FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

"I come from Arkansas. I get why she's hot out there, why she's doing well. People look at her, and they say: 'All those kids. Something that happens in everybody's family. I'm glad she loves her daughter and she's not ashamed of her. Glad that girl's going around with her boyfriend. Glad they're going to get married. . . .' [Voters will think] I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They're wonderful children. They're wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy." From WSJ 9/25/08 issue of “Notable and quotable”

September 26, 2008
Thinking About McCain
By DAVID BROOKS
I’ve been covering John McCain steadily for a decade. A few years ago, I worked on a book, which I foolishly never completed, on the U.S. Senate with McCain as the central character. So when I step back and think of McCain, even in the heat of this campaign, I still think of him first in the real world of governing, not in the show-business world of the election.
I think first of the personal qualities. He was an unfailingly candid man. When other politicians described a meeting, they always ended up the heroes of the story. But McCain would always describe the meeting straight, emphasizing his own failings with more vigor than his accomplishments.
He is, for a politician, a humble man. The most important legacy of his prisoner-of-war days is that he witnessed others behaving more heroically than he did. This experience has given him a basic honesty when appraising himself.
His mood darkened as the Iraq war deteriorated, but his accomplishments mounted. I don’t think any senator had as impressive a few years as McCain did during this span of time.
He lobbied relentlessly for a change of strategy in Iraq, holding off the tide that would have had us accept defeat and leave Iraq to its genocide. He negotiated a complicated immigration bill with Ted Kennedy. He helped organize the Gang of 14 and helped save the Senate from polarized Armageddon over judicial nominations.
He voted against opportunist bills like the pork-laden energy package and the prescription drug plan. He led a crusade against Jack Abramoff and the sleaze-meisters in his own party and exposed corrupt Pentagon contracts.
I could fill this column with his accomplishments during this period, and not even mention the insights. At a defense conference in Munich, I saw him diagnose and confront Russian hegemony. Week after week, I saw him dissent from G.O.P. colleagues as their party lost its way.
Some people who cover the campaign seem to have no knowledge of anything but the campaign, but I can’t get these events " which were real and required the constant application of judgment, honor and courage " out of my head.
Do I wish he was running a different campaign? Yes.
It’s not that he has changed his political personality that bothers me. I’ve come to accept that in this media-circus environment, you simply cannot run for president as a candid, normal person.
Nor is it, primarily, the dishonest ads he is running. My friends in the Obama cheering section get huffy about them, while filtering from their consciousness all the dishonest ads Obama has run " the demagogic DHL ad, the insulting computer ad, the cynical Rush Limbaugh ad, the misleading Social Security ad and so on. If one candidate has sunk lower than the other at this point, I’ve lost track.
No, what disappoints me about the McCain campaign is it has no central argument. I had hoped that he would create a grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century and how McCain’s worldview is different.
McCain has not made that sort of all-encompassing argument, so his proposals don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. Without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different, he’s had to rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat. He has no frame to organize his response when financial and other crises pop up.
He has no overarching argument in part because of his Senate training and the tendency to take issues on one at a time " in part, because of the foolish decision to run a traditional right-left campaign against Obama and, in part, because McCain has never really resolved the contradiction between the Barry Goldwater and Teddy Roosevelt sides of his worldview. One day he’s a small-government Western conservative; the next he’s a Bull Moose progressive. The two don’t add up " as we’ve seen in his uneven reaction to the financial crisis.
Nonetheless, when people try to tell me that the McCain on the campaign trail is the real McCain and the one who came before was fake, I just say, baloney. I saw him. A half-century of evidence is there.
If McCain is elected, he will retain his instinct for the hard challenge. With that Greatest Generation style of his, he will run the least partisan administration in recent times. He is not a sophisticated conceptual thinker, but he is a good judge of character. He is not an organized administrator, but he has become a practiced legislative craftsman. He is, above all " and this is completely impossible to convey in the midst of a campaign " a serious man prone to serious things.
Amid the stupidity of this season, it seemed worth stepping back to recall the fundamentals " about McCain today and Obama on some other day in the near future.

Yes, I am advocating letting our market crash and heading straight for recession and maybe even the D word. I know, it will suck. We'll all lose a lot. It will have global implications. We'll all get hit hard and lose savings and houses. There will be higher crime and prices and everything will just really really suck.

For a while. But maybe if we take it on the chin now we can save our kids and grandkids from having to take it in the gut later. At some point, our debts will catch up to us and the mess will be too big to clean up. That can be now or it can be later. I'm proposing we suck it now. (please don't take that last bit as a sig line without context)

Who's in?

Lately many in the press have expressed McCain's possible absence at tonight's debate (apparently he will now attend) and his meeting with Bush, Pelosi, Reid, Obama, et.al. on the financial bailout thing on Thursday as nothing more than a "gamble" and political posturing. I see it as pure McCain trying to do the right thing by the American people.

I would try to explain it to you, ci, if I thought it would help. The tag does stick because it didn't happen accidentally. There are specific reasons why Obama fits the tag, messiah. Ponder it over, and someday I might explain it to you.

Pitiful attempt at a dodge, Okie. You call him that in order to disparage people like me. It's not Obama you are insulting, it's me. Own up to your ****.

Cycloptichorn

"Congress has every duty to be careful with taxpayers' money and to suggest improvements in the administration plan. But part of Congress's reaction has nothing to do with improving the proposal and everything to do with assuaging the rage of constituents -- even if it jeopardizes the package's chances of success, either by weakening it or by larding it up with useless complicating provisions designed solely to give the appearance of sticking it to the rich.

Window dressing such as capping pay packages, which the Bush administration has already caved in to. I've got nothing against withholding golden parachutes from failed executives. But artificially capping the pay of people brought in to lead these wobbly companies back to health is a fine way to tell talented executives to look elsewhere for a job. In the demagogic parlance of this election year, it is a prescription for outsourcing our best financial minds to London and Dubai.

The mob is agitated but hardly blameless. While the punch bowl -- Alan Greenspan's extremely low post-Sept. 11 interest rates -- was being held out, few complained about cheap loans and doubling home values. Now all of a sudden everything is the fault of Wall Street malfeasance.

I have little doubt that some, if not many, cases of malfeasance will emerge. But what we conveniently neglect is the fact that much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people.

For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which in turn pressured banks and other lenders -- to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity.

In 2003, Frank opposed Bush administration and Congressional Republican efforts for the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis.[28] Under the plan a new agency would have been created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry. "These two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis," Frank said. He added, "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

KMOV Channel 4’s TV newscast night before last at 6 PM had a story, that stated that St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, both Obama supporters, are implying that they will bring criminal libel charges against anyone who levels what turns out to be false criticisms of their chosen candidate for President