Unbelievable

This is a screenshot from the Hannity and Colmes show yesterday on FOX News. You gotta love that insightful and politically correct label-making: "Large ethnic population." Blacks and Cubans and Jews, oh my! Fox News, bravo! Idiots...

Fox News

Witness the crapfest that is Fox News.

Obama's getting off easy

By Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times

The Democratic nominee scorned the "prejudice and bigotry and hatred and division" on display in the Arizona senator's campaign. As for his own platform, he said that "we will do all these things because we love people instead of hate them. ... Beware of those who fear and doubt and those who rave and rant about the dangers of progress."

This wasn't last week, but 44 years ago. The Republican from Arizona -- demonized by the entire Democratic and journalistic establishment -- was Sen. Barry Goldwater. And the Democrat, of course, was LBJ.

There are differences between then and now, to be sure. For starters, there was still a great deal of work left to be done on civil rights in 1964 (and John McCain is no libertarian). But even then, the attempt to paint Goldwater as a hate-monger was idiotic and dishonorable. It was almost as dishonorable as Harry Truman's attempt 16 years earlier to cast his opponent, businessman Thomas Dewey, as an American Hitler.

Liberal Democrats have a long tradition of tarring opponents as the monolithic forces of hatred and prejudice while casting themselves as the enlightened proponents of peace, love and decency. And this election shows that tradition is alive and well.

Over the weekend, civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis of Georgia sold off another chunk of his reputation by coughing up some absurd partisan talking point about how the McCain-Palin campaign reminds him of that of Dixiecrat segregationist George Wallace. And, for the last week, a host of reporters -- not just liberal pundits -- have ominously fretted that the McCain campaign's use of former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers as an issue is a racist ploy. The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut, for instance, wrote that Sarah Palin's comment that Barack Obama was "palling around with terrorists" is "a turn of phrase that critics said was racially loaded."

The most laughable evidence that McCain is sowing hatred stems from the shouts of "terrorist!" and "kill him!" from a few hothead buffoons at McCain rallies. Of course, rather than foment this sort of thing, McCain went out of his way to chastise his own supporters personally and publicly.

McCain has done nothing to fuel racism. Or, put another way, the McCain campaign has done as much to promote prejudice as the Obama campaign has to inflame the vile passions behind the "Abort Sarah Palin" bumper sticker, Madonna's stage video lumping McCain in with Hitler, the eugenic snobbery aimed at Palin's son with Down syndrome or the column in the Philadelphia Daily News that predicted a "race war" if McCain wins.

Wait a second, shout Obama supporters. What about the attempts to paint Obama as "the other," as "different"? Peter Beinart writes in Time that the Republican campaign is trying to cast Obama as not "American enough." Obama is cosmopolitan and represents a changing world. To cast that in a negative light, insists Beinart (a friend and frequent debate opponent), amounts to "shocking" racism.

Beinart recounts how Palin said at one rally, "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America." Beinart makes it sound as if she said this through a Klan hood. Please. Every single presidential campaign boils down to an argument about how the candidates "see America." Suddenly that question is out of bounds because Obama is black?

According to the liberal history books, in 1988 the GOP cast Michael Dukakis as too elitist, cosmopolitan and not American enough. In 1992, it ran a similar attack against Bill Clinton -- remember the hullabaloo about draft dodging and that trip to Russia? In 2000, ditto with Al Gore, though the emphasis was less on foreignness and more on extraterrestrialness. And in 2004, there was John Kerry's "global test" for U.S. national security. Lack of originality notwithstanding, why is it suddenly racist to treat Obama just like the four white guys who preceded him? Talk about racial double standards.

Obama holds mega-campaign rallies in Berlin, touts his global appeal and says a top foreign policy goal is to get other countries to like us. But it's racist to call him cosmopolitan?

He has nontrivial ties to an unrepentant (and white) former leader of the Weather Underground, a radical leftist organization that sought to kill American soldiers, policemen and politicians. But it's "racist" to bring that up? (If anything, by not attacking Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and other politically unsavory nonwhite associates, McCain is self-censoring for fear of seeming racist.)

If Obama were a white Democratic nominee named Barry O'Malley, the GOP would be going after him twice as hard. But many liberals would still caterwaul about fomenting hatred and racism, because that's what they always do.

The Mask Slips

By Bob Herbert, New York Times

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.

The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.

Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.

In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.

These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.

Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.

Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.

When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”

Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.

“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.

The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.

The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama

By Frank Rich, New York Times

IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.

There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.

Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

A Fool’s Paradise

By BOB HERBERT, New York Times

Published: October 6, 2008

With less than a month left until Election Day, there is still time for the presidential candidates to focus with great intensity on what should be the most important issue of this campaign. It’s not just the economy, stupid — it’s jobs.

The stock markets were rocked again on Monday, and the need to stabilize the financial system is obvious. But the U.S. economy is never going to be really healthy until the country figures out how to provide work at decent pay for all, or nearly all, of the men and women who want to work.

We’ve been living for years in a fool’s paradise atop a mountain of debt. The masters of the universe on Wall Street lost all sense of reason, no doubt. But most of us have been living above our means through the magic of easy credit, ever lower taxes, ever rising property values, stock market bubbles and the gift of denial, which we used to assure ourselves that the bills would never come due. We’ve even put our wars on a credit card.

The burden of debt for a typical middle-income family, earning about $45,000 a year, grew by a third in just the few years from 2001 to 2004, according to the Center for American Progress. The reason for this unsustainable added weight was the rising cost of such items as housing, higher education, health care and transportation at a time when wages grew only slightly or not at all.

In other words, work was not enough.

As for the debt burden of the federal government, don’t ask. (But you might want to ask your grandchildren how they plan to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

With reality now caving in on us — banks and brokerage houses falling like tenpins, a trillion dollars or so in bailout money being added to the nation’s debt burden, families by the hundreds of thousands being driven from their homes by foreclosures — it might make sense to get back to basics. And in the United States, the basic economic component of a sustainable family life is a good job.

What we haven’t paid close enough attention to for many years (a period in which we’ve been oddly obsessed with the financial lives of the rich and famous) is the fact that there haven’t been enough good paying jobs to sustain what most working Americans view as an adequate standard of living. This is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. economic system.

With the latest financial meltdown, there has been widespread outrage over the excessive compensation of top corporate executives. Where has everybody been? The rich have been running the table for the better part of the past 30 or 40 years.

Example: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from the late 1970s through 2005. The story for working families over that same stretch was one of constant struggle to just stay even. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reported last year: “The earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.”

Disaster was held at bay by the entrance of wives and mothers into the workplace, and by the embrace of colossal amounts of debt for everything from home mortgages, cars, clothing and vacations to food, college tuition and medical expenses.

Now middle-class and working families are up against the wall. With most other options exhausted, the only real way for the vast majority of Americans to continue financing a reasonable quality of life is through the proceeds from employment.

Unfortunately, we’re retreating on that front. Nearly 160,000 jobs were lost in September. More than three-quarters of a million have vanished over the past nine months.

The economy won’t be saved by bailing out Wall Street and waiting for that day that never comes when the benefits trickle down to ordinary Americans. It won’t be saved until we get serious about putting vast numbers of Americans back to work in jobs that are reasonably secure and pay a sustaining wage.

And that won’t begin to happen until we roll up our sleeves and begin the immensely hard and expensive work of rebuilding a nation that unconscionably was allowed to slip into a precipitous state of decline. We’ll end up spending trillions for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and another trillion, at least, to clean up after the madmen on Wall Street.

Now we need to find the money and the will to put Americans to work rebuilding the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure, revitalizing its public school system, creating a new dawn of energy self-sufficiency and rethinking our approach to an economy that remains tilted wildly in favor of the rich.

That’s what the presidential campaign should be about.

Wow.

I try to be bipartisan and fair, but this is too much! Do people really think like this?

By David Limbaugh, Washington Times

COMMENTARY:

There are many reasons Sarah Palin is energizing the conservative base. It's not just her authenticity, freshness, noble defense of traditional values and vivaciousness. This lady is finally giving Red-state conservatives a voice, and she is taking it to the other side without apologies.

Democrats are crying foul because she is confronting Barack Obama for his worrisome attitudes about America and his way-more-than-casual association with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers. Some squeamish conservatives are counseling that we ignore this issue either because it is unpleasant and unfair or that it's a distraction from the "substantive" issues.

Nonsense. This issue is neither unfair nor a diversion. It is imperative that we learn the extent of Mr. Obama's intimacy with this man. It's vital that we examine whether this relationship is part of a pattern of Mr. Obama associating with people and causes hostile to the foundational principles of this nation.

We must reject the Democrats' convenient talking point that Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin can't walk and chew gum at the same time. That if they focus on Mr. Ayers, they can't explore the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Antoin "Tony" Rezko, Franklin Raines, ACORN, the Democrats' primary culpability for the financial crisis, the evils of socialized medicine, the danger to America in Mr. Obama's retreat-and-defeat foreign policy, or his hostility to the free market.

Indeed, we must applaud Sarah Palin for standing up to her opponents and returning hostile fire. We're ready for her to lead the charge, not only on Mr. Obama's sordid relationships but also in articulating the monumental differences between the liberal and conservative approaches to governance.

These national Democrats must be kidding when they complain about incivility or dirty politics. They've written the book on partisan incivility during the last eight years with their ceaseless avalanche of lies in service to their psychotic catharsis against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

But Republicans don't have to resort to dirty politics to score points against Mr. Obama and his running mate Joe Biden. They just need to get the truth out.

Conservatives, who have witnessed the Democrats' propaganda bloodbath against the Bush administration since Bush-Gore 2000, have wondered, "When is the president going to fight back?"

We see Democrats driving around with their snarky bumper stickers, "Had Enough?" and think to ourselves: "Yes, we've had enough of the lies. We've had enough of the assault on traditional values and the sanctity of life. We've had enough of tearing America down. We've had enough of the mainstream media being in the tank for Democrats and Barack Obama - then shamelessly denying it. We've had enough of Bush Derangement syndrome. We've had enough of their resistance to taking the terrorist threat seriously. We've had enough of the class and race warfare that threaten the social fabric of our society and the economic underpinnings of this nation. We've had enough false allegations of voter intimidation from Democrats who turn right around and threaten criminal prosecution against those who criticize their presidential candidate. We've had enough of liberal candidates deceitfully denying their liberalism. We've had enough of incendiary charges of racism against Republicans such as Sarah Palin for daring to suggest that Barack Obama doesn't see 'America like you and I see America' "

I don't know about you, but I'm not particularly interested in some bipartisan love fest in which Mr. Biden tells us he loves John McCain or Mr. McCain lavishes high praise on global warming fearmonger Al Gore.

The future of this nation is on the line in November, and I don't believe our destiny depends on whether Washington politicians demonstrate collegiality. Isn't it more important that they stand on principle?

We can only hope more Republican politicians will follow Sarah Palin's valiant lead in defending the traditional values and principles shared by the less than vociferous center-right majority in this nation.

They must quit knuckling under to the opportunistic demonization of achievement, profit and free-market forces. They must resist the patronizing pandering to "the middle class." They must oppose environmental Stalinists, who will destroy our way of life and our economy based on false, sensationalized and disputed science and who demonize anyone who challenges their orthodoxy. They must call down those who insist on pooh-poohing the terrorist threat and downplaying the essential moral distinction between the forces of good and evil in the world. They must protect our borders despite the dishonest charges of racism and nativism. They must protect our Constitution from activist judges.

Now is not the time for conservative politicians to go wobbly, even if some conservative commentators are. It is the time to fight back - to challenge the fundamental assumptions of liberalism and underscore the threat it represents to this country.

So keep it up, Sarah, and maybe others will follow your courageous example.

David Limbaugh is a nationally syndicated columnist and a lawyer. His book "Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party" was released recently in paperback.

Clearing the Ayers

By Gail Collins, New York Times

John McCain traces the rancorous tone of the presidential campaign back to last summer when he invited Barack Obama to have lots and lots of town-hall meetings with him all around the country. When Obama turned him down, obviously McCain had no choice but to start depicting his opponent as a terrorist-loving advocate of talking dirty to kindergarteners.

Finally this week, the two men did meet in a town-hall showdown, which turned out to be like all other debates, except with much less excitement and much more pacing around. It seems unlikely that many people switched off their TV sets and said: “Gee, I could sit through a dozen of these.”

McCain may feel compelled to go back to his guilt-by-association theme. And this has me feeling very guilty about my associates.

The McCain folks have been obsessed with William Ayers, a neighbor of Obama’s who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Back in the 1960s, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were leaders of the Weather Underground, an antiwar group whose penchant for violence was exceeded only by its haplessness. Ayers has since become an education expert and was named Chicago’s Citizen of the Year in 1997. He gave Obama a house party when Obama was running for the State Senate.

In my experience, most State Senate hopefuls are so thrilled at any sign of interest that they would happily attend a reception given by a homeless couple in their cardboard box. But even though Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weathermen were in the news, that house party puts all their misdeeds on his platter. Sarah Palin has been telling her increasingly scary rallies that he is somebody “who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists.”

Fox News, in a one-hour special on Obama’s associates hosted by Sean Hannity, came up with an “Internet journalist” named Andy Martin who has spent his life running bizarre political campaigns with occasional detours into the clink and filing lawsuits laced with paranoia and anti-Semitism. Based on this expertise, Martin deduced that Ayers was the puppet master of Obama’s rise in politics and that Obama’s community-organizer gig was actually training for “a radical overthrow of the government.”

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. When I was a college student, I believe I attended a party with Bernardine Dohrn. This was pre-Weather, when Dohrn was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as S.D.S. Some of my friends wanted to meet her because they were interested in establishing an S.D.S. chapter at our campus. I was opposed, under the presumption that S.D.S. meant Students for Decent Styles, a group that had been active in fighting spaghetti-strap dresses at my high school.

Still, under the new rules, I believe I may now be held partly responsible for all of Dohrn’s misdeeds, including aggravated battery, bail jumping, the Days of Rage and unreadable political tracts.

McCain’s favorite supporter, Senator Joseph Lieberman, recently called the Obama-Ayers connection “fair game.” This reminded me that Lieberman once came to a party at my house. It was years ago, when he was still a Connecticut state senator, and we have already established that state senators will go to anything. Still, I can’t help but feel that I am not only a potential victim of the new guilt-by-association standard, I am also somewhat complicit in establishing it.

Obama’s retaliation for the Ayers assault has been to remind voters that many years ago McCain was censured in the Senate for his relationship with Charles Keating, the rogue banker whose failed Lincoln Savings and Loan cost the taxpayers $2.6 billion at a time when $2.6 billion was really worth something.

When I was a teenager, Keating came to my Catholic girls high school in Cincinnati in his capacity as the founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-pornography group. His theme was the evil of wearing shorts in the summertime.

Keating said he knew a young mother who took her child for a walk while wearing Bermuda shorts. A motorist, overwhelmed with lust at the sight of the back of her uncovered calves, lost control of his car and slammed into them. Everybody was killed, and it was all her fault. We were then asked to sign pledge cards promising to conform to standards of modesty that would have satisfied the Taliban.

True, none of this really proves that I was responsible for the banking scandals of the 1980s. But if Barack Obama is responsible for the Weather Underground, and if the mother in Bermuda shorts was responsible for the car crash, I am pretty sure that I am on the hook as well.

Hasta la Vista, Baby

By Roger Cohen, New York Times

I did what John McCain has suggested he might not be prepared to do. I sat down with the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and talked to him for an hour.

I’m pleased to report that I and several New York Times colleagues survived. National security between the United States and our NATO ally was not, to my knowledge, compromised.

Zapatero’s a wry, polished, suave politician — a socialist with that European socialist habit of being amused by almost everything and committed to almost nothing. It’s fair to say that his view of the United States is cool, colored by a relationship with President Bush that started badly and never got better.

One of the first things Zapatero, 48, did upon his election in 2004 was announce the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. His conversation with Bush about this decision was, he said, “unforgettable.”

When he told Bush that Spanish forces in Iraq were history, the president replied: “I’m very disappointed in you.”

Zapatero deadpanned: “I understood this really well because he had no reason to be enthusiastic about me.”

I told you the Spanish leader was a wry guy.

Undeterred, Zapatero tried to explain that he was the leader of a democratic country, and his campaign promise had been getting the troops out. Bush, as the leader of another democratic country, should understand this.

“But Bush was very cold. He said, ‘O.K., all right, goodbye.’ ”

Hasta la vista, baby.

That was about it for Spanish-American relations in the last half-decade. Yep, you’re with us or against us.

Zapatero said that, nonetheless, he had a “certain consideration” for Bush, because “I recognize that my electoral success has been influenced by his governing style.” In other words, Bush was so unpopular in Spain that he helped Zapatero win in 2004 and 2008.

Wry.

I relate all this because the unhappy saga of U.S.-Spanish relations reflects bungled American foreign policy. It’s one thing to have a disagreement between friends, another to have discord fester through spite. Bush’s vengeful streak is worthy of the schoolyard.

The United States is weakened when it’s feuding with its allies. The so-called coalition in Iraq has emptied that word of meaning.

Barack Obama gets this. A weakened United States, militarily stretched and economically snared, cannot be cavalier about its alliances. McCain, to judge by his refusal to say he would meet Zapatero, is still in muscle-flexing mode. That’s the last thing we need.

My second reason for relating this is that Zapatero is the kind of guy who reminds me of the need for smart American leadership. In fact, he reminds me of why, raised in Europe, I chose to become an American.

Despite Spain’s dictatorial past under Franco, Zapatero seemed to me mealy-mouthed about totalitarianism and tyranny. Moral relativism oozed from his lawyerly repartee. He illustrates why Orwell felt compelled to say: it’s not enough to be antifascist; you must also be in principle anti-totalitarian. The European left has often had a hard time with this notion.

Asked about Russia and Georgia, Zapatero came back with rhetorical questions. “What was the purpose of the creation of NATO?” he asked. “To defend ourselves against Russia or Communism? The expansion of NATO, and NATO today, what is it defending?” As for the Georgians, Zapatero mused, “were they enslaved by Russia or Communism?”

Who cares?

The Georgians were enslaved by a Soviet totalitarian system. So were the Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Estonians and countless others. That nightmare is vivid for them, as is America’s fight for their freedom. They do not want to risk falling back. They want the “normality” they feel NATO — and the European Union — guarantees them. It’s a psychological thing. Spain should get that.

But Zapatero’s more concerned about “certain gestures that may provoke Russian nationalism.” He seems to buy into Vladimir Putin’s nonsense about the “encirclement” of Russia, which spans from Eastern Europe to Northern Asia, by the likes of Lilliputian Georgia, if it were allowed into NATO.

“To think that Georgia will be more secure if it’s in NATO, that won’t be the case,” he said. “All we’ll achieve is a greater divide between Moscow and the rest of the world.”

Wrong. NATO locks in liberal democracy. It brings stability and prosperity, not threats, to Russia’s environs.

Zapatero is also wrong about the United States. He said it was a “diverse, creative, dynamic” country, but “it does not need to have a mission.”

But America was born as an idea and cannot be itself unless it carries that idea forward. That’s the tragedy of the Bush years: the undermining of American ideals. The United States is inseparable from the hope given Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses yearning to be free;” it is bound to the struggle to ensure that, as Lincoln put it, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Obama, if he wins, should get Zapatero to the White House pronto. These are ideas worth discussing between friends.

Editorial: Politics of Attack

Originally published in the New York Times

It is a sorry fact of American political life that campaigns get ugly, often in their final weeks. But Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember.

They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr. McCain, but there is no comparison.

Despite the occasional slip (referring to Mr. Obama’s “cronies” and calling him “that one”), Mr. McCain tried to take a higher road in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. It was hard to keep track of the number of time he referred to his audience as “my friends.” But apart from promising to buy up troubled mortgages as president, he offered no real answers for how he plans to solve the country’s deep economic crisis. He is unable or unwilling to admit that the Republican assault on regulation was to blame.

Ninety minutes of forced cordiality did not erase the dismal ugliness of his campaign in recent weeks, nor did it leave us with much hope that he would not just return to the same dismal ugliness on Wednesday.

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Ms. Palin has taken to saying.

That line follows passages in Ms. Palin’s new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama’s ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she’s done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers — and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, “sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Mr. McCain’s aides haven’t even tried to hide their cynical tactics, saying they were “going negative” in hopes of shifting attention away from the financial crisis — and by implication Mr. McCain’s stumbling response.

We certainly expected better from Mr. McCain, who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics. He was driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear, orchestrated by some of the same people who are now running his campaign.

And the tactic of guilt by association is perplexing, since Mr. McCain has his own list of political associates he would rather forget. We were disappointed to see the Obama campaign air an ad (held for just this occasion) reminding voters of Mr. McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five savings-and-loan debacle, for which he was reprimanded by the Senate. That episode at least bears on Mr. McCain’s claims to be the morally pure candidate and his argument that he alone is capable of doing away with greed, fraud and abuse.

In a way, we should not be surprised that Mr. McCain has stooped so low, since the debate showed once again that he has little else to talk about. He long ago abandoned his signature issues of immigration reform and global warming; his talk of “victory” in Iraq has little to offer a war-weary nation; and his Reagan-inspired ideology of starving government and shredding regulation lies in tatters on Wall Street.

But surely, Mr. McCain and his team can come up with a better answer to that problem than inciting more division, anger and hatred.

Palin’s Kind of Patriotism

By Thomas L. Friedman

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

I can understand someone saying that the government has no business bailing out the financial system, but I can’t understand someone arguing that we should do that but not pay for it with taxes. I can understand someone saying we have no business in Iraq, but I can’t understand someone who advocates staying in Iraq until “victory” declaring that paying taxes to fund that is not patriotic.

How in the world can conservative commentators write with a straight face that this woman should be vice president of the United States? Do these people understand what serious trouble our country is in right now?

We are in the middle of an economic perfect storm, and we don’t know how much worse it’s going to get. People all over the world are hoarding cash, and no bank feels that it can fully trust anyone it is doing business with anywhere in the world. Did you notice that the government of Iceland just seized the country’s second-largest bank and today is begging Russia for a $5 billion loan to stave off “national bankruptcy.” What does that say? It tells you that financial globalization has gone so much farther and faster than regulatory institutions could govern it. Our crisis could bankrupt Iceland! Who knew?

And we have not yet even felt the full economic brunt here. I fear we may be at that moment just before the tsunami hits — when the birds take flight and the insects stop chirping because their acute senses can feel what is coming before humans can. At this moment, only good governance can save us. I am not sure that this crisis will end without every government in every major economy guaranteeing the creditworthiness of every financial institution it regulates. That may be the only way to get lending going again. Organizing something that big and complex will take some really smart governance and seasoned leadership.

Whether or not I agree with John McCain, he is of presidential timber. But putting the country in the position where a total novice like Sarah Palin could be asked to steer us through possibly the most serious economic crisis of our lives is flat out reckless. It is the opposite of conservative.

And please don’t tell me she will hire smart advisers. What happens when her two smartest advisers disagree?

And please also don’t tell me she is an “energy expert.” She is an energy expert exactly the same way the king of Saudi Arabia is an energy expert — by accident of residence. Palin happens to be governor of the Saudi Arabia of America — Alaska — and the only energy expertise she has is the same as the king of Saudi Arabia’s. It’s about how the windfall profits from the oil in their respective kingdoms should be divided between the oil companies and the people.

At least the king of Saudi Arabia, in advocating “drill baby drill,” is serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. My problem with Palin is that she is also serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. That’s not patriotic. Patriotic is offering a plan to build our economy — not by tax cuts or punching more holes in the ground, but by empowering more Americans to work in productive and innovative jobs. If Palin has that kind of a plan, I haven’t heard it.

Check Point: The Second Presidential Debate

Originally published in The New York Times

The Times’s Peter Baker, Julie Bosman, Kitty Bennett, Jackie Calmes, Michael Luo, Robert Pear, Andrew Revkin, Larry Rohter, Kevin Sack, David E. Sanger, Matthew L. Wald and Jeff Zeleny are examining the policies and statements of Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama in real time tonight.
For more on the candidates and the issues, see The Times’s Election Guide. For more on the debate see our Live Blog.

In their second debate Tuesday night, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain indulged in their fair share of misrepresentations. Here are some of them.

Health Costs Senator Obama said health costs were breaking family budgets. “If you’ve got health insurance,” he said, “most of you have seen your premiums double over the last eight years, and your co-payments and deductibles have gone up 30 percent just in the last year alone. And if you’re a small business, it’s a crushing burden.”

Mr. Obama was generally correct in what he said about premiums. Premiums doubled from 1999 to 2007, according to annual surveys conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust. The latest report, issued two weeks ago, shows that the average annual premium for employer-sponsored insurance rose 90 percent from 2000 to 2008 for individual coverage, to $4,704 this year, while the average premium for family coverage increased 97 percent, to $12,680.

Deductibles increased significantly last year, but they vary greatly among plans, and Mr. Obama may have overstated the typical increase.

For workers in preferred-provider organizations with deductibles, the average annual deductible for family coverage increased to $1,344 in 2008, from $1,040 in 2007, according to the Kaiser survey. On the other hand, more workers are choosing high-deductible policies, often in combination with savings accounts, and the average deductible for family coverage in these plans was much higher - - about $3,500 this year, as in 2007, according to the Kaiser survey.

Health Care Plans Both candidates mischaracterized elements of their opponent’s health care proposals and may have oversold their own.

Mr. McCain, in arguing that Mr. Obama favors government solutions to the plight of the uninsured, charged that Mr. Obama would “impose mandates” on small businesses to provide coverage for employees and on parents to insure their children. As Mr. Obama pointed out in response, Mr. McCain was only half right.

“If you’re a small businessperson and you don’t insure your employees, Senator Obama will fine you,” Mr. McCain said. “He’ll fine you. That’s remarkable. If you’re a parent and you’re struggling to get health insurance for your children, Senator Obama will fine you.”

Mr. Obama would, in fact, require medium and large employers to either provide coverage to their workers or pay a tax into a fund that would help subsidize coverage for low-income people. But his plan specifically exempts small businesses from the requirement. In fact, Mr. Obama proposes to offer a substantial tax credit to small businesses to encourage them to provide insurance.

Mr. Obama has not said how small a firm would have to be in order to qualify for the exemption, nor has he quantified the size of the penalty.

Mr. Obama has, however, said he would require parents to insure their children. He has not specified a penalty for those who do not. Though Mr. McCain asserted that “every parent I know would acquire health insurance for their children if they could,” studies have shown that more than 1 million low-income children who are eligible for inexpensive government insurance plans remain uninsured.

Mr. Obama was correct that Mr. McCain voted against increasing funding for one of those plans, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He did so twice last year.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, charged that Mr. McCain would “strip away the ability of states to provide some of the regulations on insurance companies to make sure you’re not excluded for preexisting conditions or your mammograms are covered or your maternity is covered.”

Mr. McCain has not specifically proposed deregulating the insurance industry by removing coverage requirements. But some economists argue that could be the effect of his plan to allow the sale of insurance policies across state lines. Because some states require insurers to cover more conditions and procedures than others, Mr. Obama contends that insurers would flock to states that impose the least burdensome regulations.

Mr. Obama also repeated his oft-stated assertion that his plan will save the average family $2,500 a year in premium costs. Many health economists question whether he can save that kind of money in a single term, as Mr. Obama promises.

Mr. McCain said that his plan – which would end the exclusion of employer-sponsored health benefits from income taxes and instead give families a $5,000 tax credit – would leave 95 percent of Americans with a net gain. That, too, is in dispute, as the McCain campaign has based its calculation on the average cost of a family health insurance policy. Furthermore, because Mr. McCain’s tax credits would likely not keep up with inflation, many economists believe that more and more consumers will suffer a net loss as time passes.

Getting Bin Laden | 10:26 p.m. When Senator Obama was asked whether he would violate Pakistan’s sovereignty and go over the Pakistan border to pursue the militants who are attacking American forces in Afghanistan he narrowed the question — saying he would go into Pakistan if he had information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. That, of course, has been the Bush administration’s policy since just days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The question he sidestepped is more difficult: Whether he would go after the forces attacking Americans — a mix of Taliban, of tribal militants and distant associates of Al Qaeda. That is a far more difficult question than going after Al Qaeda. In July, President Bush reversed himself on this question and issued classified orders permitting American special forces to do just that. Neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain referred to that decision, or said whether they would continue the policy Mr. Bush adopted over the summer.

Senator McCain talked about cooperating with the Pakistanis, suggesting that it was their responsibility to take action in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North and South Waziristan, the safe haven for the militants. But he also, on two occasions, referred to his hero Teddy Roosevelt, citing his famous statement about the need to “speak softly and carry a big stick” — Roosevelt actually said “walk softly and carry a big stick.”

Letter mailed to various Southern CA newspapers

Dear Editor,

I am writing to express my support for a "NO" vote on Proposition 8 this year. History has shown the folly of denying people their basic human rights in the form of stipulating who a person can and cannot marry. For example, 50 years ago blacks and whites were prohibited from marrying in some states of this union. We rightfully judge those legal restrictions of that bygone era to be what they were: shackles born of prejudice and small-minded hatred. We should be proud that our society has moved beyond such a shameful period in our history. We should not allow future generations to judge us in the same manner. I call on all of my fellow Californians to put themselves in their neighbor's moccasins for a moment and consider the wisdom of denying something so fundamental to our brothers and sisters in this state. While I try to understand and empathize with those who view homosexuality as destabilizing or sinful, I still feel it my duty to urge everyone to do the American thing and stand up for liberty and equal protection under the law. Ingraining this kind of human rights violation into our California constitution is a mistake. "NO" vote on Prop 8.

--
Jay M. Taylor

Biden, the master gasbag

By Jonah Goldberg
Published in the Los Angeles Times

Last Thursday's vice presidential debate was the most revealing, and depressing, event of the entire campaign because it showed how irredeemably fraudulent America's political class is and how superficial the voters who will decide this election are.

Recall, if you will, that going into the debate, the conventional wisdom was that Gov. Sarah Palin would be woefully outgunned by Sen. Joe Biden. A self-touted foreign policy expert and constitutional law professor, Biden joined the Senate some time after the Cretaceous period but well before bell bottoms went out of style.

As we know, the conventional wisdom was wrong. Palin wasn't stellar. But she crushed those low expectations, salvaged her political career and turned herself back into an asset for the McCain campaign.

But what about Biden? Overwhelmingly, the professional political class proclaimed that he blew her away on "specifics" and "knowledge" and "seriousness." The New York Times said Biden avoided making any gaffes, "while showing a clear grasp of the big picture and the details." The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib proclaimed on ABC's "This Week" that Biden avoided any "verbal excesses or rhetorical flourishes."

The Associated Press called Biden the "master senator ... rattling off foreign policy details with ease."

And that's true in a sense. Biden was at ease; he easily rattled off a string of falsehoods and gasbaggeries.

According to the master senator, the U.S. and France "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon." Afterward, according to Biden, "I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it.' " Perhaps Biden meant to say the U.S. and France kicked Syria out of Lebanon. But even this is woefully glib. Syria never fully abandoned Lebanon. And there was no "vacuum" for Hezbollah to fill. The terrorist group was already firmly in control of southern Lebanon and part of the government. No one remembers Biden and Obama fighting for the stupidly impossible NATO move either.

Biden insisted it's "just simply not true" that Obama has said he'd "sit down with [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad," even though in the primaries Biden criticized Obama for exactly that.

Biden bragged about how he and Obama have focused on Pakistan, insisting that "Pakistan's weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean." Um, no. Their missiles don't get halfway there.

The constitutional law professor scornfully mocked Dick Cheney because the vice president "doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president. That's the executive branch." Wrong. Article I defines the Legislature, Article II the executive branch. Both define the role of the VP.

He flatly said that McCain voted with Obama on a tax hike. He didn't. He said McCain's healthcare plan amounted to a tax hike. It doesn't. Biden said we "must" drill for oil, but that ain't how he's voted. He said he's for clean coal, but just this month he passionately insisted to a voter that "we're not supporting clean coal" and vowed "no coal plants here in America." The scrapper from Scranton boasted about bonding with the common folks at a restaurant that's been closed for two decades.

Now, Palin had her own problems. She failed to answer direct questions directly. She offered up some obviously canned one-liners.

But here's the difference. Palin is supposed to be everything Biden isn't, according to liberal pundits and mainstream reporters alike. For weeks they've been saying she's ill-prepared, uninformed and lacks the requisite experience. But that criticism is also an excuse of sorts.

Biden has no excuse. He's been in the majors for nearly 40 years, and yet he sounds like a bizarro-world Chauncey Gardner. The famous simpleton from Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There" (played by Peter Sellers in the film) offered terse aphorisms that were utterly devoid of specific content but nonetheless seemed to describe reality accurately. Biden is the reverse: He offers a logorrheic farrago of "specifics" that have no connection to our corner of the space-time continuum.

In short, he just makes stuff up. But he does it with passionate, self-important intensity. He's like a politician in a movie with a perfect grasp of a world that doesn't exist. He's not an expert, he just plays one on TV.

No one seems to care. He convinced the focus groups he's an expert. The media, with a few exceptions, let it all slide. But imagine if Palin had made any of these gaffes. It would be incontrovertible proof that her critics are right.

Palin "lost" because she's bad at being a dishonest politician. Biden won because he is, after all, a "master senator."

What a debate!

This is the 1960 presidential debate between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. It is well worth a watch, especially by those of us who have grown up in a time when such eloquence, decorum, and reason are rare commodities. It is a masterful, inspiring piece of American history.

Time for McCain to take off the gloves

By Larry Elder
Published: Saturday, October 4th, 2008
Originally published in the Washington Times.

Barack Obama says, without rebuttal, that his plan lowers taxes on "95 percent of working families." This is flatly impossible because 32 percent of income tax returns filed (some 43 million Americans) pay absolutely nothing in federal income taxes. Mr. Obama makes his claim by offering a $500 "Making Work Pay" tax credit to everybody ($1,000 per family), by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and creating other credits. If your tax credit is more than your tax liability, you receive a check from the Treasury and you pay no taxes. That is not a "tax cut." Mr. McCain, too, offers a tax credit - a $5,000 tax credit for health care. Yet neither the media nor Mr. McCain calls it a "tax cut."

Mr. Obama says, without rebuttal, that his tax increases only affect those earning more than $250,000. Yet when you consider his spending plans, and the amount of money he expects to raise by "closing corporate loopholes" and taxing the rich, it simply does not add up. Moreover, he calls raising taxes (a) good economic policy, and (b) a matter of fairness. Mr. Obama, pointing to the sluggishness of the economy, recently said he might "defer" the tax increases.

Hold it, Mr. McCain should have said. If raising taxes on the so-called rich makes good economic policy, why "defer" it? Doesn't the economic sluggishness create even greater urgency in order to, as Mr. Obama claims, "jump-start" the economy?

Mr. Obama recently said, without a debate response from Mr. McCain, that because of the faltering economy, he may cut back on some of his proposed spending. Again, didn't Mr. Obama call the spending an "investment" in education and health care, job training and "volunteering"? If "investing" means a more productive and dynamic economy, doesn't an economic slowdown cry out for more spending?

Mr. Obama claims, without rebuttal, that he "pays for" the increased spending. If "closing corporate loopholes" and increasing taxes on the rich pay for more social spending, why put those off simply because of an economic downturn? Mr. Obama's latest backtracks on taxes and spending say one thing, loudly and clearly - they hurt the economy. And by his own admission!

Missed opportunities on foreign policy:

Mr. Obama calls, without rebuttal, the Iraq war a blunder. Is it? By an almost even margin, 39 percent of Americans call Iraq a failure, while 41 percent say that history will judge it as a success. The numbers considering it a future success increased from 29 percent last August, while the it-will-be-deemed-a-failure crowd fell from 57 percent.

Mr. Obama still claims, without rebuttal, that while the surge succeeded, it failed to bring about the "political reconciliation" intended. This is patently false. In addition to meeting or making progress on nearly all of the 18 political benchmarks set by Congress, the Iraqi government, just last week, set a time for provincial elections - perhaps the most important benchmark. Mr. McCain never mentioned it. Instead of a fledgling democracy and a potentially strong Muslim ally in the Middle East in the war on terror, Mr. Obama wanted a precipitous withdrawal. As former Secretary of State James Baker said, "If we picked up and left right now, you would see the biggest civil war you've ever seen." Even a liberal, anti-Bush newspaper such as The Washington Post recently published an editorial pointing to Iraq's continuous improvement, and criticized Mr. Obama for his insistence on a timed withdrawal: "Democrat Barack Obama continues to argue that only the systematic withdrawal of U.S. combat units will force Iraqi leaders to compromise. Yet the empirical evidence of the past year suggests the opposite: that only the greater security produced and guaranteed by American troops allows a political environment in which legislative deals and free elections are feasible."

Mr. Obama claims, without rebuttal, that he consistently opposed the war. Did he? Mr. Obama, after his antiwar speech in 2002, later said he understood why senators voted for the Iraq war and admitted he was "not privy to Senate intelligence reports"; that it "was a tough question and a tough call" for the senators; and that he "didn't know" how he would have voted had he been in the Senate. More than a year after the war began, Mr. Obama said, "There's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." Given Mr. Obama's 97 percent record of voting with his party, why accept the idea this cautious get-along, go-along "present"-voting former state senator, now U.S. senator, would have defied the majority of his party - including all of his fellow senators running in the presidential primaries - and voted against the war?

Mr. McCain foolishly "suspended" his political campaign to go to Washington and deal with the economic crisis. But when the polls show the other guy ahead, and he leaves the debate with no blood, no ambulance - you lose.

Mr. McCain wants to "put his country first." The best way is simple: Get aggressive and win the election.

• Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated columnist, radio talk show host and best-selling author.

Republicans' tug of war

By Deborah Simmons
Published: Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Originally published in the Washington Times.

The Republican Party ain't what it used to be. Sure, it still takes on the Democratic Party and can be counted on to fight the good fight when it comes to faith, family and freedom. But Republicans have lost considerable ground with the very working-class and middle-class Americans who have delivered resounding victories to them since Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush took on Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1980. The shift in relationship with those same voters began in 2006, when Democrats gained control of Congress, and it continues as the election draws near. This doesn't bode well for the McCain-Palin ticket and the two dozen House Republican seats that are looking more purple than red.

Have Republicans lost their soul? Have they merely lost their way? Is the internal tug of war that began during the contentious primaries to blame?

The Huckabee-McCain-Romney split almost became too much to bear. And even after John McCain emerged from that brusing battle as the apparent nominee, many were left wandering.

The Moral Majority may be no more. But the moral majority remains those voters of all ethnicities who are pro-life, America-first, law-and-order, individual-freedom-loving, less-government-intervention, free-trade red-blooded Americans. Is the Republican Party paying attention?

First, Republicans proposed and supported a bailout of the financial system in all its unglorious corporate-welfare underpinnings. Then they didn't. Then they said, "We believe" - sounding more like underdog fans during the fourth quarter of a football game than politicians elected to maintain America's leading role in the 21st century. They fell in and out of love with Sarah Palin quicker than she could pluck a fast-wilting daisy and say, "They love me, they love me not."

Mr. McCain knew what he was getting his party into when the name Gov. Sarah Palin passed his lips that fateful day. While some commentators were giddy (I've never seen Pat Buchanan so happy), many others momentarily held their breath before fully exhaling. Doug Wilder had this to say about Mrs. Palin: "If that is the cream of the crop, God save the milk." Well-known voices are doubting Thomases, too. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker wrote: "As we´ve seen and heard more from John McCain´s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem." Andrew Sullivan called Mr. McCain's decision "the most irresponisble act any candidate has ever made." Conservative George Will also let his doubts become known.

It really doesn't matter what the Palin barometers register following the debate with Joe Biden. As Mr. McCain goes on Nov. 4, so goes the party.

What is happening of late raises questions about Mr. McCain's leadership qualities, Mr. McCain's coattails and the perception — and inside the Beltway perception is reality — the Republican leadership in both chambers.

Only in America would the president say there is a crisis at hand that needs the full time and attention of Congress, and then his own party - that would be the Republicans - fail to deliver to its leader. One chamber, the House, tells the president no and goes on holiday. Leadership, not experience, and hero-worship, not moral clarity, had a lot to do with that outcome.

Mr. McCain, aka Sir Anti-Earmark, was considered our knight in shining armor, coming off the campaign trail to the rescue of Main Street, Wall Street and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the end, his lack of leadership delivered disappointment. Mr. McCain's insertion into the deliberations either left his party brethen twisting in the wind or further stiffening their spines on the bailout. But then he turned around and did the unconscionble: Mr. McCain voted "yea" on the pork-laden Senate version of the bailout.

Mr. McCain broke his own rule and disavowed his own principle. His armor remains forever tarnished.

Mr. McCain cannot defend his support for this lard: Manufacturers for children's wodden arrows get $6 million; $192 goes to Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum producers; auto-racing tracks get $128 million. Of course, that isn't the entire list. But it's enough — $326 million — to let struggling Main Street American voters know that there is little that remains "grand" about today's Republican Party.

Two dozen Republican House seats are in the "voters' dunno" column. Poll numbers for President Bush are so low they no longer are of any consequence. Sure, Mr. Bush can help raise funding, after all he is the president. But Republicans need more than money between now and Election Day.

Republicans need to win over voters who have lost their jobs and their job prospects, who see their American dream being dashed by stinking rich Republicans and Democrats who gambled and lost and voters who — and this is key — have fallen inline behind Barack Obama (or the Clintons) and know that change and reform are not synomous.

Republicans need to remember Americans in red states are tuning in daily to WII-FM (what's in it for me) and the voices that they are hearing don't belong to Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

The Democrats are peddling themselves as the change agents. Republicans need to retreat, regroup and re-emerge. Their soul-searching time is running out.

Dick Cheney, Role Model

New York Times Editorial

Published: October 3, 2008

In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.

In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”

It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.

Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice president — a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook — is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution.

Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution.

This isn’t the first time that Ms. Palin was confronted with the issue. In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend. The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq.

There was not a word about Mr. Cheney’s role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made him very rich before the administration began.

Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden, Ms. Palin’s rival, the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive” held that “Congress and the people have no power in a time of war.” And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history.”

The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.

Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.

So far, Ms. Palin has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.

Talking in Points

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: October 3, 2008
Originally published in The New York Times

The Republicans were euphoric over Sarah Palin’s debate performance, particularly the part in which she stood tall and refrained from falling off the stage. “There are conservatives and Republicans across America who are ... breathing a sigh of relief,” said Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, adding that “of the four debaters we’ve seen, she was the most interesting, attractive of them all.”

Palin did indeed answer each question with poise and self-confidence, reeling off a bunch of talking points that were sometimes totally unrelated to the matter at hand. When she was asked to respond to Joe Biden’s critique of the McCain health care plan, she announced: “I would like to respond about the tax increases,” cheerfully ignoring the fact that tax increases had never been mentioned.

After the recent Katie Couric unpleasantness, Palin told the viewers that this time they were getting a chance to hear her “answer these tough questions without the filter.” And, indeed, her answers were murky in the extreme. She railed repeatedly about government regulations getting in the way of the private sector, then announced that the financial rescue plan “has got to include that massive oversight that Americans are expecting and deserving.” She said that she didn’t want to discuss what caused global warming, only how to ease its impact.

She appeared to agree with Dick Cheney’s manic theory that the vice president is a member of both the executive and legislative branches, although it’s hard to tell since she began her answer this way: “Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position.”

When the moderator, Gwen Ifill, asked under what circumstances the candidates would consider bringing America’s nuclear weapons into play, Palin said: “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.”

It’s hard to remember that a month ago, very few people had ever heard of Sarah Palin. McCain sprung his vice-presidential selection on us at the last minute, possibly under the impression that the country felt things had gotten too boring lately, and would appreciate the excitement of having a minimally experienced political unknown serving as backup to a 72-year-old cancer survivor.

Since then, she has spent most of her time going from one Republican rally to the next, repeating chunks of her convention speech, which have grown more disjointed with every stop. (In an airplane hangar in Ohio recently, she told the people of Youngstown she was happy to be there because Alaska has, per capita, the nation’s most “small planes and small pilots.”)

For reporters hoping to question her, she has been determinedly unfindable, a Judge Crater from Juneau. And after the Couric debacle, you can bet your boots that the campaign is going to take Palin’s debate performance, declare victory and wrap her up until after the election.

This is all a terrible shame. For us, mainly. But also for Palin, whose intelligence and toughness may wind up buried under the legend of her verb-deprived ramblings.

Palin is, in many ways, a genuine heir to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which tried to make sure that future generations of American women would grow up feeling they had every right to compete with men for all the best rewards and adventures the world had to offer. She never seems to have had a single doubt that she could accomplish whatever she set her mind to. When she got involved in politics, she used the time-honored male route of cultivating powerful mentors, then pushing them out of the way at the first possible opportunity. When she was governor, she did what very few female politicians do, and ignored all the subsidiary issues in order to put all her bets on one big policy payoff in the form of a new state energy policy.

Then, somehow, she concluded that her success in clawing her way to the top of Alaska’s modest political heap meant she was capable of running the United States.

This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.

That rubbish they talk about the credit crunch

Capitalism is dead. America has gone socialist. US leadership has collapsed. Europe has shown the way. Oh yes?

By Gerard Baker,
originally published in the Times of London

There's something curious about the human imagination. Confronted with unprecedented events of unfathomable scale, it seems to find the shocking reality insufficiently interesting and reaches instead for even grander, more cosmic explanations of what's going on.

The financial crisis is precisely that sort of moment. It's a vast drama, with consequences that will ripple steadily from immediate economic hardship to changes in short-term political fortune to a broad recasting of the way our economies and societies work.

But that's not enough, apparently, for the drama queens and kings of our political and media establishments. Hastily, they've constructed a grand historical narrative in the last couple of weeks, composed largely of overarching myths that are in danger of hardening into conventional wisdom.

So at the risk of being accused of missing the historical boat, let me try to take a few of them on.

Capitalism has failed and the US has embraced socialism

This one has adherents, surprisingly, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the birthplace, etymologically speaking, of Schadenfreude, the Germans and French have been eagerly stamping on the grave of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. In America they've found unlikely allies among a bunch of hardline conservative Republican politicians and commentators. These latter-day Bourbons claim the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan for banks will rank with the October Revolution and Mao's Long March as seminal events in the history of human serfdom.

Let's take the latter claim first. Seven hundred billion dollars certainly sounds like a big chunk of the economy to be placed in the hands of the Government. It could, spent wisely, get you some way to the top of the commanding heights of America's $14 trillion economy.

But I doubt the Hank Paulson plan would win him plaudits with Marx and Engels. For starters, acquiring the financial equivalent of a junkyard is not quite what socialists have in mind when they urge nationalisation.

In any case the actual outlay will not be anything like $700 billion. The Government is merely proposing to use that money to buy the putrid assets that now clog the balance sheets of banks. When the frozen credit markets thaw, it will sell them back. It's unlikely the whole exercise will cost more than a couple of hundred billion dollars, which represents about 1.5 per cent of the US economy.

That leads us to the argument about capitalism's terminal failure.

As I've argued before, the current collapse owes as much to government intrusion into the free market (the abominable hybrid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the regulatory requirement that banks lend money cheaply to those who couldn't afford to repay it) as it does to the madness of free market savagery. There's been precious little financial deregulation in the past ten years. The one big piece of liberalisation - the abolition in 1999 of Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banks - has been a lifesaver, enabling investment banks to save themselves by merging with, or becoming, retail banks.

Capitalism's Cassandras might also want to consider that the crisis the current mess most closely resembles is the Swedish banking collapse of 1991-92. I don't remember Sweden being reviled in those days as a model of heartless capitalism.

The unpleasant truth is that financial excesses occur quite frequently in the capitalist system and always require modifications to it, not its abolition.

One hundred years ago, John Pierpont Morgan singlehandedly rescued a financial system near collapse. The experience led directly a few years later to the creation of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank (greeted then, by the way, by the same sort of extremists, as a harbinger of socialism). In the 1930s the Depression resulted in reforms that changed but did not destroy the free market. In the early 1990s the Government spent a couple of hundred billion dollars bailing out the savings and loans industry. That didn't noticeably undermine capitalism.

America's political leadership has collapsed

Let us acknowledge first that this is not a week to earn many American politicians a chapter in a future volume of Profiles in Courage. The vote on Monday was a failure of management as much as anything.

John McCain has rightly taken a lot of stick for making a big deal out of returning to Washington to save the world. There was nothing wrong with his Superman act except that he didn't execute it. When you dive into the telephone box and don the suit with the S on the chest, you can't simply sit quietly and listen sympathetically to everyone's concerns, say you hope it all works out and head back to the office.

Barack Obama's performance was even less inspiring. His message to Washington in the midst of the worst financial crisis in 75 years was (I'm not making this up): “Call me if you need me.”

But - and I'm loath to excuse politicians - could we have expected them to fall into line, without a struggle, with the plan the Bush Administration handed them? If you asked the top 200 economists what they thought of the plan, I guarantee that a clear majority of them would say it was riddled with flaws.

In any case, all the indications are that the House will pass the plan - with amendments - today. Not a straight path to a resolution, but certainly not one to perdition either.

Europe has shown how to deal with the crisis

This myth strikes me as the most dangerous and delusional of all. Its first incarnation a few months back was that social democratic Europe had avoided the financial disasters of the Anglo-Saxons. Little local difficulties at Fortis and Dexia have taken care of that, so now the claim is that cool-headed Europeans have saved the day.

Really? Ireland's bold move to protect depositors is producing a competitive run on other European banks and seems to have mortgaged the entire eurozone to an open-ended commitment from a government that is already fiscally challenged. Over to you, Mr Sarkozy and Mrs Merkel.

The bigger problem with the Europeans is their steadfast refusal to recognise the severity of the crisis. While the Federal Reserve has slashed interest rates, the ECB and the Bank of England continue to worry about inflation and refuse to cut interest rates.

Capitalism is flexible enough to bend when the financial hurricanes blow. Let's hope we can say the same for Europe's policymakers.