Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

James Fallows: After the Obama Infomercial

After the Obama infomercial - James Fallows: 30 Oct 2008 12:30 am Let's review what we have seen from Barack Obama through the two years of his campaign:

• Skills in formal oratory that, in my view, you'd have to go back to John F. Kennedy to match. Bill Clinton could, and can, hold an audience spellbound, but his speeches are a collection of brilliant apercus more than a central argued-out idea. (Illustrative experience: read one of Clinton's books, and read Obama's first book.) In his main speeches, starting with the 2004 Boston convention speech and with a particular highlight in the "Jeremiah Wright" speech about race in Philadelphia, Obama has been both interesting to listen to serious in trying to present a main idea. The other competitor would be Ronald Reagan. I don't think most of his speeches pass the "serious big idea" test, but I know that some people do.

• Skills in using technology to raise money for which there is no real precedent (as Josh Green was one of the first to describe, in this Atlantic article).

• Skills in Get Out the Vote organizational efforts that we saw in the Iowa primary and which we're primed to look for next Tuesday.

• Skills in one-on-one debating technique that led to all three presidential debates being seen by the public as big Obama wins. And now, with the informercial:

-  Skills in telling stories (and evoking emotions) through pictures that we associate mainly with Reagan and no one since.

• And (update) skill in personal presentation, which means that the candidate is never seen as being testy, rarely seems rattled, seems to know where he wants to go and makes some progress every day -- the only candidate this really resembles is Ronald Reagan.   We can wonder later on -- and, minus something we can't now imagine, we can wonder pretty soon -- about the organizational and analytic skills Obama will display in office. But as a collection of talents brought to bear in a campaign, this is quite remarkable. And the sequential underestimations -- by the Hillary Clinton camp, and now by the Republicans -- will merit future analysis.

John Holbo: Which Sort of Conservative Was Hayek Not?

Which Sort of Conservative Was Hayek Not? — Crooked Timber: Jonah Goldberg has responded to my “Spread The Wealth” post. A minor point: “My longstanding gripe with the use and abuse of that essay [Hayek’s “Why I Am Not A Conservative”] is that some libertarians and liberals deliberately confuse the fact that Hayek isn’t referring to American conservatives when he says he’s not a conservative.”

Well, I have always taken Hayek to be referring to American conservatives: “Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character.”

‘Recent attempts to transpant’? Russell Kirk, I presume. “Has acquired a somewhat odd character.” Frank Meyer and 1960’s National Review-style ‘fusionism’, I presume. A halfway Hayek, halfway Kirk hybrid. That’s Goldberg, too, give or take.

Now there is a diplomatic quality to Hayek’s essay, which could lead you to miss the fact that he is, in fact, talking about American conservatives. Pragmatically, Hayek regards American conservatives as his allies, but only because he thinks they can serve as a counterweight to socialism, not because he agrees with them philosophically. He thinks they have ‘a somewhat odd character’. The essay is, in part, an attempt to tell American-style conservatives this without really rubbing their noses in it – more flies with honey and all that.

What does Goldberg make of the essay’s epigraph, from Lord Acton? “At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition.” I wouldn’t say this is flamingly self-evident, but I have always taken this to be Hayek’s way of expressing the somewhat delicate balance of his personal alliance/association with American-style conservatism...

Chris Shays Gets Off the Straight Talk Expres

Chris Shays gets off the Straight Talk Express | Video Cafe: Virtually certain now of McCain's imminent defeat Chris Shays effectively tosses McCain under the bus. In an interview with the Yale Daily News:

NEW CANAAN, Conn. - The first ballot has yet to be tallied, but some Republicans are already hammering nails into the McCain-Palin campaign's coffin.

Locked in a tight congressional race, Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut's 4th district is the latest in a slew of Republican incumbents, including Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, to concede a near-certain victory to the Obama camp.

"I just don't see how [McCain] can win," Shays said in an interview here on Sunday.

Shays, the Connecticut co-chair of McCain's campaign, said he was disappointed by the standards of McCain's race, which has increasingly relied on mudslinging.

"He has lost his brand as a maverick; he did not live up to his pledge to fight a clean campaign," Shays said.

And for AP :

"He's taken the thing that is most valuable, his (maverick) brand, and he's not staying true to it," Shays said. "I admire John McCain more than you can imagine. He would make a great president."

But, Shays added, "I don't see how he wins if he isn't true to who he is ... a straight shooter talking about the issues."

I suppose this would be surprising coming from the co-chair McCain's Connecticut campaign if it were anyone else but Chris Shays. But right now survival is the name of the game and it's every man for himself.

Connecticut Republicans tried to put on a brave face, at least in public.

Connecticut Republican Party chairman Chris Healy said he didn't think Shays' comments were damaging to McCain's campaign.

"Chris Shays is a loyal Republican, a great asset to the party," Healy said. "Chris Shays always speaks his mind, and that's why people like him. I think part of it is frustration with our message not getting out.

"But like a lot of things about Chris Shays," Healy added, "he says things that give people something to reflect."

Behind the scenes things were clearly different.

Connecticut conservatives are furious and many are swearing off support for Shays. "I know he always votes the right way when we really need him," said a Republican elected official in Fairfield County, who asked to remain anonymous, "but this is the last straw. He's just so treacherous and hypocritical. We all know McCain is going to lose but does that mean you kick him in the teeth on his way down. Christopher Shays owes Republicans an apology."

Tags: Chris Shays, CT-04, jim Himes, John McCain

Matthew Yglesias: Sanchez v. Goldfarb: Rick Sanchez carves a “B” in Michael Goldfarb’s face

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page: Sanchez v. Goldfarb: Rick Sanchez carves a “B” in Michael Goldfarb’s face: Couldn’t have happened to a more loathesome operative. At the same time, I have no idea why we’re conceding the premise that Rashid Khalidi is motivated by anti-Jewish racism. I suppose their might be some evidence for that, but one would think that being a Palestinian would be a perfectly sufficient reason for being a Palestinian nationalist.

Martin Feldstein: The Stimulus Plan We Need Now

Martin Feldstein - The Stimulus Plan We Need Now: The President-Elect Won't Have to Wait Till January to Act

Further legislation to deal with the economic crisis should not wait until the new president takes office. Fortunately, the president-elect will be a senator and can propose legislation without waiting to be sworn in as president. Immediately after Nov. 4, the winner could, and should, take the lead in the legislative process.

The economy faces two separate problems: the downward spiral of home prices, which hangs over the financial markets, and the decline in aggregate spending, which could cause a deep and prolonged recession.

Home prices have already fallen about 25 percent from their peak in 2006, and experts say they must fall an additional 10 to 15 percent to get back to pre-bubble levels. But they could fall much further than that as a result of mortgage defaults and foreclosures. Further declines from the current level would increase the number of homeowners whose mortgages exceed the value of their homes, creating a strong incentive to default. Defaults and the resulting foreclosures would put more homes on the market, driving down prices even more.

And this fear of a deep drop in home prices depresses the value of mortgage-backed securities, contributing to the difficulty that banks are having raising funds and to their reluctance to make loans.

Although home prices must get back to pre-bubble levels, Congress should enact policies to reduce defaults that could drive prices down much further. Direct help to the 12 million homeowners who already have negative equity in their homes could help to stop foreclosures. But it is important for Congress to go further and stop declining prices from pushing a large portion of the other 37 million homeowners with mortgages into negative equity, which could tempt them to default. The mortgage replacement loan plan that I suggested in June, essentially a congressionally enacted mortgage "firewall" to prevent prices from dropping too far, is one possible way to do that.

Falling home prices have already reduced homeowner wealth by about $3 trillion; the stock market decline has cut wealth by an additional $8 trillion. This reduced household wealth is causing consumers to cut spending, leading to lower employment, lower incomes and, therefore, further cuts in consumer spending.

Other components of aggregate demand are also falling. The decline in consumer spending will lead to less business investment in plants and equipment. And the recession in Europe and Japan will further reduce our net exports.

With the Fed's benchmark interest rate down to 1 percent, there is no scope for an easier monetary policy to stop the downward spiral in aggregate demand.

Another round of one-time tax rebates won't do the job. The rebates that Congress enacted this spring failed to stimulate consumer spending: More than 80 percent of tax rebate dollars were saved or used to pay down existing debt.

The only way to prevent a deepening recession will be a temporary program of increased government spending. Previous attempts to use government spending to stimulate an economic recovery, particularly spending on infrastructure, have not been successful because of long legislative lags that delayed the spending until a recovery was well underway. But while past recessions lasted an average of only about 12 months, this downturn is likely to last much longer, providing the scope for successful countercyclical spending.

A fiscal package of $100 billion is not likely to be large enough to revive the economy. The fall in household wealth resulting from the collapse of the stock market and the decline of home prices may cut aggregate spending by $300 billion a year or more.

The president-elect should focus on developing a mechanism for identifying and funding spending initiatives that can occur quickly and that would otherwise not be done. While it would be good if some of the increased spending also contributed to long-term productivity, the key is to stimulate demand. Any plan to finance this spending by raising taxes, even if postponed, as Sen. Barack Obama has suggested, would hurt the recovery by causing affected taxpayers to cut their spending now.

The increased government spending should include not only money for infrastructure such as bridges and roads but also for a wide range of equipment. Rebuilding some of the military capacity that has been depleted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be done relatively quickly and should be part of the overall package.

Although the economy is facing severe challenges, the president-elect can turn the situation around by introducing legislation to deal with the downward spiral in home prices and with the declining level of aggregate demand. It is important that such legislation be enacted as quickly as possible.

Tom Watson: And Lay Bare the Secret Heart of America Itself

Tom Watson: And Lay Bare the Secret Heart of America Itself: There have been only ten national election cycles since Lyndon Johnson stood before a special joint session of congress on March 15, 1965 and gave the greatest presidential speech of my lifetime. And LBJ has had only seven successors in the office soon to be occupied by the first African-American president. The history is so near, and the voices of that era still echo.

The other night, I walked over to the Paley Center and listened to some of those voices - civil rights leaders Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Andy Young along with veteran newsmen Dan Rather, Richard Valeriani and Haynes Johnson - discuss the events that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The audience included LBJ's daughter Luci Baines Johnson and the voices on the stage paid tribute to her father for his leadership on civil rights - colorful tribute, to be sure. Video from the Paley's incomparable collection punctuated the discussion, which was ably facilitated by Pat Mitchell; the footage from the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma police riot was particularly compelling, no matter how many times you may have seen it.

It was a night to consider the passing of four decades and just how much change we've witnessed - in 1965, blacks were routinely turned away from the offices of poll registrars across the south. Now those same states and cities and towns generally welcome an army of grassroots volunteers for a black presidential candidate.

No matter who wins in two weeks - and I think I know who will - that is change. Throw in the final sputtering death throes of the over-used southern strategy of American conservatism, and LBJ's political promise looks more like a prophecy. We have overcome.

What struck me in listening to Diane Nash, Congressman Lewis and Ambassador Young was their simple matter-of-fact tone. We did this. They did that. I went to jail. Their lack of anger, and the absence of any bitterness in their tone was incredibly moving. Like most Americans, I've heard the closing coda to LBJ's famed '65 speech - but the whole thing is worth reading (I haven't found a full video file - the clip above has the first five minutes). The video shows how deeply Johnson believed in his words, and how strongly he sold them in the House chamber. The contained anger, the singularity of purpose, the sheer all-in wagering of ever bit of his political capital remains compelling. But the words were elegant, and the speech brilliantly composed - like in this middle section:

There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our Democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government--the government of the greatest nation on earth.

Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country--to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. In our time we have come to live with the moments of great crises. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues, issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For, with a country as with a person, "what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.

So often, we tend to throw around the word "leadership" with the same alacrity for dumbing down linguistic superlatives that we reserve for "legendary" and "star." On that night in 1965 when Johnson called the Congress into a rare joint session, he laid it all on the line without knowing the political outcome.

Ezra Klein: McCain's Racism

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: [I]t's now fairly broadly believed that McCain's path to victory relies on Pennsylvania. And I don't know anyone who believes that in the unlikely event of a McCain win in Pennsylvania, the winning margin won't be provided by racists. Ross is annoyed that liberals insist on reading attacks as racist, but in most cases, liberals aren't doing that. They're reading the response as racist. And they're probably right about that. The fact of racist conservatives rather sucks for non-racist conservatives.

Which is why it would have been good if McCain had made more of a point of denouncing racists within his own coalition. In the Democratic primary debates, John Edwards frequently said that if his supporters were voting against Obama's race or Clinton's gender, he didn't want their vote. By contrast, when confronted with racist behavior at his rallies at one of the presidential debates, McCain replied, "let me just say, categorically, I'm proud of the people that come to our rallies." Then he attacked John Lewis for awhile. That's not to say that McCain is racist, or the bulk of his supporters are racist. But racism exists in his coalition, and it would be harder for liberals to bring it up if McCain had been more aggressive in tamping it down. But rather than reject it, McCain has tried to ignore it, which has led lots of folks to conclude that he wants to quietly benefit from it. So it gets brought up a lot.

Oliver WIllis: The Mask Slips Sometimes

The Mask Slips Sometimes | Oliver Willis: Conservative blogger Dan Riehl:

Anyone watch the afro-mercial last night?

Ari Kelman: Step away from the television

Step away from the television. « The Edge of the American West: So, I watched Obama’s subliminal message to Kill Whitey! last night. And it was great in a high-gloss, reach-out-to-the-undecided-heartland kind of way. But then, I made a really big mistake. I kept watching tv: a few minutes of Larry King and then a few more of Christopher Matthews. I know, I know, bad move. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure that Obama hypnotized me to enter self-destruct mode. If he can get The Man to take himself out, the Army of Black Liberation — made up largely of the Fruit of Islam and the S1Ws — he has waiting in the wings will save ammo on January 20th. Which means that budget surpluses are just around the corner!

Anyway, cable news. Wowza. First, John McCain was on Larry King’s show. And he was the same candidate we’ve been seeing throughout the campaign: angry, unsteady, and occasionally afflicted with aphasia. But then, after McCain doddered off the set, Larry and his other guests insisted that he had done really well. (Actually, Larry took partial credit for how well McCain had done. It was like a superannuated support group.) McCain’s comeback has begun, I learned. A week is a lifetime in American politics, Dan Rather told me. And so on. It occurred to me that without a focus group to provide instant reactions to McCain’s bile, the pundits default to their baseline setting: McCain’s just good, plain folks; his campaign has done him wrong; and there’s no way a war hero like him should lose. The punditocracy want a horse race — for the ratings, for the theater, for America — so badly that it’s painful to watch their dreams die in real time. Well, not really.

Chris Matthews was even worse. His first guest was Tom DeLay. Who kept insisting that Barack Obama really is an America-hating radical. No, seriously, that negro African-American dood is a socialist — at best. And Obama and his friends — the S1Ws, the Fruit of Islam, and probably some dashiki-wearing Kenyan warlords (mirrored sunglasses, too) — want to dance with your dates. Also: Bill Ayers. And teh gayz. Homosexuals who Rev. Wright is just waiting to gay marry in your kid’s kindergarten class, whereupon those faggots will probably sodomize your little boy. Because that’s just how they are. Better yet, Matthews, who we’re supposed to believe is in the tank for Obama, legitimated DeLay by noting what a political realist he is. Seriously, on cable news channels Tom DeLay is a reasonable conservative and Barack Obama is a spearchucking Marxist.

So, after I glued the pieces of my head back together, I changed the channel. All of which is a long way of saying, a sort of public service announcement, that if you’re watching cable news, you’re living in an alternate universe. I can’t tell you if the facts in that universe are closer or further from the truth than those that I find at FiveThirtyEight or Pollster. But things sure are scarier on television. I won’t be going back there again. Until Tuesday, that is, when I won’t be able to turn away.

Scott Horton: The New McCarthyism

From <>:

The New McCarthyism—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine): The last weeks of every presidential campaign I can remember bring out the crazies. Candidates are reviled as “racists,” “Nazis,” “Communists,” and the like. But this year the process has gotten nuttier and more malicious than usual. Perhaps it is a sign of desperation, given that polling does not suggest a close campaign, and a party now long entrenched appears to be poised for a swift kick in the behind—for the second time running.

Still, I was amused at how absurd some of this is. The National Review is worth examining regularly these days–it has turned into something of a circular firing squad. I used to read and love it back in the heyday of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s editorship. It was home base for a certain rigorous, philosophically based conservatism that valued the classics. I search in vain through National Review today for any trace of the erudition and intellectual integrity that Buckley brought to the publication. And I suspect that Buckley himself was unhappy with the magazine’s course in his final years. Two years ago, I spoke at a conservative, religiously affiliated college in the South and discovered that my predecessor at the lectern, just the night before, had been Buckley. When I asked how his talk had gone, my faculty handler told me it had been a surprising experience. Buckley spoke at some length about the mistakes that the Bush Administration had made, starting with the Iraq War. When one student observed that his comments were rather at odds with the views that appeared in National Review, Buckley replied, “Yes. We have grown distant.”

In the current issue of National Review, Andrew McCarthy continues his campaign to link the Democratic nominee to various and sundry Hyde Park radicals. This time it is “PLO advisor turned University of Chicago professor Rashid Khalidi,” who now heads the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Columbia University. Khalidi, we learn, makes a habit of justifying and supporting the work of terrorists and is “a former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat.” And then we learn that this same Khalidi knows Obama and that his children even babysat for Obama’s kids!

This doesn’t sound much like the Rashid Khalidi I know. I’ve followed his career for many years, read his articles and books, listened to his presentations, and engaged him in discussions of politics, the arts, and history. In fact, as McCarthy’s piece ran, I was midway through an advance copy of Khalidi’s new book Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East. (I’ll be reviewing it next month–stay tuned.) Rashid Khalidi is an American academic of extraordinary ability and sharp insights. He is also deeply committed to stemming violence in the Middle East, promoting a culture that embraces human rights as a fundamental notion, and building democratic societies. In a sense, Khalidi’s formula for solving the Middle East crisis has not been radically different from George W. Bush’s: both believe in American values and approaches. However, whereas Bush believes these values can be introduced in the wake of bombs and at the barrel of a gun, Khalidi disagrees. He sees education and civic activism as the path to success, and he argues that pervasive military interventionism has historically undermined the Middle East and will continue to do so. Khalidi has also been one of the most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority—calling them repeatedly on their anti-democratic tendencies and their betrayals of their own principles. Khalidi is also a Palestinian American. There is no doubt in my mind that it is solely that last fact that informs McCarthy’s ignorant and malicious rants.

McCarthy states that Khalidi “founded” the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). In fact, he neither founded it nor has anything to do with it. But AAAN is not, as McCarthy suggests, a political organization. It is a social-services organization, largely funded by the state of Illinois and private foundations, that provides support for English-language training, citizenship classes, after-school and summer programs for schoolchildren, women’s shelters, and child care among Chicago’s sizable Arab community (and for others on the city’s impoverished South Side). Does McCarthy consider this sort of civic activism objectionable? Since it was advocated aggressively by President Bush–this is “compassionate conservativism” in action–such an objection would be interesting. Nor was Khalidi ever a spokesman for the PLO, though that was reported in an erroneous column by the New York Times’s Tom Friedman in 1982. That left me curious about the final and most dramatic accusation laid at Khalidi’s doorstep: that the Khalidis babysat for the Obamas. Was it true? I put the question to Khalidi. “No, it is not true,” came the crisp reply. Somehow that was exactly the answer I expected.

Of course, Khalidi has been involved in Palestinian causes. McCarthy ought to ask John McCain about that, because McCain and Khalidi appear to have some joint interests, and that fact speaks very well of both of them. Indeed, the McCain–Khalidi connections are more substantial than the phony Obama–Khalidi connections McCarthy gussies up for his article. The Republican party’s congressionally funded international-networking organization, the International Republican Institute–long and ably chaired by John McCain and headed by McCain’s close friend, the capable Lorne Craner–has taken an interest in West Bank matters. IRI funded an ambitious project, called the Palestine Center, that Khalidi helped to support. Khalidi served on the Center’s board of directors. The goal of that project, shared by Khalidi and McCain, was the promotion of civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank. Of course, McCarthy is not interested in looking too closely into the facts, because they would not serve his shrill partisan objectives.

I have a suggestion for Andy McCarthy and his Hyde Park project. If he really digs down deep enough, he will come up with a Hyde Park figure who stood in constant close contact with Barack Obama and who, unlike Ayers and Khalidi, really did influence Obama’s thinking about law, government, and policy. He is to my way of thinking a genuine radical. His name is Richard Posner, and he appears to be the most frequently and positively cited judge and legal academic in… National Review.