Right Wing Nut House

“May you be cursed to live in interesting times.”
(Not an old Chinese Proverb)

Negotiations to bail out Wall Street, dead beat homeowners, school loan scofflaws credit card scammers, ACORN, and others who have lined up outside the doors of Democratic lawmakers with their hands out wanting a piece of that $700 billion in free money appear to be stalled at the moment. Apparently, House Republicans are balking at the prospect of a large chunk of our free market economy being taken over by the government and are exploring alternatives.

If such action is necessary to keep us from sliding into a depression with a financial implosion this country may never fully recover from, then I am one of those conservatives who would reluctantly sign on to the Paulson plan - even with its goodies for left wing special interest groups and bailouts unrelated to the credit crunch on Wall Street.

But the more I read about this plan, the more I’m convinced that something akin to the 1982 tax cut bill is being acted out on Capitol Hill with everyone and their cockeyed uncle getting in line for a piece of the bailout pie. It is the time honored practice of log rolling - legislators loading up a bill with unnecessary and unrelated provisions supported by this powerful member or that one, done so that support for the overall measure can be gained. The smell of free money is loose in the land and the sharks are in a feeding frenzy.

Even with all of that, I’d be willing to embrace the bill - if there is no viable alternative. At the moment, there doesn’t appear to be one. Holding up the bailout are conservative Republicans in the House who, even if they come up with something, will never get Pelosi and Reid to go along with it. In that sense, their efforts are a waste of time. The Bush Administration has caved on just about all of the Democrat’s demands to make this a “comprehensive” (read “Christmas Tree”) bailout bill. And the liberals are not about to give up the goodies they have fought for to help their various constituencies. Hence, the best the free market conservatives can hope for is to make a statement for the historical record that somebody stood up for liberty when the rest embraced dependency.

Overly dramatic? Not by much. No, we are not “nationalizing” Wall Street nor is America going to become a socialist country overnight. But to say nothing fundamental is going to change in America as a result of this massive intrusion by the federal government in the financial markets is equally wrong. We will come to rue this day, of this I am sure.

Here is a smattering of responses to three questions from “free market” economists that Reason’s blog Hit and Run asked: How bad is the current market situation?; how bad are the current proposed bailout plans?; and what’s the one thing we should be doing that we’re not?

How bad is the market? Bryan Caplan is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University:

To be honest, I’m not too sure. While we’re blaming banks and investors for their “herd behavior,” we should remember that politicians and the media often run with the herd, too. When the dust settles, I suspect we’ll realize that conditions weren’t as bad as people assumed—or at least they weren’t until we tried to fix them.

Same question to Robert E. Wright, clinical associate professor of economics at New York University:

The current situation is potentially dire. The comparison with 1932-33 is sobering: An unpopular Republican president is in office, the financial system is a mess, and an important election looms, yet many fear what the articulate Democratic candidate might do if elected. We won’t have to wait until March to find out this time around. But given how fast the world moves these days, late January will seem an eternity away. The payments system broke down last time (March 1933), necessitating a bank “holiday,” a moving speech (”the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”), and creation of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation). Breakdown of the payments system today would stagger the economy

Next question. How bad are the current bailout plans? This from Jeffrey A. Miron, senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard:

The bailout is a terrible idea. It transfers a huge amount of wealth to people who do not deserve it. It will generate enormous incentives for creative bookkeeping as the investment houses and banks try to rid themselves of any assets they do not want. The bailout fails to eliminate the crucial policies that contributed to and caused the current situation, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and so on. Last but hardly least, the bailout sets a terrible precedent: If you take huge risks and become too big to fail, the government will bail you out.

Finally, what should we be doing? This from Fredric Sautet, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University:

Getting out of the mess is not going to be easy. Once the perverse incentives are in the system, it’s hard to go back. Bailing out is very bad and in the long run is worse than bankruptcy. It is not a coincidence that Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and is now bailing out his friends. The problem is that bankers should be punished for their careless, stupid investments (JP Morgan, for instance, has $8.1 trillion in credit derivatives on its books), but since it was largely driven by the government’s loose monetary policy and regulation, bankers are not the only ones responsible. Clearly letting the banks fail in the short run would have bad consequences for many households in the U.S. (and elsewhere). The problem is that the government does not have the incentives to intervene just for a short time. Once the banks are nationalized, it may take a while before the government leaves the place. Ultimately, this situation calls for radical policy solutions: The return to the gold standard and the abolition of central banks.

What is truly frightening to me is that no one really knows how bad things are now. Nor does anyone have a clue whether this bailout plan will work or make things worse. And to top it off, there is a growing belief among some economists that we are in a world of hurt and the probability of not a slowdown but an actual contraction of the economy looms large.

Yves Smith of the blog Naked Capitalism (writing in the same Reason Magazine article) points to a 2007 study done by Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff and the University of Maryland’s Carmen Reinhart who analyzed similar market conditions that led to contractions in other countries. This is long but worth reading in its entirety:

This credit crisis has already led to the biggest 12-month fall in household wealth in U.S. history, including during the Great Depression. It has not yet had a commensurate impact on economic growth because our foreign creditors provided what economist Brad Setser called “the quiet bailout,” lending to us to the tune of roughly $1,000 per man, woman, and child. But it would be a mistake to expect this largesse to continue, at least at such favorable interest rates.

As Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff and the University of Maryland’s Carmen Reinhart found in their analysis of financial crises, every country that experienced a housing/bank crisis of the magnitude of the one we are in has suffered a marked fall in GDP. As they noted in their paper “Is the 2007 U.S. Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different? An International Historical Comparison”:

At this juncture, the book is still open on the how the current dislocations in the United States will play out. The precedent found in the aftermath of other episodes suggests that the strains can be quite severe, depending especially on the initial degree of trauma to the financial system (and to some extent, the policy response). The average drop in (real per capita) output growth is over 2 percent, and it typically takes two years to return to trend. For the five most catastrophic cases (which include episodes in Finland, Japan, Norway, Spain and Sweden), the drop in annual output growth from peak to trough is over 5 percent, and growth remained well below pre-crisis trend even after three years.

Note that their study shows the U.S. to be on a trajectory considerably worse than the average of the five worst cases, suggesting our fall in growth will be at least as severe. And no public official in the U.S. is willing to tell the public that no matter how this crisis plays out, we will suffer a fall in our standard of living.

Contraction, deflation, high unemployment, the disappearance of entire industries, a budgetary nightmare of unimaginable deficits in the out years that will top half a trillion dollars - this is what we have to look forward to even if this bailout plan goes forward - at least according to some economists.

Is this a glimpse of the future? Or just a worst case scenario? No one knows. And this is why the markets are so unsettled - panicky if you will. Uncertainty will eat away at our economy until not just Wall Street but Main Street as well feels the effects of the crisis.

Thankfully, we are not likely to have the bank failures, the soup lines, the massive dislocations that occurred during the Great Depression 80 years ago. FDIC and a social safety net along with (hopefully) no Dust Bowl will bring us to a hard, but manageable landing. But any recession (or contraction) will not be measured in months. It will be years before the toxicity of all this debt is wrung from the economy. It appears to me from reading what economists of all stripes are saying, that we are in for a period of slow or non-existent growth that could last 3 to 5 years (some say longer).

None of this refers to our current problem; the bailout and what to do about it. My desire - my longing - for alternatives to this plan will apparently not be realized. And while it is not a universal belief that catastrophe will occur if we do nothing, enough people who are a helluva lot smarter than me (and not all of them in government or supporting Bush) seem to think the chasm is open beneath our feet already and we are hanging on to the edge of a very steep cliff.

Incredibly, some Republicans are screaming for us to let go:

According to one GOP lawmaker, some House Republicans are saying privately that they’d rather “let the markets crash” than sign on to a massive bailout.

“For the sake of the altar of the free market system, do you accept a Great Depression?” the member asked.

If it were just some Wall Street fat cats who would lose their shirt, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over killing the bailout. But since there is no realistic chance for any other emergency measure to pass - not with Bush’s shameless caving in to the Democrats and the Senate Republicans meekly going along not to mention the Democrat’s desire to pander to their left wing interest groups like ACORN - I am forced to the conclusion that without this bailout, havoc would ensue and we might very well have a serious contraction of the economy with the result being the end of the US as a economic powerhouse for the foreseeable future.

The Germans already see it:

Germany blamed the United States on Thursday for spawning the global financial crisis with a blind drive for higher profits and said it must now accept more market regulation and a loss of its financial superpower status.

In some of the harshest criticism of the United States since the crisis threw Wall Street banks into financial disarray this month, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said the turmoil would leave “deep marks” on both sides of the Atlantic, but called it primarily an American problem.

“The world will never be as it was before the crisis,” Steinbrueck told the Bundestag lower house of parliament.

“The United States will lose its superpower status in the world financial system. The world financial system will become more multi-polar,” he said.

Once again, I must confess ignorance as to whether Steinbrueck is blowing smoke out of his ass and engaging in a little wishful thinking or whether this is a consensus belief among other European powers. If the former, I hope he chokes on his sauerbraten. If the latter, we better get used to the idea that the kinds of huge capital infusions from overseas that have been one of the driving forces of American entrepreneurship may dry up and curtail business formation and expansion.

Whatever they are going to do, I hope they do it quickly. With Washington Mutual being seized by the government and many of its assets sold to J.P. Morgan while the credit crisis for ordinary folks hits home - the result of a wait and see attitude on the part of banks large and small on this bailout plan - you would hope that the powers that be on Capitol Hill might put aside the campaign for a moment to do something, you know, for the country.

But with John McCain’s political stunt apparently yielding zero results at the negotiating table while Democrats falsely accuse him of gumming up the works (after demanding he make his position on the bailout known), it doesn’t appear there are any grown ups in Washington who want to bite the bullet and do what is right for the country. There is suspicion that many of the liberal ornaments on this Christmas Tree were put in for the unexpressed purpose of presenting the Republican Congress with a plan they could not possibly support:

One of the sticking points, as Senator Lindsey Graham explained later, wasn’t a lack of begging but a poison pill that would push 20% of all profits from the bailout into the Housing Trust Fund — a boondoggle that Democrats in Congress has used to fund political-action groups like ACORN and the National Council of La Raza

So before we hear much about GOP obstructionists, perhaps we should look at the question of why Democrats would make that a deal breaker in their negotiations if not to play politics with the nation’s economic future?

Obama? MIA, of course. Not a peep from the messiah on the biggest issue to hit Capitol Hill in a generation. So much for leadership, eh?

If there is no plausible alternative, pass the damn Paulson plan and let’s hope for the best. That’s all we’ve got at the moment. Otherwise, the consequences of doing nothing may make us all wish we were somewhere else come Monday.

With the momentum of the campaign swinging decisively against him, John McCain has rolled the dice once again, hoping to alter the dynamics of a race where events over the last 10 days were playing directly into his opponent’s strengths while blunting his own post convention surge.

The suspension of his campaign is a gimmick, of course - a stylized Kabuki play where Obama was to meekly acquiesce, following the older man’s lead by going to Washington and help bring Congress together on a bailout package. But Obama didn’t want to come out and play. He is calling McCain’s bluff and will show up at the debate in Mississippi on Friday night even if McCain eschews participation. He also declined McCain’s gracious invitation to play second fiddle in Congressional negotiations on the package.

Is this smart? More than smart, it was necessary. McCain is the one gambling here, not Obama. There is very little risk for Obama continuing the campaign and going through with the debate. In fact, if McCain’s gambit is seen as playing politics with the crisis - a perception Obama surrogates are already trying to push - it may be very difficult for McCain to recover from that kind of damage before the election.

Nothing screams “President!” quite like “crisis leadership” and the McCain camp may have believed they had Obama trapped. If he had acceded to McCain’s wishes and gone back to Washington, the Republican would have had a triumph. I don’t think the McCain campaign ever saw that happening, though. More likely, they believed the contrast drawn between the two candidates - one selflessly suspending his campaign while the other cynically taking advantage of the crisis as well as his opponent’s “putting the country first” - would work in their favor.

In this, I believe they have miscalculated. This really is too gimmicky to work that well. McCain may not lose as much as he probably should (he may get some credit for the gambit) but all he has succeeded in doing is dominating one or two news cycles.

On the other hand, I don’t see this as a desperation move by McCain - a “hail Mary” as some commenters are dubbing it. It’s way too early for that kind of panic. And I also disagree that some of these polls that appeared yesterday had much to do at all with this move. They wouldn’t suspend their campaign based on the kind of polling done by WaPo or any other media outlet. They spend millions on their own polling thank you - polling that is much more accurate with regards to what people are feeling about the candidates and the race.

What they saw in their internal polling was no doubt some bad trends toward Obama. The Democrat is almost certainly not 9 points ahead nationally - not with both Gallup and Rasmussen showing it much closer. Nor do the state polls reflect that big of an Obama lead. My friend Rich Baehr at The American Thinker - a very savvy and incisive poll reader - gives Obama a 4 point lead based on his reading of the state polls with momentum clearly swinging his way the last 72 hours. This almost certainly reflects the voter’s skepticism that any bailout will be achieved hence McCain’s belief that he might tap into that worry by demonstrating crisis leadership and declaring his willingness to work toward a bi-partisan solution. The media isn’t buying it nor, if overnight flash polls can be believed, is the public.

So where does that leave McCain? I believe that the GOP will close ranks today and agree to join the Democrats in voting for the bailout package. McCain will suddenly discover the crisis is over and show up in Mississippi for the debate on Friday night. Yet to be seen is what effect, if any, the Gambit will have on people’s perceptions of the campaign and of McCain in particular. One flash poll taken minutes after McCain’s announcement is meaningless in this regard. It will take 48 hours or so for perceptions to harden as the news is filtered through the regular channels of cable news, the internet, and the MSM. I would expect that any polls taken just prior to the debate will reveal if McCain’s gamble had any effect on the race at all.

If it does nothing more than slow Obama’s momentum, it could be seen as a partial success. But frankly, I think both candidates are at the mercy of events with McCain at a decisive disadvantage. By 2-1 the public - rightly or wrongly - places the blame for the Wall Street meltdown on Republicans. And Obama is not going to let people forget that.

I am afraid I’ve been derelict in my duties as Chief Bemused Chronicler of the Coming Catastrophe. I’ve got an excuse, though. My Give a Damn’s Busted.

Well, that’s only half right. Of course I care about the precipice we are currently teetering upon. Nevertheless, part of me wants to scream “Jump!” just because the idea of huge corporations with enormous political influence and the fabulously wealthy men who run them getting off the hook and not paying dearly for the cruddy decisions they made with their customer’s money sickens my soul.

In six months, even the ones who are fired will no doubt land on their feet running some other company or fund into the ground. They are losers. And the helluva it is, many of these fellows with their hands out, begging us to backstop their stupidity will not be fired, or disciplined, or even given a slap on the wrist. They may even receive kudos from shareholders and the “experts” for having the good sense to finagle cash from the government in exchange for paper that is worth less than a supermarket full of Charmin.

Yes, I know that eventually the Treasury Department will try and sell these securities. And no doubt, the American taxpayer will be told that it was a great deal because we bought in for a song and sold for a huge profit. In the meantime, these same guys will be planning their next get rich quick scheme, gambling that they won’t be one of the suckers holding the bag when the crap hits the fan next time.

As I understand it (and I use the word “understand” in the minimalist way as in “I “understand” quantum mechanics isn’t about repairing tiny cars) the whole point of these trillions of dollars in mortgage backed securities bought by banks and investment firms all over the world is that it “spread the risk” so that no one company would be too exposed.

Who came up with that idea? And why, after spreading the risk all over the world, does it come all the way back and slap the American taxpayer square in the face?

In the immortal words of C-3PO, “Don’t get technical with me.” We are used to government programs being designed to do one thing while ending up accomplishing exactly the opposite. But a financial instrument?

We are told there hasn’t been enough regulation. We are also told there’s been too much regulation. We’ve been told that capitalism is at fault. We’ve been told that it’s government’s fault. We’ve been told it’s a lack of oversight. We’ve been told that banks were forced to lend to deadbeats. We’ve been told it’s the fault of greedy businessmen. We’ve been told it’s no one’s fault, that everyone is to blame.

Now I am not that bright about this kind of thing but to my way of thinking, I’m not sure everything we’ve been told can all be right. And given the track record of the people making these grandiose claims of fault - right and left - it hardly engenders confidence that anyone, anywhere knows what the hell they are talking about.

We might as well face it. Even the financial gypsies at the Fed don’t know what they are doing in this situation. They are in full reactive mode and their crystal balls have gone dark. And if the Fed is in the dark, the hacks at the Treasury Department are only guessing too.

Now I may not understand what’s going on too well but common sense would tell the average Joe that before we go off half cocked and start handing out taxpayer money that maybe, perhaps, we should have the slightest idea if this is going to work.

Just sayin’, that’s all.

Do we have a fallback plan in case this doesn’t do the trick? Or are we just going to throw more money at these Wall Street geniuses and hope for the best?

One thing about this crisis that is truly entertaining is reading bloggers trying to outdo one another in the level of hysteria that their posts reach. It is truly amazing. I’ll bet some of those online thesauruses are getting massive traffic as bloggers search for new adjectives to describe how dire is the situation we find ourselves.

One would think such hyperbole would be the exclusive province of the left. But we righties are making a brave stab at matching them - not in describing the financial crisis but in warning of the catastrophic consequences of the bailout plan. Now, one can oppose the Treasury plan without going off half cocked about “nationalizing Wall Street” or “socializing” the financial system in America. Similarly, one can write of the gravity of the situation without resorting to florid language about selling apples on street corners and half of America standing in soup lines.

But then, what fun is being calm and reasonable? After all, this is an election season and the more out of control and idiotic the rhetoric, the more some people will take you seriously. Besides, predicting the end of the world makes you sound smart to some. It speaks to one of humanity’s most fundamental impulses; the need for drama in our dull and dreary existence. We see this with global warming advocates whose calamitous warnings actually make them feel good inside. There is something almost sexually arousing about imagining the end of the world.

And some bloggers appear to really have a hard on for this disaster.

It is painfully obvious listening to the interview that John McCain had with a reporter from Radio Caracol Miami that the candidate had a very hard time understanding the interviewer’s words because of her very thick accent - coupled with the facts that she had a nasty habit of swallowing words at the end of her sentences and spoke very rapidly to boot.

It is not — repeat not, my lefty friends — because McCain doesn’t know where Spain is or who Zapatero is, or any other idiotic spin you want to put on it. That is so far beneath all of you (except Josh Marshall whose silliness is so out of control he should dress himself and his website up in a clown outfit) that it makes a mockery of any other critique you wish to make of McCain’s attacks on Obama.

There was a point when the interviewer realized McCain didn’t understand she was talking about Spain:

After an extended interview dealing with countries to our south, McCain used the question about Spain to allude back to Mexico, note his work “with leaders in the hemisphere,” and our relationship with “Latin America and the entire region.”

McCain also never makes any mention of Spain or Zapatero.

Further, the individual conducting the interview has a thick accent and McCain appears not to understand her at times.

“Ok, what about Europe, I’m talking about the President of Spain?” she asks.

“What about me, what?” McCain responds, believing she said “you” instead of “Europe.”

Listening to the exchange (it come about 3 minutes into the interview), it is understandable why McCain was having so much trouble. What is totally ridiculous is that McCain didn’t either 1) ask for clarification from the interviewer immediately; or 2) tell the truth after the interview rather than pretending he understood perfectly.

Despite all this, McCain’s campaign insists he was aware it was Spain that was being discussed.

“No, the questioner asked several times about Senator McCain’s willingness to meet Zapatero, and ID’d him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred,” said McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Schuenemann in an email. “Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview.:

McCain’s campaign also noted that since Zapatero pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq, he has still sought a coveted White House meeting. Representatives of his government have met with the campaigns to discuss the issue.

It seems quite possible in all this that McCain had stopped paying attention to the interview, but still got the policy line right on Spain by sticking to platitudes.

But it’s hard to imagine McCain saying this of a NATO member and European democracy, even one whose government is currently not seen as friendly: “I am willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy that we are for human rights, democracy and freedom and I will stand up to those who are not.”

I was having a hard time myself trying to understand her. And I was listening to the clear end of the transmission as McCain was being interviewed by phone. I know exactly why McCain didn’t keep saying “What? Would you please repeat that?” He would have had to do it for almost every question given how the woman would trail off into incomprehensible gibberish at the end of her questions while speaking very rapidly with an accent that was very difficult to understand.

I had the exact same difficulty the other day talking to a very nice Hispanic woman in the Verizon customer service department. Now my hearing is going bad anyway but it is likely that most people would have had a problem comprehending what she was saying. She spoke so rapidly and her accent emphasized different syllables in some words so that the overall effect was that I was able to grasp about every third word.

Finally, I apologized profusely, saying I didn’t want to offend her, but her accent was causing me an enormous amount of trouble. She was very sweet and slowed down considerably. After that, I still had some problems but it was much better.

Now I am not running for president but why couldn’t McCain do the same thing? He is a proud man and because he is running for president, he didn’t want to show any potential weakness. It’s not surprising. The very same lefties making out as if he doesn’t know where Spain is or who President Zapetero is would spread the idiocy that he was hard of hearing. As it is, they are virtually accusing him of suffering from dementia.

Any fair minded person listening to that broadcast would agree with me. John McCain couldn’t understand the interviewer. But it was stupid of him to have his campaign go out and pretend that he understood perfectly. No one believes him and it only makes it appear that he did suffer some kind of brain cramp.

The election of Barack Obama would be a catastrophe on the scale of the Great Flood and the Permian Extinction all rolled into one. His ascension to the presidency will mark an end to the American Experiment in self government, open the door for socialism, allow for the payment of reparations to former slaves, ensure the triumph of radical Islam (after turning the White House into a mosque), bring back the Fairness Doctrine, require everyone to become a homosexual, allow the United Nations to run our foreign policy, bring Ahmadinejad over for coffee and some of Michelle’s delicious snack cakes, and turn the United States into a vassal of Sweden.

And that’s not the worst of it.

An Obama victory would also force the Republican party to take a long, hard look at itself and work to discover where things went off the rails. The deadwood and deadheads who are currently in control of the party would be kicked upstairs in order to make room for a new generation of leadership; sobered by defeat, cognizant of the mistakes made in the past, eager to reform everything from the budget process to ethics, and most importantly, able to develop a plan to not only win back power but govern the country once victory is achieved.

A victory by McCain will derail that effort by several years if not, for all practical purposes, shelve it completely. What need is there for reform if we’re winning - even if victory takes the GOP farther away from answering fundamental questions regarding philosophy and identity? John McCain the reformer will find a brick wall if he tries fundamental party reform. Those currently in power are a big part of the problem and it is hardly realistic to believe they will simply fall on their swords and give way to others with new ideas and little baggage to make reform a reality.

If there is a difference in the psyche of the two parties, it is in the way each goes about the process of self examination. Republicans by and large eschew navel gazing, preferring to bull their way ahead with a minimum of self absorbed clutter to distract them. The way the party approached the 1994 elections is a good example. The “Contract with America” was part political testament, part side show, part exercise in turning ideology into governance. It was canny, corny, and brilliantly executed. And after it was realized, the GOP didn’t have a clue what to do with their success except hold on to power.

The Democrats on the other hand are so angst-ridden and emotive when looking at themselves, you half expect the entire party to be locked up and put on a suicide watch. It takes them a lot longer to figure out what went wrong (not liberal enough) and where they should be going (elect more liberals) but when they decide what to do it is for the long term.

Yes, an Obama victory would be bad for America. But if this country can survive a Jimmy Carter, a Herbert Hoover, and a George Bush, it can certainly survive an amateur and fakir like Obama. It will be his incompetence that probably saves us in the end. He has yet to prove himself a success at anything except getting elected. He was a failure as a community organizer, a failure as head of the Chicago Annenberg Project, a failure as a state senator, and a non-entity in the short time he has been a US senator.

With a record like that, how much do we really have to worry about?

I will grant those of you who are wiping spittle off your monitors at this point that an Obama presidency means a much more lefty oriented Supreme Court. We shall see. The GOP will still have the filibuster in the senate. A truly egregious choice could be sidetracked. But even bringing on moderately liberal justices will no doubt mean there will be decisions that will be odious to most conservatives. The key will be to make Obama a one term president while using the next several years to reform the party so that when the GOP is able to win back the House - probably not until 2014 at the earliest - there will not only be a plan for electoral victory but a blueprint for governing as well.

The alternative is for the GOP to continue to wander in the wilderness; directionless, moribund, and with the current leadership more interested in holding on to what they have than seeking to do the things necessary to bring about a resurrection. The party has virtually disappeared from the northeast, the mid-atlantic, and the upper midwest while being challenged in the upper south, border states, the mountain west, and even in the midwest.

There won’t be much of a party left unless Republicans have the courage to take a good long look at themselves, at the last 8 years, at the people who have led them to this near catastrophe, and at a new breed of conservative Republican who could revitalize and re-energize the party and show the American people that the GOP is the party of the future once again.

Obviously, I am not working for a McCain defeat. But his loss would not be the end of the world and could very well be the catalyst for a new, smarter, more dynamic Republican party. It all depends on whether those of us who are in a position to call for change learn the right lessons from a McCain defeat and go about the slow, laborious process of building a new GOP. A party that would not only be capable of winning elections but of governing this beloved country honestly and with the humble realization that the American people need more out of us than moralizing and the tired ideas of the past.

If John McCain’s “Lipstick on a Pig” attack was criticized for being petty and irrelevant to the “real issues” of the campaign, what should we make of this stellar piece of investigative reporting?

Sarah Palin brought one unusual accessory to the Alaska Governor’s mansion after moving in last year: A tanning bed.

Al Giordano’s NarcoNews first reported that Palin had the apparatus installed in the mansion in Juneau, and a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, Roger Wetherell, confirmed the account to Politico.

“She paid for it with her own money,” Wetherell said in an email.

It does get awful dark up there in Alaska, but health authorities like the American Cancer Society generally frown on tanning beds as cancer risks.

The McCain-Palin campaign didn’t have an immediate comment on the purchase.

Matthew Yglesias, true to form, puts the tanning bed caper in “proper context” by pointing out that only those weird, hillbilly Alaskans who eat stuff like “Moose Stew” would think it middle class to have a tanning bed:

But that’s all pretty weird. Normal Americans don’t live in Alaska, don’t experience 22 straight hours of darkness ever, and don’t own personal tanning beds. Long story short, tanning beds are about as all-American as moose stew, which is not to say not all-American at all but rather idiosyncratic elements of the culture of an odd state located northwest of Canada.

I thought that kind of venomous, class conscious, dripping condescension went out of style for the left when Gus Hall moved on to that great proletariat gig in the sky. Jesus Lord God and they wonder why those of us in flyover country believe people like Yglesias to be effete, elitist snobs? Substitute “moose” for “rabbit” or “squirrel” or even “possum” and you have a delicacy enjoyed by millions of hunters and just plain folk all over the south and mountain west - two regions where Democrats, not surprisingly, are as scarce as hen’s teeth.

But the point isn’t that Yglesias and other lefties are out of touch. It’s hysterically funny that they threw a tantrum over McCain’s “Lipstick” attack for being irrelevant to the campaign and now they are attacking Palin for having a tanning bed that she paid for herself?

What is Obama’s position on tanning beds? A vital issue like this and Obama hasn’t formulated a position? How many tanning bed advisors does he have? I would say that’s just one more piece of evidence showing that he is unfit to be president.

Then there’s the latest Obama ad that comes right out and says McCain is “lying” about Obama’s record. The press, rousing itself temporarily from its peripatetic slumber, has suddenly realized that John McCain is indeed making a mockery of the campaign by attacking Obama mercilessly, exaggerating his record beyond recognition. To their mind, it is unfair - especially since it seems to be working. The pushback on the editorial pages and even by friendly columnists has probably hurt McCain or at the very least, blunted his momentum.

But the question is: Are they going to referee this contest and call both candidates out when they exaggerate or lie about their opponents record?

They didn’t do very well when Obama was using McCain’s “100 years” quote to falsely claim his opponent wanted to fight a war in Iraq for 100 years. In fact, most of these same columnists who are tsk-tsking and wagging an accusing finger in McCain’s direction never lifted a pen to take Obama to task for that hugely unfair portrayal of what McCain was saying.

But now that the press is awake and have presumably had their morning coffee, perhaps they’d like to do something about the lying being done by both Biden and Obama regarding McCain’s common sense statement yesterday that the fundamentals of the economy are sound:

“You know that there’s been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall St. And it is — people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think still — the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.”

What does McCain mean by “fundamentals?” Old Wall Street hand Mayor Bloomberg of New York, agreeing with McCain, helps the clueless Democrats and liberals out:

“I do agree that fundamentally America has an economy that is strong,” he said. “America’s great strength is its diversity, its hard work, its good financial statements, its broad capital markets,its enormous natural resources” and its work ethic, he said at an afternoon press conference devoted to reassuring New Yorkers that the city’s finances and its economy are intact.

“I’d rather play America’s hand than any other country,” he said. “Without problems? No.”

Obama and Biden both twisted McCain’s words and made it sound like he was saying all was well, that the economy was doing great. First Biden yesterday:

I believe that’s why Senator McCain could say with a straight face, as recently as this morning, and I quote “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” That, “We’ve made great progress economically” during the Bush years. But friends, I could walk from here to Lansing, and I wouldn’t run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain.

John McCain just doesn’t seem to understand what middle class people are going through today. I don’t doubt that he cares. He just doesn’t think that we have any responsibility to help people who are hurting.

That statement is a vicious, false lie. First, McCain did not say “as recently as this morning” that “We’ve made great progress economically…” That is an out and out lie since McCain said it months ago. Secondly, McCain did not say the “economy was doing well.” In fact, he took great pains to say the opposite. What he said was that the underpinnings of the economy - imports, exports (McCain was wrong in saying we’re the #1 exporting country - Germany is), capital markets, and the most productive work force in the history of human civilization - are still strong. There is nothing myopic about this statement. It is a fact despite Obama and Biden’s attempt to lie about what McCain actually said.

Obama’s lies were even worse:

Why else would he say that the economy isn’t something he understands as well as he should? Why else would he say, today, of all days - just a few hours ago - that the fundamentals of the economy are still strong?

Senator - what economy are you talking about?

What’s more fundamental than the ability to find a job that pays the bills and can raise a family? What’s more fundamental than knowing that your life savings is secure, and that you can retire with dignity? What’s more fundamental than knowing that you’ll have a roof over your head at the end of the day? What’s more fundamental than that?

The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great - that promise that America is the place where you can make it if you try - a promise that is the only reason that we are standing here today.

Obama is not describing the “fundamentals” of the economy and he knows it. He is, in fact, talking about the micro of all micro parts of the economy - the individual citizen’s pocketbook. Obama knows damn well McCain’s statement was about the macro economy. It was not only common sense to say what McCain said. It was the sign of a responsible leader that on a day when hyperbole and lies were coming from Democrats about a serious but manageable crisis on Wall Street, John McCain stood up and sought to remind people that despite the turmoil, we were not going into a depression. He didn’t seek to minimize what was going on. He didn’t try and sugar coat what was happening. But his common sense words sought to keep people calm and try to reassure them that there was nothing to panic about, that the Federal Reserve and the government were on the job.

He never said the economy was doing well. He never said individual Americans weren’t suffering. He said that the economy was not going to collapse - something the statesman Obama did not do and instead, the messiah tried to use scare tactics by totally misrepresenting what McCain said.

So where’s the press? How about a little fairness here? Obama and Biden have shamelessly lied about what John McCain said and not a peep from our guardians of truth in the media. They have reported what Obama and Biden said yesterday without any mention of the fact that they lied through their teeth.

That’s the problem, of course. They never will - especially now that they’ve called McCain out for lying, they are going to allow Obama to get away with even more exaggeration and hyperbole. This is “fairness” as far as the press is concerned.

It had to happen sooner or later. Once the emptiness of Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign was realized by the voters, the Democratic candidate for president had precious little substance to fall back on.

Political attacks only resonate if the voter perceives a kernel of truth in them. And the way John McCain has been pounding away at Obama’s non-existent plans for what exactly he would like to accomplish as president, it was bound to have an effect on the polls.

It has.

Abandoning all pretense of being a candidate who can unite the country by reaching across the aisle to Republicans and reforming Washington, Obama has dramatically shifted his campaign rhetoric to the Bill Clinton strategy of telling voters “I feel your pain:”

Barack Obama sounds more like a man trying to shake a rain cloud these days, dispensing a teeth-clenching, I-get-your-pain stump speech in town after town that offers only snippets of the unbridled optimism that long permeated his campaign pitch.

Beginning in the days before his party’s convention, the inspirational has given way to the traditional: attacks on John McCain, a register of policy prescriptions and partisan language with the sting of a needle.

Over the summer, Obama would often simply say that he and McCain “fundamentally disagree” on key issues. In New Hampshire on Saturday, Obama said the Arizona senator “doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know what is going on your lives. He is out of touch with the American people.”

The poetic defenses of hope, the playful jokes about being a distant relative of Vice President Cheney and the glancing attention to policy have been replaced by an emphasis on economic fears - an issue-by-issue argument of why the American dream is slipping away and the Republican ticket has no plan to rescue it. He furrows his brow, wags his finger and broadcasts exasperation at the idea that a 26-year veteran of Washington is co-opting his mantra of change.

The Obama campaign has even replaced the wistful slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” with the more imperative “Change We Need.”

This is the sign of a desperate candidate who doesn’t have a clue how to go about regaining the momentum he enjoyed in the early summer. Gone is the messiah who will go to Washington and save us from partisanship and race hatred. Gone is The One who’s campaign once promised to transcend politics and enter the realm of a crusade.

Now the brawling, Chicago trained street fighter is emerging - and it isn’t pretty. One wonders how his younger, more naive fans are taking this switch. I would have to say that based on history, many of them will become disillusioned and could stay at home on election day - as their older brothers and sisters and even their parents did when they were young and impressionable and had their eyes opened about politics and politicians.

One group this change won’t affect is Obama’s African American base who would probably vote for him if he was found to be the devil himself.  This part of the equation could still make the difference in some blue state races in Michigan and Pennsylvania (among other states) where large African American populations in Detroit and Philadelphia respectively could supply Obama with the margin of victory in very tight races.

But the millions of new voters who answered Obama’s call and saw him as a different kind of politician will, unless they are completely unaware of what is going on in the campaign, have second thoughts about this new version of Obama. This is the Machine pol who kicked his challengers off the ballot in his first state senate race by challenging their signature petitions. This is the “reformer” who walked into Illinois senate leader Emil Jones’ office and made a deal with the devil in order to have some kind of legislative record to run on for his US senate bid. And this is the Obama who threw the Chicago reformers under the bus by endorsing some of the worst Machine candidates at the expense of those running on a “hope and change” platform. All of these critiques will now resonate with voters.

That’s why Obama’s new strategy is so risky. Cynically, he is banking on the economy getting so bad that the voter will respond to his Clintonesque class warfare claims which will allow him to barely squeak out a win in November. He apparently feels that’s all he’s got left.

One thing is certain, however; Obama has totally abandoned all that made him different and exciting to so many voters and now appears to be just another Democratic politician.

This blog post originally appears in The American Thinker

UPDATE

As usual, Ed Morrissey and I are on the same page this morning:

Obama has had to turn back towards his base rather than make a play for independents and centrists. The base has begun to get dispirited, if not outright mutinous, and Obama needs an enthusiastic effort to win battleground states. Instead, he’s begun to fade in formerly safe states like Minnesota and New York, and Pennsylvania and Michigan may have already slipped through his fingers.

Make no mistake about it. Obama may claim this as going on the offensive, but this is a purely defensive move that ignores his one major theme: being different enough to transcend partisanship. John McCain has pushed him out of his comfort zone and forced him to play this election by McCain’s rules, and apparently he isn’t adept enough to figure that out for himself.

They call themselves “Values Voters” and they’re meeting in Washington this week at a gig sponsored by the Family Research Council - which in actuality does little “research” and spends most of its money and time lobbying for what they perceive to be “family issues.”

No - you won’t find too many scholarly papers or books published by the FRC. What you will find is a lot of shocking ignorance, bigotry, and a stupidity so profound that one wonders how these people can live in the 21st century without their heads exploding.

These guys would have been right at home in Salem about 400 years ago. This is their take on homosexuality:

Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed. It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects. While the origins of same-sex attractions may be complex, there is no convincing evidence that a homosexual identity is ever something genetic or inborn. We oppose the vigorous efforts of homosexual activists to demand that homosexuality be accepted as equivalent to heterosexuality in law, in the media, and in schools. Attempts to join two men or two women in “marriage” constitute a radical redefinition and falsification of the institution, and FRC supports state and federal constitutional amendments to prevent such redefinition by courts or legislatures. Sympathy must be extended to those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions, and every effort should be made to assist such persons to overcome those attractions, as many already have.

There’s never a stake and a pile of wood around when you need one, huh guys.

I am no great defender of homosexual activists - or any other activists who seek special rights or privileges based on some idiosyncratic attribute. They can’t help being gay nor can many obese people help being fat or others help the fact that they’ve got red hair (I discriminate ruthlessly against people with red hair). A line must be drawn somewhere or soon, the only people not able to claim special rights are gorgeous, hunky, heterosexual white men under the age of 40. And don’t worry, they’ll find something they’ve been discriminated for too.

But at the same time, does anyone else feel that they’ve jumped into a time machine and travelled back about 100 years when reading how the FRC feels about gays? Well, maybe not a hundred but at least 30. The American Psychiatric Association decided back in the 1970’s that homosexuality was not a mental disorder or disease so where they get this “negative physical and psychological” stuff is not, I assure you, from any recognized authority on the subject.

But the FRC talks like gays are sick while needing our sympathy and help to get rid of “unwanted” (!!) sexual desires. I pity anybody with unwanted sexual desires. It’s sort of like the feeling I get when I see Catherine Zeta-Jones in Zorro. But the FRC isn’t talking about those kind of unwanted desires; they’re talking about sexual feelings for someone from the same sex generally.

So where do they get these cockamamie, stupid, bigoted notions? It ain’t from any “research” done by the Family Research Council. Or at least any published research. What they have are brochures, “booklets,” a lecture, and a couple of friend of the court briefs filed in cases involving sodomy laws.

I have taken some pains to describe these “values” because they are apparently shared by the vast majority of “Values Voters” who showed up at this shindig in DC this week. In addition to a lot of hokum like this, they are also fed a steady diet of political red meat by the likes of Sean Hannity:

Hannity made an offer to Barack Obama. Given Obama’s predilection for scolding America for not being charitable, Hannity offered to send Obama’s destitute half-brother in Kenya $1,000, if Team Obama can send Hannity his address. If Obama will appear on his show, he’ll make it $10,000.

Afterwards, he returned to the media issue. Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s strategist, told him that the media has lost a tremendous amount of credibility in this electoral cycle. Rasmussen reports that 69% of the public believe that the media outlets have rigged their reporting to favor their candidate. In no manner is that more obvious in the way they have treated Sarah Palin. In six days, Hannity says, there were more questions about Bristol Palin than in 19 months about Obama’s association with William Ayers.

What any of that has to do with being a values voter I don’t know. But it sure revved up the troops, didn’t it?

Bill Bennett was also there. Now I happen to like Bill Bennett quite a bit and believe him to be a rational, intelligent man who speaks and writes with great clarity about the challenges of maintaining western civilization’s core values and protecting them from assault by some nihilists on the left.

But this is nonsense:

Bennett said that we have to tread carefully in our support of the Palins for the pregnancy of their teen daughter. We need to applaud the way that they handled this family crisis, Bennett says, but we have to remain focused on preventing teen sex and fight an epidemic that creates these pregnancies. We can do both, and we should.

Obama represents a different set of values, and Bennett warns that these could prove dangerous to the American way of life. We shouldn’t question his patriotism, but we can certainly question his judgment. Fred Thompson summed it up best, Bennett says. “There are two questions we will never have to ask about John McCain: Who is this man, and can we trust him with the Presidency?”

Values are “dangerous?” Are Obama’s values (he is a nominal Christian, a family man, seems fairly honest for a politician, and cares about his community) going to attack us? Maybe they’ll jump us when we’re sitting in church minding our own business. Perhaps they’ll ambush us on our way home from the store.

Values are not dangerous. They may be different. But different isn’t dangerous unless one seeks to impose those values on people who are unwilling to accept them. Obama and the Democrats may still achieve power in November. But really now, are our core values going to change that much unless we let them?

The problem is that many of the things these attendees believe to be “value oriented” either have nothing to do with “values” and everything to do with politics or, even more prosaically, are absolutely none of their fricking business as far as what others might believe, or think, or seek to live. In other words, I would tell most of the “values voters” there to get stuffed and keep their nose out of my life. My values are my own and seeking to make political issues out of personal morality is the antithesis of liberty.

For instance, saying that life begins at conception is a belief based on faith. I respect that. But science doesn’t see it that way and the government cannot, should not base laws that govern people on the way humans interpret the will and thoughts of a supernatural deity. That simply isn’t rational. Who knows the mind of God? Not Sean Hannity I assure you. And my experience has been that even great intellects and good souls like Pope Benedict harbor doubts about how well they understand what goes on in the mind of the guy upstairs.

These are not evil people at the FRC conference. I believe them to be in thrall to a belief system that they find enormous comfort in as opposed to dealing rationally with the world at large. They are led, for the most part, by good hearted people who really want to do the right thing but end up not recognizing that their own myopia about the modern world is handcuffing their parishioners and preventing them from opening their minds to all the possibilities - other ways of thinking. Other means of discovery besides finding the correct verse in the bible.

There isn’t a god but if there was, it would seem to me that he would want us earthlings to use all of our faculties, all of our experience and learning, all the cumulative knowledge built up over thousands of years of human civilization in order to get the most out of life. The discovery of carbon dating has given the lie to the notion that the earth is only 6 thousand years old. In the parlance of Christians, god opened our minds and allowed us to gain the ability to go beyond Genesis and discover for ourselves some of the mysteries of the universe. We have exceeded the knowledge of the ancients because we have built upon their work and opened our minds to the fundamental truth that we are perfectly capable creatures whose curiosity and ability to ask questions supersedes any “truth” we can get from any religion on earth.

I’m sure I share some of the “values” that these Christians accept as their own. But I don’t think I have a corner on truth nor do I think it a good idea to use the government to impose my own concept of morals or values on someone else. This I will oppose from both the religious right and secular left. My values are my own. I would be pleased if everyone - right and left - just stayed the hell out of my life and let me live it the way I see fit.

It was January 1, 1929 and Tom Lifson’s beloved California Golden Bears were facing the fearsome Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. Midway through the first quarter, Tech’s Jack “Stumpy” Thomason fumbled the ball and Cal’s center, a callow youth named Roy Riegles, picked up the ball and was hit a glancing blow by a Tech lineman that spun him around until he was facing his own goal. This proved tragic because Riegels, temporarily losing his bearings, began to run the wrong way - toward his own endzone.

The fastest man on the field was Reigles’ teammate Benny Lom, who took off after Riegels, screaming at him to stop and turn around. But the 90,000 fans in the Rose Bowl that day were yelling so loud - some for him to stop, others for him to continue - that it wasn’t until Riegels was at his own 3 yard line that Lom was able to corral him and get him turned the right way.

Too late. Half the Tech squad swarmed over Riegels and dropped him at the one yard line. The very next play, Tech blocked a punt for a two point safety, eventually winning the game 8-7.

Forever after, the young man was known as “Wrong Way Riegels.” He went on to live a successful life, dealing with his notoriety with good humor. Eventually, he was named to the Cal Hall of Fame and the play itself was enshrined as one of the six most memorable sports moments of the 20th century.

Barack Obama would do well to study the life of Mr. Riegels. For the last fortnight he has lost his bearings and has been sprinting as hard as he can toward his own goal line while his own teammates are screaming at him to turn around. In the annals of modern American political campaigns, it is hard to remember when one candidate has shot himself in his own foot so often in such a short time period.

His attacks on Palin backfired horribly. Obama should know - since he is the master of this game - that people don’t care much what your position was previously on an issue, it’s where you are now that matters. Hence, Obama’s lurch toward the center during the summer where he threw many of his previous far left positions on issues under the bus and adapted a more moderate stance worked with the voters who now see the former #1 liberal in the senate as a moderate. Similarly, Palin’s previous support for the “Bridge to Nowhere” gets tossed out the window because she now opposes it. Voters are not going to hold it against her no matter how many millions of dollars Obama spends on commercials calling her a liar.

Beyond that, he and his campaign’s snide comments about her experience and his supporters attacking her family seems to have enraged many women. You don’t go from a comfortable advantage in the polls among women to a 12 point deficit in two weeks without screwing up royally.

And speaking of screwing up, the guy who came up with this bright idea of an ad should be fired:

“Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says in a campaign strategy memo. “We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain’s attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people.”

The newest ad showcasing their hard line includes unflattering footage of McCain at a hearing in the early ’80s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit, interspersed with shots of a disco ball, a clunky phone, an outdated computer and a Rubik’s Cube.

“1982, John McCain goes to Washington,” an announcer says over chirpy elevator music. “Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn’t.

“He admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, can’t send an e-mail, still doesn’t understand the economy, and favors two hundred billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class,” it says. It shows video of McCain getting out of a golf cart with former President George H.W. Bush and closes with a photo of him standing with the current President Bush at the White House. “After one president who was out of touch, we just can’t afford more of the same.”

Bravo, Barry! You’ve just won the prize as the biggest numbnuts to ever run for president:

Yep. The day after 9/11, as part of its “get tough” makeover, the Obama campaign is mocking John McCain for not using a computer, without caring why he doesn’t use a computer. From the AP story about the computer illiterate ad:

“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,” [Obama spokesman Dan] Pfeiffer said. “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “extraordinary.” The reason he doesn’t send email is that he can’t use a keyboard because of the relentless beatings he received from the Viet Cong in service to our country. From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

In a similar vein I guess it’s an outrage that the blind governor of New York David Paterson doesn’t know how to drive a car. After all, transportation issues are pretty important. How dare he serve as governor while being ignorant of what it’s like to navigate New York’s highways.

John Hinderaker headlines his post on this “Obama Gets Tough, Shoots Self in Head.” That just about sums it up. If this is the campaign’s idea of “ferocity,” I would suggest they stop taking lessons on how to be an attack dog from Huckleberry Hound. What an insanely stupid thing to do; criticize someone for not being able to perform a physical task because they were brutally tortured (not by the “Viet Cong,”) in service to their country?

The liberals are ignoring the gaffe and concentrating instead on the fact that torture is no excuse for McCain not to be able to type, that there are plenty of devices out there that he could use that would allow him to be as computer literate as the geniuses in the Obama campaign who don’t know how to use Google to find out why McCain is somewhat constrained from using a keyboard because the North Vietnamese used a hammer on his hands to break his fingers several times not to mention hanging McCain by his thumbs and hoisting him off the ground.

The McCain campaign is taking a different tack in defense, pointing out that the candidate travels with a laptop. McCain himself has said that he is “learning” to surf the web and that his wife reads emails to him.

It is largely an irrelevant issue as Goldberg points out. And examining the attack for its political impact, let’s look at this excellent piece by Patrick Ruffini on what makes a good attack meme. First, he quotes Phil Singer’s incisive take on what is needed for a successful attack:

Political attacks work best when the charge they make is both echoed by the subject of those attacks and resonate with voter perceptions of that candidate. Case in point: The flip-flop attack on John Kerry wouldn’t have been nearly as effective as it was if he hadn’t told voters in West Virginia that he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. Kerry gave the Republicans a real time example of the negative storyline they were driving against him.

Fast forward to 2008: It’s tough to make the McSame attack stick because John McCain rose to national prominence by being a thorn in George W. Bush’s side. McCain might have voted for 90 percent of the Bush agenda but the public got to know him as a pain in Bush’s behind - a perception aided by the fact that Democrats rushed to exploit the McCain-Bush schism that came out of the 2000 primaries.

So does that mean the Obama campaign should ignore the fact that McCain voted 90% of the time with Bush. Absolutely not.

It means that the Obama campaign needs to focus its energies on generating some real time examples of McCain hugging Bush. (I think there are some other areas to hit as well but that’s a post for another time.)

Does the “out of touch because he can’t use a computer” attack resonate with voters? I’ll grant a yes to that but add that there’s a helluva lot more potent angles to attack McCain on than whether he can use a computer. Even if you can come up with an answer to the idea that he can’t use a keyboard because of torture, you are missing the point, John Cole. Even if he could use one of those devices for the handicapped, all the attack does is remind people that John McCain was tortured. Nothing else matters. You don’t criticize your opponent and then leave yourself wide open to a counterattack that uses your opponent’s powerful narrative as rebuttal.

Towering idiocy.

Ruffini points out that the Obama campaign’s attacks fail to resonate not because they’re not true but because they go against how McCain has defined himself:

This is the Obama campaign going with an Attack 1.0 strategy — pick your opponent’s theoretically most damaging vulnerability and hammer away at it, regardless of how initially believable it is. The premise: repetition will make an initially farfetched but damaging attack believable.

The McCain campaign and the Steve Schmidt machine is pursuing an Attack 2.0 strategy. Pick the most believable attack (or the one most likely to get picked up by earned media, which magnifies paid media by orders of magnitude) even if it isn’t the most damaging, and hammer away until it is the most relevant and therefore damaging.

Attack 2.0 beats Attack 1.0 because there is some kernel of public belief in the attack that allows it to go viral.

This is the premise behind “celeb” — up to that point, Obama’s celebrity status had been considered an asset. But in reality, it was always a hidden vulnerability.

I said when Obama first chose to decline federal matching funds that having too much money was a curse in many ways. This is one of them. They have been hammering the “McSame” meme for weeks, spending tens of millions of dollars and have failed to make a dent in McCain’s “maverick” personae. I daresay with less money, they probably would have realized sooner that this strategy was going nowhere and backed off. Now here we are in the middle of September and they really have not developed an overriding attack strategy at all. They are in limbo - caught between a failed strategy and a ticking clock.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is driving Obama and the netnuts wild with attacks that are resonating because they play into people’s growing perception of Obama as a far left liberal with no experience and someone who is full of hot air and not much more.

And Obama is assisting the McCain campaign by coming up with attacks that help the Republican rather than destroy him. If things keep going the way they have been for the past two weeks, this election is going to be remembered for how many times Barack Obama took the ball and ran toward his own goal line, scoring for his opponent.

This post will not be about 9/11. I have written about that day for each of the last three years and have poured out all the emotion and psychic injury that the memories engendered by watching the horror originally filled me to bursting. There is nothing left to say that I haven’t already said and I hate repeating myself. I am, as the poet said, a “vessel’s contents spilled out onto the ground, a wastrel shadow, as sands in an hourglass pouring till time marks my soul’s rest.”

Have we really changed all that much? We conservatives like to talk about Democrats and liberals living in a “9/10 World” but the fact is, the world and America were changing long before 9/11 and will continue to change as long as we are alive. As a chronicler of events and enthusiastic but hopelessly amateurish historian, I have watched history’s march these last few years and tried to answer the question “What has changed in America since 9/11?” It might surprise you that I have come to the conclusion that a much more relevant question is “What has remained the same since 9/11?”

The internet is more of a factor in people’s lives but everybody and their stupid uncle saw that one coming in the 90’s. The ubiquitousness of cell phones has made it possible for people to plug in to the world in the morning and remain wired for the whole day. HDTV is cheaper and better. The greatest boon to mankind - the Tom Tom - has altered the way we drive and probably saved a few marriages along the way.

But save a few technological baubles that glitter in our hand or in our home, what has really changed in America since 9/11/01? Democrats and the left still believe that 9/11 was a tragedy but that the “War on Terror” is a misnomer and we are going about it the wrong way. The right believes the left wants us all to die at the hands of a scimitar wielding Islamist and that the US is suffering from Sharia creep.

Both outlooks are silly, stupid, and self defeating. I would say to my friends on the left that there is a “War on Terror” whether you want one or not thanks to our enemies declaring it so. And the idea of fighting such a war by “addressing the root causes” of the conflict is just absurd. Some of the truly fabulously wealthy people on this earth - Saudi princes - are some of the most dyed in the wool, American and western hating Islamists.

It isn’t a lack of education either. The madrasses that are currently turning out Taliban fighters by the hundreds every month in Pakistan take great care in teaching their charges how to read and write, figure sums, and teach other subjects western children also learn. Of course, they also teach how to blow people up which makes them somewhat different than your average suburban American school.

To my friends on the right, please get off this silly meme that America is being Islamized. Every time I read a story about some town or city accommodating the religious beliefs of Muslims and then read blogs and commenters who point to that as evidence that America is giving in to Sharia law, I want to throw up on my monitor. You sound exactly like the Know-Nothings of the 1850’s who feared the Irish because they were “papists” and thought they would turn America into a Catholic country. There are about 5 million Muslims in the United States and the chances of them taking over and converting the rest of us are about the same as the Democrats winning the presidential race in Wyoming.

I have come to the conclusion that we are pretty much the same country as we were on September 10, 2001. We are more cognizant of the terror threat which is a good thing. But we have allowed the war against terror to become politicized which is not. I have written many times that we need the left in this fight if we are to eventually prevail. But that won’t happen as long as our liberal friends continue to see fighting terror as some kind of police dragnet and the right calls anyone who disagrees with them unpatriotic. Somehow, a bridge must be found that both sides can use to rationally discuss our situation.

And boy do we need a national conversation. Both sides have fallen into such absolutes on the issues that we have the spectacle of some on the right defending torture while some on the left seeing any increase in executive power as tantamount to the creation of a dictatorship. This is nuts. If there is one thing we should have learned since 9/11 its that absolutism is deadly. Its stultifying effects on debate precludes any kind of rational response to the serious threat of Islamic terrorism. There is room for disagreement about terrorism and other national security issues. But how can you debate someone so closed minded that they dismiss the other side out of hand because they believe their opponents don’t care about America? Or that their political foes prefer an authoritarian police state to freedom due to unreasoning “fear” of terrorism?

Toxicity in our national dialogue exists not because we debate whether Obama called Palin a pig or even if Obama is as unqualified as Palin for high office. This is politics and in case you haven’t noticed, it is the way political contests have been fought in this country for a long time. Television and the internet have only magnified the controversies, given them a more immediate impact and perhaps a longer shelf life. But jumping on something dumb your opponent has said has been forever a part of American politics. To pretend - as the left and the media is whining today - that this is something new is ridiculous.

It is not the trivial things that separate us. It is trust in the intentions and motivations of the other side. I have written often that the left - with the best of intentions - supports the trashing of our culture. The ostensible reason is more freedom. The result is toxic sludge as the appeal to the lowest impulses in human beings slithers to the surface and enters the mainstream. The backlash against this we see with Christian cultural warriors who believe the left is out to deliberately infect their children and hence, they seek to impose their own standards and morals on the rest of us.

The inevitable push back from the left, who believe the Christians are out to destroy America, adds fuel to the fire and a full blown culture war erupts where debate is useless and both sides seek government help to impose their own worldview on everyone else.

This poison has spilled over and now infects all of our politics. If there is one thing that has changed since 9/11 is that the chasm between the two sides has gotten wider and the infection has spread to the point where nothing is untouched. The hope that Obama could bridge the gap - or anyone for that matter - was never realistic. America is what it is today and blaming one side or the other for the mess our politics has become is futile.

The fear I have is that if 9/11 can’t bring us together, what will? A nuclear terrorist attack? Assassinations? War with a nuclear Iran?

We are a weaker nation because we are so divided. To my mind, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of that fact and makes us pay a price we may be unwilling to bear.