizations. Obama conveniently destroyed all his records from his time in the State Senate, and as is so often true of the memory hole that has swallowed his State Senate career, we seem to have no contemporaneous record of what he was saying at the time about the bill despite the fact that he was the chairman of the committee (York found it hard to even locate people who had served as his colleagues in the State Senate, a persistent problem in getting details about Obama's past prior to 2004 - Charles Krauthammer noted the near-complete absence of people other than Michelle Obama who stood up to testify from personal knowledge about Obama's life or work). Then I watched this July 2007 video of Obama from a Planned Parenthood event (H/T). The video is from an ABC News report at the time, entitled "Sex Ed for Kindergarteners 'Right Thing to Do,' Says Obama," - a title undoubtedly craftily planted many months in advance by the McCain campaign, kinda like the way McCain hypnotized the Washington Post into interviewing Frank Raines about his ties to Obama.

While ABC's title may itself be a bit tendentious, go and watch the video - after giving a fairly good Alan Keyes imitation, Obama laughs about the kindergarten issue but doesn't exactly deny it ("I didn't know what to say to him...but it's the right thing to do"), and launches directly into defending expanded sex education in some very broad terms, and promising to re-create at the federal level what he did in Illinois: "to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in the schools." And note that he's doing this at an event by Planned Parenthood, a group whose mission has basically nothing to do with sexual abuse of kindergarteners and everything to do with the sex ed agenda, and which - as we saw from the York article - was basically driving the Illinois bill.

The essential truth? If you are a parent who thinks that groups like Planned Parenthood have been pressing for too much sex education in school (and a great many parents do feel that the government should not be pressing its view of sexual morals on children, and that sex education inherently conveys a message about morals if only by their complete absence), and you think Obama is the kind of guy who would support and encourage that through legislation, you are correct, and the Illinois bill is powerful evidence of that. If you think Obama won't be especially picky about ensuring that there are safeguards in that legislation to keep sex education confined to children who are at an age to be sexually active, the Illinois bill is powerful evidence of that, too. The most that can be said of McCain's ad is that it takes the plain language of the bill as evidence of an intent by Obama to do something, when we really lack any contemporaneous evidence one way or another of what Obama intended. And that, to me, is really #3 on my list (the omission of context) rather than the more serious problem with #2.

Why that matters to today's news, of course, is that even as the headlines have been dominated by one ripple of the credit crisis after another, McCain has acknowledged the damage and the need for reform, but he has stubbornly refused to panic, and has urged the voters even in hard-hit communities not to panic either. Over and over he has insisted that underneath all the credit craziness, the fundamental foundation of the American economy - the labor force, the businesses, the old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity, the entrepeneurial spirit - is still strong and still the envy of the world. As McCain's economic guru, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, put it recently, "You shouldn't run for president by running from everything in sight and trying to scare people." (H/T) McCain himself has promised regulatory-agency reform that "consolidate[s]" the alphabet soup of regulators (e.g., Treasury, Fed, SEC, CFTC, OCC, FINRA, OFHEO, PCAOB, to say nothing of 50 state banking agencies, 50 state securities commissions, 50 state insurance commissions), but also warned against "a risk of overregulation and overreacting...Congress has a tendency to do that." His latest TV ad stresses this bedrock optimism, the can-do sense that we've been through worse and can beat this too:

But every time McCain has made this point, Obama and his campaign have flown into a tizzy. Obama seems to think it's a great selling point to attack McCain for trying to tamp down panic over the fundamental foundations of the economy. This is perhaps unsurprising; Obama's never had to stand his ground under fire for anything, so he doesn't understand why McCain is doing what he's doing or what value there could be in reassuring the public to hang in there. The signature feature of Obama's career, after all, has been a restless desire to move on to the next thing; even his survival of the long primary race against Hillary Clinton was all about simply running out the clock before his act wore too thin. But panic and 'malaise' is the last thing we need right now:

The palpable panic of Obama and the Democrats can best be seen in their aimless and economically illiterate lashing out to try to capitalize on the credit crisis after weeks of losing polling ground. Joe Biden thinks he can convince people to blame the Bush tax cuts for the credit crisis (!), or worse yet, he believes it himself. Obama himself can apparently barely even spell AIG and is voting 'present' on the bailout, yet he's still pushing to jack up taxes on all forms of investment, even months after admitting that he favored a capital gains hike even if it didn't bring the government any more tax revenue. Harry Reid gives an unhinghed speech calling the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act "financial weapons of mass destruction," ignoring the fact that Reid and Joe Biden voted for the Act in its final form, to say nothing of the fact that J.P. Morgan's purchase of Bear Stearns, Barclays' purchase of Lehman Brothers, and Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch would all have been impossible without Gramm-Leach-Bliley's elimination of the archaic and artificial Depression-era barriers between commercial and investment banking. Then, Reid turns around and admits that "No one knows what to do." At this point, the whole lot of them look like Kathleen Blanco, the Democratic Governor of Louisiana who simply froze up in the crisis of Hurricane Katrina.

By contrast, the McCain camp has been steady - even as McCain has warned against the "moral hazard" created by bailouts, his running mate has acknowledged the real-world reasons why the Fed may have felt it necessary to throw a credit lifeline to AIG. McCain isn't pushing a radical expansion of government or a dire view of the state of the economy, just a promise to reform and modernize the way government works within its proper scope. He's being the one adult in the room.

Maybe this realism about the situation and steadiness in its face is one reason why McCain is now slightly more trusted on the economy than Obama, as a decisive plurality of voters share McCain's concern that the federal government will overreact.

McCain and Obama both want us to have hope for the economy. But somehow it seems that only McCain understands the lesson he learned in that long-ago POW camp - that you can't have hope unless you have faith.

A couple of things jump off the list:

(1) Yes, as we all know, Colorado and Pennsylvania are two of the really critical battlegrounds in 2008, and not only at the presidential level.

(2) Some states are genuinely competitive yet never become swing states at the presidential level. Maine has two Republican Senators because they are much more liberal than any national Republican; South Dakota has a Democratic Senator and at-Large Congresswoman because they are much more conservative than any national Democrat, and aren't running for Commander-in-Chief.

I. "The Issues"

I think I've made this point before recently, but when you hear people on the center-left or Left talk about "the issues," what they mean is health care. Well, not only health care, but invariably what they have in mind - as you can tell from reading many years' worth of such complaints - are domestic policy issues that can be solved by some combination of federal government spending, federal government regulation, and federal bureaucracy. Thus, a Republican who gives a campaign speech about taxes, national security/foreign policy, the courts and social and/or law enforcement issues can still end up being denounced for "ignoring the real issues" or running on "distractions from the real issues."

For the most part, Republican campaigns on the national level have responded to these sorts of complaints by rejecting their premises: (1) that large, expensive federal government programs are the answer to what ails us and (2) that things like national security, taxes and social issues are not legitimate subjects for debate. On a deeper level, GOP campaign strategy in national elections - especially in successful Republican campaigns - has tended to do two things:

1. Focus on a few simple points about a few core issues.

2. Spend the rest of the campaign drawing contrasts on things like character, experience, personality and values.

As I've said many times before, ideas don't run for president; people do.

Journalists tend to sneer at this approach as if it's some sort of voodoo trickery on a gullible citizenry, but you don't have to view the voters as ignoramuses to recognize that the average voter quite rationally does not have the time or the resources to evaluate, say, two complex competing health care plans, especially when proposed by politicians who cite competing and conflicting statistics, factoids and anecdotes to support them. Nor do most citizens these days trust the media to adjudicate such disputes fairly. A successful campaign can at most widely communicate a handful of things about its views on the issues - when Bush ran in 2000, for example, pretty much everybody knew about his tax cut plan and that he wanted to toughen educational standards, and most people got the message at a general level about his support for missile defense and private Social Security accounts. This was his core message, the rest of which was details and background noise to the average voter. Beyond the headlines, voters tend to just rely on their background impressions of what the parties usually stand for. (Which is not to say the candidates can afford to ignore the need to flesh out answers on ever imaginable issue - there are still many people who vote on one or another single issue that flies below the surface of the main debate - but there just isn't a way to communicate your message on every issue to the great mass of voters).

With the core message set, much of the rest of the campaign ends up being a battle to convince voters that the candidates share the voters' values and worldview and are the kind of people who will do at least some of what they promise and handle the inevitable unpredictable crises. Sometimes, that means using positions on real issues to illustrate a point - that John Kerry was unable to take and hold a clear position on the crucial life-and-death issue of the Iraq War, that Michael Dukakis took such an unserious approach to crime that he supported prison furloughs for violent sex offenders, that Barack Obama is such an extremist on abortion that he even proudly opposed a bill designed to protect children born alive after an abortion. Those issue discussions are intended less to "debate the issues" than to reveal something in the outlook of the candidate that will permeate multiple issues. Voters who lack the means to weigh two sets of platforms end up relying on their own ability to take the measure of the men.

In short, there are perfectly valid reasons why presidential campaigns are almost never mainly about "the issues" in the sense that liberal journalists use the phrase. (What stories actually sell newspapers and get read or watched on TV tends to reinforce that fact). As I will discuss below, however, that's not the only reason why this race seems to be less about "the issues" than usual.

II. How We Got Here

The second key to how the McCain and Obama campaigns have approached "the issues" is recent history. Since the end of the Cold War, the American electorate has been pretty evenly divided - there are still more registered Democrats than registered Republicans, but there also tend to be more Republican-leaning independents, especially in presidential elections, than Democrat-leaning independents. Between 1992 and 2001, the conventional wisdom was that both parties needed to move towards the center to win at the presidential and statewide levels (even as House races were getting ever more polarized and ideological), but that the Democrats needed to move further, and had done so under Clinton. Most observers would agree that Bill Clinton, while unmistakably liberal on a number of issues, had in fact made some real, substantive moves to the center on issues like the death penalty, free trade and (grudgingly) welfare reform, whereas George Bush's moves to the center were milder and more rhetorical, notably on spending (when he accused the GOP Congress in 1999 of "trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor") and immigration.

That all changed after September 11. In 2000, Republicans had a mediocre year - Bush barely won election while losing the popular vote, and nearly all the close Senate races went to the Democrats - but did succeed in electing the second-most conservative President since Coolidge. In 2002 and 2004, though, Republicans consistently whupped the Democrats. Bush won the first national popular majority since 1988. Republicans won all but a handful of the contested Senate races. And they did so in large part by pummelling the Democrats on a consistent message of a few core issues - tax cuts, control of the courts, and of course the paramount importance of national security. The result was a commanding Republican position in the legislative and executive branches, and talk on the Right of a realignment.

As we all know, the political environment has been all downhill since then. While the 109th Congress was not without its accomplishments, most of the GOP's major legislative goals have gone down in flames since then, the 2006 elections were a rout outside of a handful of governors' races (Alaska, South Carolina, Minnesota, Florida, Rhode Island), various special elections have gone badly, opinion polls consistently showed major movement away from the GOP brand, and pretty much everybody thought that the Democrats would make major gains again in Congress in 2008 and that the presidential election was theirs to lose.

The question is why this happened. There's certainly evidence to support the argument that Republicans got beat on the merits on some issues. While Bush badly mismanaged and mishandled the rollout of his Social Security reform plan (I also blame the Terri Schiavo controversy, which sucked up crucial media oxygen at precisely the time when Bush should have been selling his plan), the fact remains that there's a lot of public resistance to anything that alters the entitlement programs. The Democrats successfully publicized and exploited issues where the GOP view was (unfortunately) out of step with public opinion, like embryonic stem cell research. And the agonizingly slow progress of the Iraq War was, for much of the past 4 years, a major drag on GOP political fortunes.

That being said, I believe - and I think many conservatives believe and more than a few Democrats would have to admit to themselves - that the bulk of the problem Republicans have faced in recent years is not about Republican ideas, but the people the party elected to office. The problem has been one of competence and integrity much moreso than ideology. I don't weep, of course, for the public officials who have suffered the consequences of their own failures in this regard, but you have to diagnose the problem.

This is not to say, of course, that all the criticisms on non-ideological grounds have been fair or well-founded, but that's another day's argument; the perception is a reality all to itself, and it's got enough foundation to it that it's no longer worth fighting over rather than try to move on from it with new leadership that has the credibility to fix the problem.

Integrity

The Democrats were highly effective at deploying the "culture of corruption" theme in 2006, and Capitol Hill Republicans gave them a lot to work with. Of course, finding corruption in Congress is like finding sand in Saudi Arabia, and of course, there has been plenty of Democratic corruption in the same time period, but (1) Republicans were running the place and (2) a key part of the selling point of the GOP is being the faithful steward of the taxpayer. Republicans win by promising to stand for the general interest in less government against special interest governance that says government has to respond with a wheelbarrow of cash whenever anybody says they need it.

But to say that Republicans were punished at the polls more than Democrats would be for corruption, overspending and shady pork projects - in short, for fiscal hypocrisy - is to understand that voters didn't lose faith in Republican ideas; they lost faith in Republicans' willingness to execute them.

By the standards of two-term presidencies the Bush Administration has had remarkably few scandals centered on personal venality; most of the executive branch controversies have derived from disputes over policy and politics. But that doesn't mean Bush's image has been untouched. By failing to veto even a single bill produced by Congressional Republicans, Bush was part of the problem.

Competence

If the GOP Congress had an integrity problem, the Bush White House in its second term had a competence problem. Of course, there were things done poorly in the first term and things done well in the second, but broadly speaking voters in 2004 had rewarded a Bush team that accomplished a lot: a steady response to 9/11, the successful toppling of the Taliban and Saddam, a blizzard of complex new legislation, prevention of any further terror attacks, a booming economy.

But the second term has been marred by too many high-profile failures of competence. Hurricane Katrina, of course, was the signal failure from which Bush never recovered, and for the most part the Administration's problem was simply the fact of having put an unqualified guy in the job of FEMA chief and left him there. The Harriet Miers nomination was a failure of competence - another unqualified pick fairly tarred as cronyism - and if anything a failure to trust in the conservative ideology that helped her successor, Samuel Alito, pass the Senate. The various screwups by people like Alberto Gonzales and Scott McClellan had little enough to do with ideas, which happens when you appoint people who don't have any ideas (Slight digression: this is why Presidents should appoint people loyal to the President's policy agenda rather than personally to the President. The latter expect personal loyalty in return, the former expect to be judged on what they accomplish for the larger cause). And even the public disenchantment with the progress of the Iraq War was driven in significant part by the faction of conservative-leaning or "Jacksonian" voters who felt the war was repeating the failed half-measures of Vietnam.

To sum up, while Republican and conservative ideas took a few lumps over the past few years, there is little enough evidence to suggest that voters who believed those ideas actually lost faith in them; what they lost faith in, in larger numbers, was that Republican leadership in the White House and on Capitol Hill would, and could, carry those ideas into execution. The challenges for the two parties entering the 2008 elections, then, would be driven by the gulf between the enduring popular appeal of bedrock conservative ideas and the unpopularity of Republican leadership.

III. The More Things "Change," The More They Are Not McSame

So, the public was hungry for change from Republican leadership, but not necessarily hungry for the alternatives sold by the Democrats. (The abysmal popularity of the Pelosi-Reid Congress is surely some proof of this). How did the two parties approach this challenge?

The Maverick

For Republicans, the answer proved, after an agonizingly unsettled primary season, to be relatively simple: pick the candidate who could most easily distinguish himself from what went wrong. Running a campaign just on traditional GOP rhetoric wouldn't work because the voters didn't believe that Republicans believed it.

For a time, Republicans flirted with candidates who could run on executive competence, such as Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, but eventually the GOP lined up behind John McCain. McCain embodies a rejection across the board of everything that created the party's integrity problem. He's been a long-time critic of overspending in general (he opposed the 2003 Medicare bill) and pork barrel spending in particular. He's crusaded against the influence of big money and lobbyists - not always wisely, when you consider McCain-Feingold, and not always comprehensively (it should shock nobody familiar with politics that his staff still includes current and former lobbyists), but he's made his name trying to do things other people wouldn't. Republicans sustained a ton of damage from the Jack Abramoff scandal; McCain held hearings publicizing the story, making him a lot of enemies on top of his already extensive collection (Tom DeLay: "McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of").

As for the competence issue, the simple fact that McCain was an early and persistent critic of Bush on so many fronts, most notoriously in his longstanding view that Bush needed to send more troops to Iraq, meant that the public was highly unlikely to just assume that electing McCain would be an uninterrupted continuation of the fumbles of the Bush second term.

Finally, even on the issues, McCain has dissented from Republican and conservative orthodoxy more times than anyone can recount, and done so specifically on issues like stem cell research where the public wasn't with the GOP. It's true, of course, that in many cases McCain's distancing act was at the margins of an issue and didn't put him all that close to agreeing with the Democrats, but that's fine; for voters who liked the GOP agenda more than the Democratic one but were uncomfortable with some of the specifics, McCain offers a way to buy in to less than the whole thing.

The very fact of McCain's moderation on a number of issues, however, creates two problems for him in running an issues-based campaign in the way that Bush did in 2000.

First, following the reasoning set out above, contrasts on the issues have to be crisp and stark - we saw in the Democratic primaries how much energy was wasted by Hillary and Obama comparing the microscopic distinctions between their respective health care plans. But because McCain has often sanded down the edges of the distinctions between his position and that of the Democrats, it's harder for him to draw out cleanly, without a lot of explaining, how he differs from them in where he stands. He's been able to hit Obama on some of the many issues where Obama's record is extreme to the left (e.g., abortion and taxes), but these are mostly not positive selling points for McCain.

Second, because of his many apostasies from party orthodoxy, McCain has always been at risk for re-opening old wounds with his own base if he talks too much about the areas where he's taken sides against President Bush or - worse yet, in the case of immigration - taken sides along with President Bush and the Democrats against the Republican base. This is one reason why McCain's campaign in the primaries was almost entirely devoid of discussions of domestic policy issues except to respond to the other candidates' attacks. McCain's been running ads lately that serve to blur distinctions with the Democrats by highlighting his positions on stem cell research and immigration, but again, these are efforts to remind swing voters of the separation between McCain and the rest of his party; they are not, in and of themselves, the stuff of a core issue platform.

As a result of these hurdles, McCain has struggled at times to come up with that ideal 3- or 4-bullet point-style agenda that a national campaign aspires to. His corporate tax cut plan is good policy but not terribly exciting - McCain has gotten traction attacking Obama's tax-hike plans but far less for his own relatively modest proposals for additional cuts. He dedicated a lot of his convention speech to school choice and other education reforms, but hasn't made a sustained pitch on that issue. He's been surprisingly vehement about free trade, but that's an issue where there's really no constituency demanding a change from the status quo in the direction McCain favors.

Still, by midsummer he had found a few core items to emphasize. #1 on the list is energy, on which McCain has joined with the Congressional GOP in hammering Obama and the Hill Democrats for opposing expanded domestic oil drilling and nuclear energy production. Typically of McCain's moderate record, he had to jettison his own prior opposition to offshore drilling to accomplish this, and signal his willingness to reconsider his position on drilling in ANWR, especially now that he's added the pro-drilling Governor of Alaska to his ticket (on nuclear he's been a long-time proponent). Energy is the one issue where a President McCain, if elected, can claim a legitimate mandate to get significant legislation passed early in his term. (You don't get a mandate you don't campaign for).

#2, improbably, has been Iraq, really the one issue McCain trumpeted ceaselessly in the GOP primaries into the face of the prevailing political winds, but which ultimately won him the respect of long-skeptical Republican primary voters. If anything, the surge in Iraq has been too successful, as voters are now less concerned about avoiding defeat there and the pace of victory has muddled McCain's message as even President Bush and Prime Minister al-Maliki now believe that U.S. troop withdrawals can proceed apace over the next 18 months or so. But McCain has visibly put Obama on the defensive repeatedly over their diametrically opposite positions on the surge and the fact that McCain's position, of the two, has been proven conclusively correct and Obama's conclusively wrong.

And #3, pork-barrel spending and earmarks. Pork is generally an inside-the-Beltway issue because what it says about the integrity of our government is outweighed by the small impact it actually has on the overall budget, compared to, say, the colossal size of entitlement programs. As a result, I've been skeptical from the outset of the value of focusing on earmark reform to the exclusion of more substantive issues. But McCain has been betting that with voter disillusionment with the GOP being driven largely by the integrity and competence issues discussed above, his best bet is to win people back by showing them that he's going to clean house.

The Changeling

McCain isn't the only one, however, whose ability or willingness to campaign on a crisply defined agenda has been impeded by the dynamics of the 2008 race. Voters are generically sick of Bush and mistrustful of Republican leadership, but that doesn't mean they've overnight embraced the agenda of the Democrats, much less the agenda of Barack Obama, the most left-wing presidential candidate since George McGovern and maybe since Henry Wallace.

One way to square this circle is the one Obama has chosen. It's a strategy with three parts:

First, campaign generically on "change." Voters who are unhappy with the status quo can identify Obama with "change" without having to have the uncomfortable conversation about whether Obama is proposing to change what they dislike about Bush in a direction they would support.

Second, run as the candidate of "new politics." Voters cynical about the loss of integrity by Republicans in Washington (and the perennial scandal problems of Democrats) can identify Obama as the man to rise above corruption by virtue of running a campaign that shows him to discard many of the things voters identify with a corrupt system.

Third, tie his opponent to Bush, with the "McSame" or "McBush" label. Argue at all turns that McCain is exactly the same as Bush.

It's not hard to see why this strategy was so successful in the early going, why it has worn badly thin since then, and why it has effectively precluded Obama from running on a concrete positive agenda. If Obama talks about an issue on which the main voter disagreement with Republicans is that they didn't keep their promises and Obama is promising the opposite, he loses the "change" argument; he also loses that mantle if he basically serves up issue proposals that sound like the same things Democrats have been peddling for decades, which on most issues aptly describes his policy proposals, few of which would have looked - or did look - out of place in the McGovern platform. If Obama talks about an issue where he disagrees with Bush and so does McCain - and there are plenty of those - he loses the "McSame" argument. "McSame" is fundamentally a weak argument because it's not credible in general, and all but the youngest voters know it - anybody who followed politics since 2000 will be left wondering who this Obama dude is to show up and tell them that after all those years of McCain pissing in Bush's morning coffee, he's really the same as Bush after all. It's also not specific to the causes of voter disenchantment with Bush. Obama basically ended up having his strategy outsmarted by GOP primary voters who correctly diagnosed the party's problem and turned to the man most likely to fix it. Throw in the many ways (I won't get into these here) in which Obama has abandoned his various "new politics" promises, and you end up with essentially an empty shell of a platform.

This is not to say that Obama has no issue agenda. His website will earnestly explain to you at length, albeit with some important details omitted, what he would like to do in office. He handed out a longer laundry list even than McCain in his convention speech. But beyond two issues he really has not driven home the sort of specific, concise and consistent message that would enable the average voter to recite from memory what he stands for. Go ahead, recite for me the 3- or 4-point plan that constitutes Obama's core message; most people can't do it even if they've been following this campaign fairly closely.

One of those two issues is ...wait for it...health care. Obama's plan is complex and basically a variation on the same "universal coverage" theme the Democrats have been pushing for 35-40 years, and we've had several demonstrations of the facts that (1) Democrats frequently lose national elections even when voters prefer their proposals on health care and (2) when Democrats actually get in power and try to enact their health care policies, they become a lot less popular. Still, it's something.

The other issue, the one that was really the centerpiece of Obama's primary campaign in differentiating himself from Hillary, was his unbending opposition to the Iraq War, including his opposition to the surge and his proposal for a complete withdrawal by March 2008. But even to a war-weary public it's hard to see how that's now anything but a net liability for Obama; certainly it's no longer an issue he can trumpet without some serious blowback.

Of course, Obama is also running on "the economy," but simply denouncing all bad things that happen is not the same as having a plan anybody understands.

I've long believed, and I think it's a general rule of thumb among political consultants, that you can't successfully roll out a new message after the conventions, and it's foolhardy to try. Obama got this far by campaigning at a high level of abstraction for "change," and even now the polls have him running close enough that despite the recent surge of momentum in McCain's direction he may yet win. But nobody should be surprised if neither candidate gets any more specific in identifying a core of concrete issues than what we have heard so far.

Six months ago, no one would have pegged McCain as the most cybersavvy of this year's crop of candidates. At 63, he is the oldest of the bunch and because of his war injuries, he is limited in his ability to wield a keyboard. But McCain's job as chairman of the Senate commerce committee forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him. Well before he announced his exploratory committee, McCain had assimilated the notion that the Web could be vital to the kind of insurgent, anti-establishment campaign he wanted to run.

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Thanks to Fose and Gullett, the McCain campaign has become the most eager experimenter with Web advertising, Web organizing, and Web fund raising. "Even more impressive than the money is the way we can communicate with people," McCain said on the bus. "We can communicate with them eight to 10 times a day. You know how much it cost to communicate with someone eight times a day before the Internet? It's going to change politics."

Last night McCain participated in another Web first: the first-ever "cyberfundraiser." At the event, he boasted about the latest returns from his Web site. In the first eight days following the New Hampshire primary, he raised $2.6 million on the Internet, for a Web total of $4.1 million from 40,000 individual donors. According to Fose, money is still coming in from the candidate's Web site at the rate of about $100,000 a day. In addition, the Web site has had 10 million hits in the week following New Hampshire. Some 100,000 people have clicked a button asking for volunteers who want to be actively involved with McCain's campaign. One of them was Andy Grove, the chairman of Intel.

I suppose it could be worse: Obama's other main line of attack today is that McCain is too out of touch to be President because he's a Senator. And questioning McCain's patriotism, which I suppose is a fair enough argument despite the Democrats' incessant shrieking when the topic comes up...but not a battle Obama is likely to win.

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

As you can tell from Gibson's question, Gov. Palin has simply reiterated the central and foundational element of the NATO Charter. Article 5 of the NATO Charter, to which Gibson and Gov. Palin refer here, "states that an armed attack against one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.". Article 5 is the reason for NATO's existence, and of course it was originally drafted in 1949 precisely to deal with the situation of a Russian (then Soviet) invasion of the easternmost frontier of NATO, which is precisely what Georgia and/or Ukraine would become if their NATO membership is approved next year.

Funny, isn't it, how the Left loses interest in multilateralism and treaty obligations when it suits their purpose? No responsible American leader would offer a different answer to Gibson's question. Any other answer would simply be a declaration of intent to withdraw from NATO.

UPDATE: TPM boss Josh Marshall repeats this line of attack on Gov. Palin, and seems incredulous at the notion that a NATO member might be obligated to go to war if another NATO member is attacked. Seven years ago, NATO invoked Article 5 following the September 11 attacks; it was much noted at the time that this recognized that an attack on the United States was an attack on all NATO members.

How soon they forget.

The RCP map shows Obama up 217-216, with nine states up for grabs

I generally think that's correct as far as the states that RCP has moved into each candidate's column - those are states that are not going to be in play unless you get a big national movement. For example:

1. McCain largely burned his bridges long ago in Iowa, a 2004 Bush state, by his principled opposition to ethanol subsidies; he skipped the 2000 Iowa caucuses and finished a distant third there in 2008. Obama, by contrast, is one of the ethanol industry's largest recipients of cash and (perhaps not coincidentally) a booster of subsidies. Iowa launched Obama, and is likely to stay in his column along with politically similar Minnesota and Wisconsin, even though all three will end up being fairly close.

2. A surge of African-American voter turnout will make North Carolina closer, but I expect McCain to hold his turf there.

3. Florida may be close in the polls, but really it's been a steady Republican state. There were two anomalous factors that conspired to make it close in 2000: the popularity of Joe Lieberman on the ticket with older Jewish voters transplanted from the Northeast, and the early call by Fox and other networks for Gore that sent Republicans home in the panhandle before the polls had closed. Absent those factors, 2002, 2004 and even 2006 were all good Republican years in Florida.

When push comes to shove, I also expect Indiana - a rock-ribbed Republican state even in the Clinton years - and most likely Ohio and Virginia to stay home with the Republicans, close though all three will be, and while Obama has struggled in Pennsylvania (recall the "bitter" comment and his thumping in the primary there), I suspect that traditional party loyalty and Ed Rendell's machine will put him over the top at the end. As you will see as you walk through these maps, it's all but impossible for McCain to win without both Ohio and Virginia (and, obviously, Florida) - he's unlikely to swipe Michigan or Pennsylvania unless he's winning Ohio - and even more implausible for Obama to win without Pennsylvania. These are bedrock states of each party's path to victory.

If you add in those states to each side, that gives us a map with only five swing states, and a 260-238 McCain lead:

McCain has a lot of atmospheric help going for him in Michigan: Democratic mismanagement of the state government and the economy; the arrest and resignation of Detroit's Democratic mayor, who supported Obama; lingering bitterness over Obama's effort to avoid seating the Michigan delegation during his battle with Hillary. On the other hand, McCain got beat in the Michigan primary himself after his comment about jobs not leaving and not coming back was taken as a sign of undue pessimism about the economy. Fundamentally, though, Michigan is a Democratic state, albeit narrowly; it's still an uphill battle. If we assume Obama holds onto it, we get McCain 260, Obama 255, with only Colorado and Nevada (won by Bush twice), New Mexico (won by Bush and Gore), and New Hampshire (won by Bush and Kerry):

All four of these states seem legitimately too close to call if you've been reading the polls. There are individual factors at work. McCain's been popular forever in New Hampshire, site of his crucial primary victories in 2000 and 2008 (both of which depended on his popularity with independents) and the home of countless McCain town halls and bus rides over the years, whereas Obama fared poorly in the primary there. In Nevada, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site is a flashpoint; McCain's support of the site and ambitious plan to build more nuclear plants, compared to Obama's unwillingness to embrace either, put McCain in a bind there. Colorado's been trending Democratic due to a large influx of Latinos as well as liberal Californians. Then again, the distinctly Western flavor of the McCain-Palin ticket could prove appealing over prolonged exposure in CO, NV and NM.

This is where things get really hairy, because there are three different combinations (McCain wins CO, or NM + NH, or NV + NH) that get us a 269-269 tie. I think we can all agree that this would be a terrible outcome for the nation, and would cripple the next president's ability to govern, just as the recount made it impossible for Bush, even before he took office, to even approach the "uniter, not a divider" tag he'd campaigned under; the Democrats were permanently estranged from him before Day One.

The first problem, if there's a 269-269 tie, is the "faithless elector" problem, i.e., some elector bolting sides to break the tie, a result that would create an enormous outcry. If we get past that, the 12th Amendment explains what happens:

The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.--The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.

We'll skip over here the part where some bizarre deadlock prevents the House from deciding, and Dick Cheney ends up the President...basically, the vote would come down to which party controls the most state delegations in the House, and at least at present, that's the Democrats by a margin of 2 or 3 states as of last count - I believe the most recent special elections swung them another state. I'm sure we'll all count more closely if it happens. Of course, that's the current Congress; I'm a little less clear on whether the current Congress or the one elected in November would tally the electoral votes...but assuming it's still the Democrats, this probably means Obama wins if it's 269-269.

Then we get the VP, picked by the Senate. The Senate currently has 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans, one Socialist, one member of the Connecticut for Lieberman party who has endorsed McCain-Palin, and a tiebreaking vote by Dick Cheney. My guess is that given Senatorial courtesies and the like, especially with Biden as the opponent, McCain would probably dissuade Republicans from putting up a fight to saddle Obama with Palin as his VP, another outcome that would be highly unstable and bad for the country.

Well, that was a long digression into the parade of horribles, but the bottom line is, McCain needs 270 to win, Obama probably needs 269. And at this writing, the single state most likely to swing that difference is Colorado. The odds are pretty good that the margin of victory will be one state, maybe two, that are decided by just a percentage point or two.

Fasten your seatbelts.

Now, nobody really believes that most politicians write their own stuff, but remember that this is the same Obama campaign that thought it important to redirect attention away from Sarah Palin to her speechwriter. But of course, Obama has his own speechwriting team, and that apparently still doesn't stop him from serially recycling other people's words, which is pretty ironic given that Obama's words and "change" are supposed to be his big selling points.

I suppose it would be unfair to compare him to that other famous plagiarist, Joe Biden, since if you recall the 1988 race, what got Biden in trouble wasn't the comparitively venial sin (by politician standards) of plagiarism but the more serious one of fabulism - claiming details about himself from other people's lives (Ace and Dan Spencer explain this point in some detail).

But clearly, for all of Obama's famous eloquence in delivering speeches, original thought is not his forte. But I guess some people enjoy watching reruns and pretending it's something new.