n looking for some other kind of information on his site, I happened to see that my congressman, Charlie Rangel, lists something like 30 congressional "caucuses" he's a member of. He's a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He's a member of the Progessive Caucus. He's a member of the Army Caucus and the Navy/Marine Caucus. (He was a staff sergeant in the Army and earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in Korea, by the way.) He's a member of the Caribbean Caucus, which takes some chutzpah, given the trouble he's gotten into with unreported rental income on a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic. (Which may explain why he's also a member of the Real Estate Caucus.) He's a member of several caucuses that don't reflect his own history but rather the causes he chooses to support: the Caucus for Women's Issues, the Caucus for Armenian Issues, the Fire Services Caucus, etc., etc.
One caucus he belongs to, however, just cracked me up: the Rural Housing Caucus. Now, sure, he can be interested in the issue of rural housing, and let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he is. But still it seems strange. Rangel represents the densest Congressional district in the United States. That is to say, each member of the House of Representatives represents approximately 600,000 people, but Rangel's district is geographically the smallest, covering just a little over 10 square miles of northern Manhattan, Rikers Island (definitely not a rural population there), and a tiny part of Queens that is, true, very lightly populated — because it mostly consists of a Con Ed power plant.
But, hey, good for him if he's interested in rural housing. Just so long as it doesn't take away from his work with the Kidney and Glaucoma caucuses, for example. Or the Caucus on Hellenic Issues. Or the Boating Caucus. Or... .
I donated more money to his campaign than any other campaign I'd ever donated to
On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give him, maybe, an 8 so far. (If he'd quit discharging soldiers under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" I might move that up to a 9, even.)
On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Michelle Obama a 10 so far
I've been interested in both the history and the modern working of the White House since I was in junior high school
I'm generally a fan of Brian Williams
I'm fascinated by the open access the White House gave NBC for 5 days to produce its two-night "news special" on the Obama White House
I didn't tune in for a hard-hitting expose or confrontation between the Executive branch and the Fourth Estate
...then why am I feeling so profoundly embarrassed by Brian Williams's fawning hagiography of the Obamas in this special? Are there still, somewhere in the mists, the faint fumes of ink from my diploma for a B.A. in journalism wafting somehow in my direction? I doubt it, but I'm still embarrassed for him, nonetheless.
If it updates quarterly, can it really be called a blog?
Gosh, has it been over three months already? Time flies when you're being dunned.
And I haven't had the intellectual capacity to add much more here that seemed worth adding, after a bunch of work stuff and a bunch of church stuff and some other stuff that's been taking up all my mental space.
But today's readings during Morning Prayer gave me pause, following as they did so soon after I finished The Canon, by the New York Times writer Natalie Angier. (A great book, by the way, although she's sometimes too clever and too heavy with the wordplay for her own good.) One of the things that make the book brilliant is the way it's organized. It's not original with her, but still a good idea. To give an overview of basic science, it should build up, rather than work the way it does in our elementary and high school educations. Start first with the scientific method, then explore probability, then measurement, and then, in this order: physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. What you learn in each of the fields helps inform what you learn later.
Angier (properly) doesn't give any quarter to scriptural views of "creation" when discussing biology, but much of what she writes -- about evolution, but also about physics, astronomy and cosmology -- had, for me, very religious overtones. I intend to do some more thinking and maybe even writing about this, but today I was struck by what seems a very modern scientific experiment, and that from a book in the Hebrew scriptures, the Book of Daniel. This was the Old Testament lesson for today's Daily Office. It's the beginning of the familiar story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (which is strange we remember them by those names, since those were the names given them by the Babylonians, whereas their real names were Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah). The Babylonian king wants the best and brightest of Israel at his court, and so orders that Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah be fed the best food (presumably meat) and the best wine. Daniel says this will defile them, if they take these gifts from the king, but their refusing makes the palace master nervous:
The palace master said to Daniel, "I am afraid of my lord the king; he has appointed your food and your drink. If he should see you in poorer condition than the other young men of your own age, you would endanger my head with the king." Then Daniel asked the guard whom the palace master had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: "Please test your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. You can then compare our appearance with the appearance of the young men who eat the royal rations, and deal with your servants according to what you observe." So he agreed to this proposal and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was observed that they appeared better and fatter than all the young men who had been eating the royal rations. So the guard continued to withdraw their royal rations and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.
— Daniel 1:10:16
A couple of things about that this pericope brings to mind:
Daniel proposes a test
The test will yield measurable results
He proposes a control for the test (the young men of the same age, on a diet of royal rations instead of vegetables and water)
The Babylonians did not have much of an ethical standard for clinical trials. While we don't know how much the control group knew about this test ("informed consent"?), they are still conducting tests on prisoners for one thing, and for another, after the test group showed better health than the control group, shouldn't they have offered the same diet to the control group?
Interesting early evidence of the health benefits of vegetarian/vegan diets (and alcohol-free, at that) in scripture. However, it also backs up what a lot of people say, which is that a vegetarian diet, alone, may not help you lose weight.
I'm partly joking in those last two points, especially, but those are exactly the kind of issues that get discussed around clinical trials in diet and medicine even today.
Let me be clear here, which is the kind of thing I want to explore more, later, at some point: I'm not saying that the Bible is scientific evidence of anything. Or that the story in Daniel is a factual, historical account -- whether it had been informed by historical events or not beyond the accepted historical fact of the Jewish exile in what is today Iraq (and there's a whole subject worth a little more discussion, probably) I don't know. But for this particular reading, it is interesting that the scientific method has a long position in Jewish history, if we take this experiment as evidence. Which makes sense, since the Greeks and the Babylonians themselves were exploring scientific methods around the time that Israel was exiled in Babylon, or soon thereafter.
I'd never noticed this use of the scientific method in this story before in reading it in the past, but it stood out to me this morning, particularly in light of my last post, about the woman with the hemorrhage who asks Jesus to heal her. I guess you could say, if there's anything theological to these observations in these readings, it's not that "a Biblical viewpoint is scientific," but rather the opposite: "a scientific viewpoint is (or can be) Biblical." That's where I would differ most profoundly, I suppose, with the literalists. By positing science as anathema to religion, or religious faith as the opposite of scientific inquiry, they insult Christianity and the Bible's relationship to it far more than any scientific rationalist ever did.
In the Episcopal Church's lectionary calendar for the Daily Office, there's one set of readings for "Year One" (years in which Easter falls in an odd-numbered year, although the calendar begins with the first Sunday in Advent the year before) and another set for "Year Two." But most of the minor feast days that are determined by a calendar date and not it's relationship to Easter or Christmas (e.g., "The Conversion of St. Paul") generally get the same readings in either year. An added wrinkle is that the "Third Sunday in Epiphany" trumps something like "The Conversion of St. Paul," so the latter celebration would in fact be "translated" (transferred) to the next available weekday -- which happened to be today, since January 25 is actually the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. But as I find it hard enough to keep up with just the regular readings, and I tend to not check the calendar before I sit down to read Morning or Evening Prayer, I end up missing most of these minor feast days (their readings are in a separate list) and I certainly never bother to try to transfer the ones that fall on Sundays to other days. For the liturgically persnickety, I'm sure I'm violating something or other, but that's between me and my Prayer Book.
I
had emergency surgery recently. (It was caused by a hernia that I already had another surgery scheduled to fix, but a strangulated small bowel turned an elective surgery into an emergency surgery, and they had to remove about 6-7" of my small intestine and resection back the healthy parts, leading to a week in the hospital and another week at T's, recovering.) As I still don't have a lot of energy -- and a cold is now sapping whatever brain activity I was capable of to begin with -- I pretty much manage to do some light reading every day, but can't concentrate for long before I find myself getting tired. But one thing I've been trying to stick to is the Daily Office (Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, or both) in the Book of Common Prayer. This has become a highlight of my day, to be honest, and I was rewarded today with a Gospel reading that seemed so applicable to feeling so under the weather as I currently do. It was Mark 5:21-43 for Monday in the 3rd week of Epiphany today:
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, "My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live."
So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, "If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well." Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, 'Who touched me?'." He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader's house to say, "Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?" But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, "Do not fear, only believe." He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, "Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping." And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child's father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha cum," which means, "Little girl, get up!" And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.
Now, of course, the two healing narratives in this passage are what made the strongest impression on me. I've read this passage many times, I know, but I'm not sure I've ever read it when I was myself was sick -- certainly never when I was recovering from a cold and major abdominal surgery. So it's a comforting Gospel lesson in Epiphanytide for that reason alone.
But I was also struck by a couple of things. For one, it's interesting to me to see that, once again, Christ's divinity is demonstrated through his interactions with women. This happens so frequently -- from his birth to his death to his resurrection -- that we don't think much about it these days. But in 1st century Palestine, I understand, it was rather radical for a teacher and a healer to devote as much time -- including, in this story, travel time -- and (literally) energy to women. Or for a strange woman to touch a man and vice versa. Some part of this openness may be due to the fact that, in Judaism, one traces one's Jewish ancestry through the mother, which itself was a novel concept for the religions of the region and is literally more "feminist" than the paternal line of determining who does and doesn't belong. But it also shows that in Christ, there really isn't "male or female, Jew or Greek." (Or "gay or straight," I would add.) Instead, all are welcome to his grace, even (or especially) a 12-year-old girl.
It heartens me also that the leader of the synagogue was so concerned about his daughter that he sought out this healer he'd heard about and begged him to attend to her. How different a story is that from what we hear how women, and especially girls, are treated in so many parts of the world even today! Here, however, two thousand years ago, was a little girl, a "talitha" in Aramaic, who was loved by her father Jairus and the people in her life as much as any boy might have been. That may not seem amazing to us today -- in fact, anything otherwise is hateful to us -- but I imagine this story has far more resonance in those parts of the world where girls still aren't valued as much as boys and where religious leadership is still solely the province of men.
The other thing that struck me as very modern is the description of the woman's ordeal with her hemorrhage: "Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse."
In other words, our healthcare system, which today continues to bankrupt sick people, hasn't much improved in 2,000 years in how its delivered, only perhaps in the science behind it.
What the Bleep Is Up with the Illinois 5th District?
Language, Please!
Chicago's Fox News outlet (so take it FWIW) is apparently reporting that Obama's incoming chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, did in fact have multiple conversations with Governor Rod Blagojevich about the successor to Barack Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate. There's no intimation that they were looking to make a deal, only that Emanuel may have provided the governor with a list of names that would be be seen as "acceptable" to the Obama administration.
Given the transcripts reported by Patrick Fitzgerald's office from the wiretap of Blagojevich's other phone conversations, and given the reputation of Rahm Emanuel for expressing himself in ways that could make a longshoreman blush, it makes you wonder what's up with the folks in the Fifth Congressional District of Illinois? Are they all a bunch of swearing pottymouths? Or, as someone elsewhere has said, can you imagine the number of F-bombs dropped in a conversation between Emanuel and Blagojevich?
Emanuel is the current representative of the 5th District, until the inauguration, when he'll assume his new job. Blagojevich was his predecessor in that seat, before he became governor. And two before Blago, they had Dan Rostenkowski, who served 15 months in prison for his role in the House post office scandal. I can't find evidence online that Rostenkowski also punctuated his sentences with profanity, but I'm willing to go out on a limb here and bet that he wasn't the most reticent of inmates.
So, if you travel through the Fifth District in Illinois, does it just sound like an episode of the Sopranos? Do, like, grandmothers and clergy in Elmwood Park and Northlake talk that way?
I should point out that my own Congressman (Charlie Rangel) has his own history of saying some pretty salty stuff (he called Vice President Cheney a "real son of a bitch," but I can't say I disagree with him there), not to mention some ethical questions that have been raised about his rent (or lack thereof) on some apartments and not reporting income from some other apartments. But we like 'em salty in New York. I guess they do in Chicago, as well. Especially in that Fifth District. Bleep yeah!
Let's Do Something Big and Simple about the Economy
Cash Ebb and Flows
H
ere's a simple idea that just occurred to me. Why don't we get rid of the idea of a free market?
I'm only partly joking there, but the idea that just occurred is actually not a joke. Given that we're seeing a kind of state-financed economy already, with a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, proposed bailouts of Detroit, etc., and that companies everywhere are experiencing fast-occuring, acute pain in their balance sheets, why don't we first of all agree that there is a role for government in stabilizing the "free" market?
Having done that, now let's agree that if companies can raid the Treasury when times get tough, they need to help build it back up when times are flush.
So, once we get through this immediate crisis, let's, yes, raise corporate taxes by getting rid of the loopholes (and, once those are gone, maybe even lower the rate a few points, to bring it more in line with other countries'). But let's use some of that increase in money -- maybe half of it? -- to set aside in a pool that earns interest and goes untouched until the economic data tanks again. Say, two consecutive quarters of unemployement increases, or GDP contractions, or some simple but intelligent combination of economic indicators as reported by the Commerce Department. At whatever point that is, the money automatically becomes available for low- or no-interest loans to businesses that have filed taxes in the previous year.
Do we concurrently suspend or lower the corporate tax rate in the rough times? Are there certain other loan application requirements a company has to meet in order to borrow from this fund? That's for other people to figure out, people who understand how the current commercial paper market works and how a liquidity crisis brought us to a bigger economic crisis.
But the larger point is this: companies pay into a collective fund in profitable times so that they can get easy credit in tight times. Think of it as an old-fashioned, neighborhood thrift or credit union for Wall Street, Main Street and all the other business districts around the country. Put the money in one of Al Gore's lockboxes. And make the program's availability predictable, based on the generally accepted economic indicators, so that there's less chance of lobbying to game the system.
he good news: at this point, it doesn't even need to be said, but that never stopped me. Talk about history. Someone pointed out that very, very few countries have elected or appointed someone of a racial minority to lead the country. The most obvious, prior to this, was Peru electing a man of Japanese descent (which didn't actually turn out too great for them). But no country near the size, power, or economy of the United States — well, there isn't one, but you know what I mean -- has done so. And yet I see something like this happen and I'm actually reminded of something Ronald Reagan quoted at the groundbreaking of his presidential library in Simi, California, from a letter someone had written to him not long before: "He said, you can go to live in another land — you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany, but you can't become a German. You can go to live in Japan or Turkey, and you cannot become Japanese or Turkish. But anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American."
Leaving aside the Constitutional requirement that someone be born a citizen to become president, I'm still stunned at what it will say to the world on January 20 when, walking into any U.S. embassy anywhere in the world, visitors will see a photographic portrait of a son a Kenyan and a Kansan as America's president. Not only that, a man who still has relatives living today in both places. And yet, far from being born to a life of privilege, grew up to be elected the most powerful person in the world. That, to me, says more about what America means in the world as much as anything else we might say or write about our country or our history.
Thomas Friedman's article today was particularly excellent: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/opinion/05friedman.html ...in which he says that "on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States."
Of course, not everyone is of the same mind. Paul Krugman's blog pointed out that some people (at least among those who write op-eds for the WSJ) think how President Bush has been treated by Americans only shows that we didn't deserve this great, great man: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/meanwhile-in-an-alternative-universe/
On a more serious note, my excitement at yesterday's election results were tempered today to learn:
The Oklahoma state legislature is now controlled in both chambers by Republicans. (In this election, no less.) That is the first time since statehood that has been true. And in a state that is 11th out of 51 (including DC) in the percentage of people living in poverty and 8th in the nation for teenage pregnancies. (Not to mention 15th in the country for babies born to teenage and unwed mothers overall.) Of course, the reason I bring all this up about Oklahoma is because no state voted more firmly for McCain this election than Oklahoma. The one (admittedly lame) saving grace I can find in this fact is that Obama didn't lose Oklahoma any worse than Kerry did. Which means, maybe, that Oklahomans are against progress more than they're against black people? Yay, progress! Or, rather...yay, anti-progress?
More importantly—because I mostly (but sadly) expected those results from Oklahoma—I'm really bummed about the results on constitutional propositions in California, Arizona and Florida about marriage—with California the most prominent. Enshrining bigotry into the state constitutions of California, Arizona and Florida definitely felt like a slap in the face, hard enough to draw blood. Arizona was one thing; but that California and Florida could turn their back on racism but still vote for homophobia is kind of a tough thing to accept. I understand that these things improve over decades and even generations. But that didn't make those votes any less a slap and spit in the face. They weren't the first states to vote that way, but I'd hoped they wouldn't be the last. Now I guess I have to hope they are the last.
It's strange what catches your attention in the news. For me, it's sometimes the same stuff that's on the 30-minute roundup that's considered "news" by the networks. Or the goofy points brought up by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who I swear has the same take as I do so often that I may just quit watching her, because even what she finds outrageous or amusing is exactly what I find amusing across the TV, Web and blogosphere regarding this election.
But herewith, in lieu of actual insight or thought (which I could never claim, anyway, for this blog, I fear) a collection of things I've noticed, shared on Facebook or in e-mail, or posted elsewhere.
For one thing, starting with today, Obama held a rally under the Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, which drew an estimated 100,000 people.
Yesterday, I ran across a link posted on a blog for an article The Onion ran back in January 2001, a satirical look ahead at the Bush Administration just getting ready to take office. It's downright eerie how prescient the gang of comedy writers who put this together was...and downright scary how closely the Bush Administration hewed to a plan that was supposed to be a satire.
Thursday night, both John McCain and Barack Obama put down the gloves and donned white tie just long enough to crack wise about themselves and their opponent at the Al Smith Dinner here in New York. (Al Smith was the Governor of New York who was the first Roman Catholic to run for president as the nominee of a major party in 1928. He lost to Herbert Hoover, so Smith obviously became a cultural favorite in hindsight, even though he also later opposed Roosevelt's New Deal program.) The dinner is sponsored by the Catholic diocese of New York and raises money for Catholic charities, who do a lot of work in this city. By tradition, the two presidential candidates address the dinner every four years (unless abortion politics intervene, as happened in 1996 and 2004).
Both candidates did an exceptional job, especially considering how tense things were between them the night before at the third debate. Definitely worth watching...
John McCain, Part 1
John McCain, Part 2
Barack Obama, Part 1
Barack Obama, Part 2
Speaking of that debate, like all of Barack Obama's supporters and none of John McCain's supporters, I thought the senator from Illinois won it (in a three-peat) over the senator from Arizona. Given this shot that came from the end of the debate, perhaps the gentleman from Arizona even agreed.
Of course, this led to all sorts of Photoshop resourcefulness on the part of many people...
Two other articles that are worth considering: In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz had a few good suggestions about where we go, economically, from here (and what got us here in the first place). Read it here.
And, finally, the notion of an October surprise is, actually, a very real threat, and not a very amusing one. It could be that, with the September meltdown of the financial sector, the October surprise came a month early for everyone. Or it could mean that the one person who wants desperately for the Muslim world to be at war with America will do whatever he can and needs to do to swing Americans in as bellicose a direction as possible to further that war. This article reminds us that George Bush is the best thing that ever happened to Osama bin Laden's career. Read it here. What the article doesn't really address, is the equally true obverse: at least as far as George W. Bush's re-election was concerned, Osama bin Laden was the best thing to happen to him, as well. Despite seven years of neglecting bin Laden, not finding him, letting him slip out of our close clutches, and a spate of other al-Qaida action and videos, Republican presidents are still imagined by too many Americans as bin Laden's worst enemy. But given the way they approach international conflict, the most recent or the next possible Republican president continues to be bin Laden's best hope for his goal of total global warfare.
ith all the panic over a credit freeze and the climbing London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), it seems increasingly clear that something is broken here. Not only is the shadow economy of investment banking threatening to bring down the real economy of labor, production, sales, and profit margin, it's now clear that the shadow economy is now the primary organism and the real economy merely survives to feed it. (A grisly picture, but it's starting to look that way.)
That's probably a result of lax regulation — old-fashioned greed isn't the culprit here so much as a get-rich-quick, quarterly horizon is — and maybe in the longer term it can be fixed. But for the last two weeks I knew there was something I'd read somewhere that was stuck in my mind from way back when. I've read a few analyses from the 40,000-foot view of how this financial crisis came about, but I was thinking of something I'd read that was more like the 40,000-year view. I finally found it:
"There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or "usury" as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. This is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life."
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952.
Yeah, that was what I was trying to remember. Thanks, Jack.
An interesting twist on this, where the meta-issues in our domestic policy meet the meta-issues in our foreign policy meet issues of faith, is the realization that, under Islam's Shariah law, charging interest is still illegal.
I'm not sure what the implications of that comparison are, and it certainly isn't a prescription for an economic rescue package that a majority of House members can vote to pass. But I find it an interesting commentary on this crisis from the perspective of religious history, nonetheless.
Markos has seven good points that should be addressed before any bailout is agreed to. Read, mark, inwardly digest.
T
his from the wayback machine seems priceless, given the news:
More recently, instruments that are more complex and less transparent--such as credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and credit-linked notes—have been developed and their use has grown very rapidly in recent years. The result? Improved credit-risk management together with more and better risk-management tools appear to have significantly reduced loan concentrations in telecommunications and, indeed, other areas and the associated stress on banks and other financial institutions.
ongressional Democrats hold the cards in many ways on this. Paulson's objection to imposing CEO pay limits on takers of the bailout? Fine. They don't have to take the bailout. Don't like bankruptcy judges rewriting mortgage terms? Fine -- if the federal government owns those mortgages, the federal government becomes the other party to the mortgage, with the homeowner. It can do it without judges at all.
The Democrats' plans are mostly in line with each other, whether that's Chris Dodd's proposal, Barack Obama's four principles for any bailout, or Hillary Clinton's proposals (though several of hers don't seem to address the immediate crisis quite so well, but are all good mid-range proposals). All are related, all have good ideas — Obama was making these same points back in March, for example — and fortunately, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd seem to be on the same page here, so Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid — and even Barack Obama — need to take their cues from them.
But beyond that, here's what the Congressional Democrats need to say to the Bush administration, including Henry Paulson: "You people and your approach got us into this mess, so now you'll take what we give you to fix it, and you'll like it. Or else, if you veto this, we're starting impeachment proceedings." Because, really, with the worst attack on American soil on their watch, a war we didn't need, gross violations of the Constitution and abuse of power, and now a meltdown of the financial sector, again on their watch, do we really need further evidence that Bush, Cheney and the whole crew headed up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is anything other than incompetent, dishonest, lazy and unconstitutional? If these aren't "high crimes and misdemeanors" then what, pray tell, is?
ast week's financial sector meltdown certainly feels like a game changer to me. For one thing, capitalists are now on record as no longer believing in the power of the free market — or, rather, admitting it has an awesome power, greater than they expected, and therefore it needs some care and feeding — and tacitly admitting that needs to come with oversight.
The Tom Toles cartoon said it best. It showed a fireman, dressed sorta like Uncle Sam, pulling a Wall Street fatcat from a burning building, who is saying, "Wait! Let me go back and save my needlepoint 'Government isn't the solution, government is the problem' inspirational wall hanging."
I have no doubt that the Republicans, as adept as they are at self- and other kinds of deception will choose to remember this crisis differently, and much will depend on what happens over the next two weeks or so. But I for most people the meltdown last week demonstrated, once and for all, that unbridled market forces, "the invisible hand of the market," cannot, by itself, bring about all the good things that we want — especially if that includes stability.
Although I have a standard disclaimer on my site that "My thoughts/opinions ≠ My employer's thoughts/opinions," I also rarely post about anything related to business or technology, so that disclaimer should be fairly obvious. But in this case, I'm going to wonder aloud about some financial and business principles that I should restate clearly are just my own musings, and not at all the opinions of my employer.
Perhaps even more importantly, I should add the warning that I understand the financial world just enough to be dangerous to myself, but don't have the capital behind me to be very dangerous to too many others. So chalk up my ignorant statements here to just that, ignorance.
But my basic, overall take is that the financial industry got completely divorced from reality. "Wall Street got drunk," as George W. Bush famously said when he thought all the cameras were off. Got drunk and started have hallucinations is more like it. This quote, from David Leonhardt's excellent piece "Bubblenomics" in this past Sunday's Week in Review section of the Times, sums it up perfectly:
Benjamin M. Friedman, author of "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth," recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.
"I have the sense that in many of these firms," Mr. Friedman said, "the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity."
Exactly. The actual banking system — where we deposit money in a bank for some small interest and banks make money by loaning it out to other people at higher interest — and the actual economy for that matter — the stuff of balance sheets and income statements — needs to be the primary means of wealth building for the country or, frankly, we're doomed.
I don't know if short-selling, for example, is a bad thing or a good thing. Or a morally neutral thing. I've heard people say that it provides liquidity in the market — increases what's out there to be bought and sold, in other words. And everyone points out that it was short sellers who first clued in that Enron's finances were a house of cards, and their selling Enron short led to deeper examinations of its financial health and ultimately, uncovered, the mess. That may be. But it's also investing merely as gambling. It allows you to sell a stock you don't yet own. If the price drops, you make money; if it goes up, you lose money. (Basically the opposite of going "long" as an investor.) But unlike going long — buying a stock because you expect its value to increase — short selling allows you to play the market with that stock but not own it until the transactions are totaled up.
Short selling is a headache for companies — who, admittedly, only want their stock to go up, even when it probably shouldn't. But my problem with it is that it further divorces the investment from the thing being invested in. It's like "Beginning Derivatives 101," with the "investment" merely being a prediction and a bet to make money on it. And that, I think, is the overall problem with our financial house today.
Another example: a lot companies don't pay dividends. Now, that alone wouldn't have saved us from this crisis, although a company that can't or won't pay the owners may not have all its ducks in a line, either. I know, I know: many companies, like Berkshire Hathaway, don't pay dividends, they reinvest the profits back into the company, and people who got in early there have made fortunes with the rise of their value of their stock. But at some level I have to ask: is there anything tangible connected to the ownership of the stock, or is it merely the perceived value that someone is willing to buy it for that makes it of value?
I know the answer to that. Gold has no intrinsic value, and yet we've still got survivalist whackjobs out there who want our currency tied to it. And the money that's been made (and now lost) in the stock market for so many people has not primarily come from dividend payouts, not by a long shot.
All of that is probably okay. As long as, theoretically, a payout could be made, or if we sold all the assets I'd get some small part of the proceeds, then that's as good as an actual dividend. And gold may not be "worth" any more than granite except because someone else says it is, but at least it's a thing. What worries me about what's happened to the financial system is that we've flopped the importance of the actual economy with a shadow economy of placing bets on the actual economy. We look at balance sheets and cash flows and buy stock in a company — even though there is absolutely no connection to the activities or even income of the company and the rise or fall of its stock.
Here's a modest proposal. But first, some background, again from that excellent article by Leonhardt:
The classic measure of whether the stock market is overvalued is the price-earnings ratio, which divides stock prices by annual corporate earnings. At the height of the bubble, in 2000, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index were trading at 36 times their average earnings over the previous five years. It was the highest valuation since at least the 1880s, according to the economist Robert Shiller.
By 2004, surprisingly enough, the ratio had dropped only to about 26, still higher than at any point since the 1930s. At the start of last year, it was still 26.
But after the market closed on Friday, the ratio was down to roughly 17, which happens to be about its post-World War II average. At least by this one measure, stocks are no longer blatantly overvalued.
So here's my proposal, or call it a musing: What would be the downside of establishing price floors and ceilings for a stock based on its P/E ratio? Say (for the sake of the argument) a 5/1 floor and a 25/1 ceiling? That would leave the vast majority of stocks unaffected. Checking the Google Finance stock screener, I see that it lists 141 stocks (out of 3,606) with a P/E ratio of 5 or less — and 17 of those have a negative P/E ratio. So maybe something has to be in place to account for those, for whatever reason they're trading so low. On the other hand, it shows 855 stocks with P/E ratios above 25 (one solar-related company as high as 4900.) In fact, Google, the providers of the stock screener, show a current P/E of 28.27.
In theory, a high P/E ratio is investor's confidence that a firm will make a lot more money in the long run, hence making this stock of such value. But given the way we've changed "investing" into "gambling," it's now really only investor confidence that the price will keep going up, and the "E" part of the equation be damned, or at least ignored.
If we had a floor and ceiling on P/E ratios, I don't know what the impact would be, to be honest. Nor what the correct such floors and ceilings should be: 0 and 30? -5 and 40? The stock market would be far less exciting, I'm sure. There'd be a whole lot less volume traded. IPOs would have to be rethought and reconfigured.
Or make it a further ratio to volume, and let the companies themselves decide on an annual basis by a vote of shareholders? If you choose a -10 to 50 range for your P/E ratio, 24-hour trading volume for your stock is held at a smaller number than if you opt for a relatively tight 5 to 20 range. Once it hits its allowable number of trades on the exchange, trading on that stock is halted for the day.
Or maybe we don't worry about P/E ratios, but we worry about day traders and those turning the stock market into a casino. That would mean getting rid of short selling and, probably, also requiring that a stock be held for one bell closing before it can be sold. Or maybe we do both. Maybe we find a way to outlaw — or at least outlaw public companies — from tradiing in investments that are two, three, and five or more steps removed from actual things — real estate, shares in companies, metals, bonds, commodities, etc.
Obviously, I don't really know. And none of my goofy proposals around P/E ratios and trading volumes would have solved this particular problem. And do I know what the floor or ceiling rules for P/E ratios should be? Of course I don't. And the primary philosophical objection would be that "no one can know, so we should let the free market decide." Except, as we've seen now in the past few weeks, the free market doesn't know either. So — and here's the actual proposal — why don't we let democracy decide?
Or is that exactly how we got to this problem? I'm not sure. Fortunately, Barney Frank is far smarter about this stuff than I am. In the political realm of all this, I have to point out the difference between these two candidates, based on their remarks on the economy last Friday, September 19:
I found these two examples very enlightening. For one thing, one of them is laying out four principles that any bailout should include, but said he'd withhold details of any plan to keep from politicizing what was being worked out between the Treasury Secretary and the Congress. (Now that we've heard the details of Paulson's plan, all three pages of 'em, Obama could probably be allowed to let loose with his commentary on it, if he hasn't already.)
The other (that would be McCain) bounced all over the map, making up new regulatory agencies even while he complains about the number of regulatory agencies. And, as part of that, he thinks a good "generalist" regulatory agency would be far more effective than the "specialist" agencies. I guess, by that line of thinking, there's really no need for all those cabinet positions, either, is there? Let's have the Treasury Department manage our federal prosecutors, the Navy, public forests, and gun licenses. (Oh, wait: they actually did do that last one for decades, until the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002.)
And he yet again yelled for the head of the head of the SEC, Christopher Cox — basically for no reason other than wanting to blame someone and look "mavericky."
But more importantly, look at how McCain took this opportunity to basically campaign against Obama, blaming him for the crisis (somehow). Obama, on the other hand, took this speech as an opportunity to say that he, John McCain, President Bush, and the Democrats and Republicans need to come together to come up with a workable plan to this financial crisis. And that was essentially the extent of his remarks about John McCain.
Now which of these two men exhibited leadership? Finally, are we seeing a trend here? The Bush Administration ignores a warning — "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S." — and Al Qaeda attacks the United States. George Bush then says the only way to address this crisis of vulnerability is to give his administration sweeping powers, and Congress must act immediately to provide those powers. From that we get the Patriot Act.
Then Saddam Hussein — who was provided financing, agriculture credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, weapons and intelligency by the Reagan and Bush I administrations — was deemed a growing threat following the US-Iraq war (see "yellowcake"), and George W. Bush again demanded sweeping powers, a blank check that would total hundreds of billions of dollars, and no oversight from Congress so he could prosecute a "preventive war" (see "Bush Doctrine").
Now we're facing the worst financial crisis in 80 years, brought on by the deregulating glee with which the Republican administrations of the past three decades treated matters economic and financial. And the solution is yet again to give the Bush Administration a blank check totaling hundreds of billions of dollars and refusal of any oversight (or it will ignore the oversight).
There really wasn't any question before last week, but last week will add at least another two decades (to the at least five decades we were already guaranteed) to any kind of historical reassessment of George W. Bush:
om made a good observation tonight: You know how they turned on the Large Hadron Collider last week in Switzerland, but people are worried it will create tiny black holes that will start sucking things into them, and they'll grow larger and larger? So who would have thought that it would have started with U.S. financial firms? Stephen Hawking, please call your office.
Today's financial news is pretty scary, and could get much scarier. It's one thing to have a Dow meltdown or a Black Monday. But when it's the actual financial firms that loan money to, fund, invest, broker, insure, collateralize, etc., all the other companies on the stock market, what happens then? Or, more to the point, what happens next?
Can someone ask John McCain if he still wants to privatize Social Security? He's pretty firmly on record for wanting to do so, but perhaps he'd like to rethink that.
'm sure many Republicans are happy to be back to normal "us versus them" politics. It seems the convention -- and Sarah Palin's nomination as VP in particular -- has energized the people who felt they otherwise would need to sit this party out, having brought us eight years of failure, incompetence, and -- not that they objected to this one -- deep partisanship. The whole point of the culture wars is to play the "us versus them" game.
Their whole approach since the convention has been to lie, only to be cheered on further by the people who like to win elections, rather than govern.
This has been the case since the 2000 election, but it's appearing in its purist form yet so far. The reason is simple: far more than than any other election in my memory, the Republican candidates are on the wrong side of the electorate on almost every issue. So they have nothing to run on except personal attacks and personal narratives.
And it works. We really are a divided country, and becoming more so with this election. I've written about this before, when I said there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think "clarity" is the same things as "truth" -- and those who think there are more than two kinds of people in the world.
It gets even simpler than that, however. Because a lot of voters basically just want to vote for someone who will go on the offensive. They misinterpret attacks, even (or especially) lies and distortions, as "leadership." They see McCain as willing to fight dirty and think: that's the kind of leadership I want to vote for.
That's what a slim majority voted for in 2004 and what slim minority voted for in 2000. One wouldn't have thought it possible based on the 2000 primaries, but given the McCain claims that Obama wanted to teach kindergarteners about sex or called Sarah Palin a pig, I have to say that this time around, McCain has managed to out-Bush Bush. Giving a new understanding to the tag line "more of the same." At this point, it's looking like "much more."
Despite the latest, post-RNC convention bounce for McCain, I'm still hopeful. For one thing, I think this year voters may be more willing to vote based on the issues rather than the distraction tactics of the Republicans. And I think there's still a lot more energy behind voting for Obama than there is for voting for McCain, Sarah Palin's nomination notwithstanding.
And I think McCain has been such a heinous liar of late -- approaching the levels of the less official but no less welcomed e-mail and rumor campaigns that are so patently false (faith; citizenship; raising taxes...) -- that a lot of people will wake up and decide not to elect another administration in the same mold as the one we've had for the past seven-plus years. But on that I'm obviously being hopeful, not predictive.
Two anecdotal bits of evidence added to my hope, however. For one, this article from August that Obama is outpacing McCain 6-to-1 in campaign contributions from currently deployed troops. That could change, become closer, even flop -- but it certainly implies something going on among military families. Especially when you consider that the Disabled American Vets gave Obama a 92% rating for voting with them, but gave McCain only 28%. Or that the Vietnam Vets of America also gave Obama a 92%, but gave McCain a 37%. And the Iraq and Afghanistan Vets of America gave McCain a rating of "D" but gave Obama a B-plus. Or why the same contributions analysis shows Obama with $335,536 from 859 service personnel (deployed or not), whereas McCain had only $280,513 from 558 such personnel. The point of the number or amount of contributions is far less important than what it may say about what active duty members are saying to their families, in-laws, and friends, who in turn influence others around them.
And then there was this I found out myself. In looking through the FEC data for donations this political cycle from the ZIP code in Oklahoma I grew up in (mostly upper middle class, mostly white, safely Republican, and did I mention it's in Oklahoma?), I found that through July, there was more money given to Democratic candidates than Republican candidates (Democrats: $81,178 vs. Republicans $72,586). More importantly, Obama recieved $46,300 in donations in this ZIP code from 52 people, whereas McCain received only $41,768 from 30 people. (As a proof point, Hillary Clinton received $30,945 from 39 people.)
These (military contributions and donations from a Republican Oklahoma ZIP code) are just two examples, and only reflect data through July. But as I say, they give me hope.
McCain's chief economic policy advisor admits he was wrong earlier, and now says that Obama's economic plan amounts to a tax cut for most Americans, not a tax increase.
Is Bush using Obama's approach to catching bin Laden for a October surprise in support of McCain?
have no pretensions that anyone is going to bother reading my blog while this Thursday night of the Democratic National Convention is going on. But I want to do this for myself, as a sort of journal entry, because I want to be able to go back to remember what is a historic night. Not as historic as Obama's inauguration will be, obviously -- yes, there's a huge assumption I just slid right past -- but still historic, nonetheless.
And I've never done this before, and there's little likelihood I'll get myself too far from the TV while it's going on, so I might as record what I'm thinking while I'm thinking it. Natalie Goldberg, author of "Wild Mind," call your office.
The Mile High Stadium looks less like the Lincoln Memorial than I expected, hearing there would be "columns" -- marking the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Instead, it looks more like Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Really. (And someone will no doubt make an Albert Speer reference to all this, if they haven't already, but seriously: it's the Shops at the Forum, not the Nuremburg Rally.)
Al Gore is currently speaking. Very quickly. Someone obviously told him they were running over time, to speed it up. Or else he's not used to speaking to 75,000 people. I don't know. But this is the old Al Gore, the same one who didn't get a (large enough) majority of votes to win the 2000 election. He's now making an analogy between Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln. I like it, but half the people hearing this will find it presumptuous, as they find anything Obama does (or is done on his behalf) to make the case that he's qualified to be president. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for him, annoying half the people with what you do, and half the people with what you don't.
Overall, a very lame speech by Al. I'm sure a lot of people hearing that are saying, "Oh, yeah: maybe it's not so bad he decided not to run this time around after all."
I'm flipping mostly between C-SPAN and PBS tonight. I've mostly watched C-SPAN and MSNBC all week, but MSNBC has become such a train wreck over the course of the week (as evidenced by this, this, this and especially this, which were cited on Salon for the same reason), I decided I wanted the sober demeanor of Jim Lehrer, the professorial frumpiness of Mark Shields, and even the innocuous David Brooks -- who's a pompous tool, but I have to give him credit for the public Biden plug, it even makes me wonder if he had an inside track.
Following Al Gore was the musician (not my friend by the same name) Michael McDonald, reprising (not nearly as well) Ray Charles's performance of "America the Beautiful" at the 1984 Republican (yes, Republican) convention. They should have gone with Keb' Mo's version.
Susan Eisenhower (Ike's granddaughter) also rushed through her speech -- but she's definitely not used to speaking to a stadium of people. I can't tell if the stiffness so far tonight of the speakers is a factor of the time they're trying for, to get Obama's own "segment" teed up for right at 10pm, or if the venue is intimidating (and how could it not be?) or...what.
Actually, Joe Biden just came out to speak, and this wasn't in the original schedule, so maybe that's why they rushed people through, to make room for him.
He just made a Floyd Little (Denver Broncos) reference. Why do I suspect Democrats between now and November are going to be saying several times, "Good ol' Joe"?
He needs to find a fresh formulation of "the cops and the firefighters, the teachers and the assembly line workers." Twice, exactly like that, is okay, but after three times, it's going to start to sound like interest groups, not careers of regular Americans.
These speeches by the "American Voices" are classic fare: members of the other party who are voting for the other party's candidate, hard-luck tales (from Democrats) or success stories (from Republicans). For the partisans, like the conventions overall, they give you a lift -- "yes, we can!" -- but then afterward you read the distanced, jaundiced commentary and the cynical, sophisticated tone of the pundits (even from your own side, usually, if you're a Democrat), and learn that it didn't earn the candidate that big of a bump in the polls, and you wonder if you were watching the same convention as everyone else, or maybe you're just more gullible than other people.
That's okay. I'll have the gullibility hangover tomorrow. Tonight, I'm enjoying the spectacle and, just as I did four years ago, I'm hoping Americans have moved enough beyond cynicism and really would like to believe in something other than the dark vision of the Republican Party that's been the prevailing message these past 7+ years.
9:56pm: With Dick Durbin up now, this is where it really begins. It's turning 7pm on the West Coast. The East Coast is still up. This is the moment they built this whole week up to. Man, I love political theater!
Obama's bio video was pretty understated, as these things go. And now he's getting ready to speak. Of course, this would be when my laundry needs to come out of the dryer...
The second round of applause I've heard this week from the Democratic convention for John McCain's service. Remains to be seen if there's any applause for Obama's achievement as the first African-American presidential nominee at the GOP convention.
Michelle Obama: that is one fantabulous dress!
Okay, I loved that speech. Apparently, the AP already has a story out there that says, basically, "ho hum." But I think it was a pretty great speech. Who knows how far these move people along in making up their mind? It's telling that Barack Obama had something like 80,000 people in attendance (not counting the millions like me, by television), whereas John McCain is apparently having problems giving away tickets to tomorrow's announcement of his running mate.
And now to bed -- and tomorrow, to Dallas for a few days of interconvention vacation with friends. Happy Labor Day!
great speech by Hillary Clinton — and exactly the response she deserved and in the best venue for her, which is a large crowd of raucous partisans of whatever stripe — that should put to bed the PUMA misallocation of principles or goals.
How can anyone who supported her as president — and as the anointed standard bearer of the Democratic Party — ignore what she's had to say since June 7, if they actually take her and her candidacy seriously? How can they continue to pretend that they support their own goals or hers by supporting John McCain or sitting out this election? They can say it — but they immediately indicate that they really didn't care about Hillary Clinton's views all along but only about what they felt she stood for.
Fair enough. It's intellectually dishonest, and disrespectful to Hillary Clinton herself, but if you're more interested in retaining generational power in the Democratic Party than in what's good for the country, then of course you'll discount her words since June 7 and still work and argue against Barack Obama as president.
Speaking of "generational power," how to say this? I guess by eliminating first the things I'm not saying.
Race is definitely an issue in this campaign. Bill Clinton's all bent out of shape that he got portrayed as a racist, when in truth he's always treated black political aspirations the same as Obama portrayed his wife's: as worthy and beneficial, especially for the group they/she represented. (He probably discounts Geraldine Ferraro's racist observations; I know I did.) But I don't think race it the primary demographic issue.
Gender was (and maybe still is) a major issue in the campaign. Hillary was the brunt of a whole load of misogyny from the media and, in a few instances, even from Obama surrogates -- let alone the misogynist expressions from Obama supporters posting on discussion boards and blogs. But I also don't think gender is the primary issue in this campaign.
Increasingly, I'm thinking Obama's problem with voters has less to do with race or gender, and everything to do with age.
Hillary Clinton is 60 years old. Her husband is 62. Oft reported, John McCain turns 72 -- the outer side of mandatory retirement for a lot of Americans -- on Friday.
Barack Obama just recently turned 47 a few weeks ago. And I'm starting to think, he's too young for too many voters.
Race, at least in marketing, is often used as a proxy for generation. Show a dreadlocked guy and you've checked off the youth vote in your ad campaign. (Yes, he'll also be youngish, but a white guy fraternity boy in a bow tie -- and there's probably a picture of me somewhere that shows exactly that -- hardly says "youth" to marketers.)
Gender is often marketed in the same way, and is a proxy for youth or generational openness to shared power.
Here's what I'm getting at: I think the fault line -- among both Democrats and Republicans -- may be age. Republican Baby Boomers have no problem voting for someone older, because they've always fetishized the past. But more importantly, I think Democrats over the age of 50 are having a tough time supporting a candidate younger than they are.
Of these Democrats, they were overly enthusiastic about Bill Clinton, despite his failings. And, I think, they're overly confident in Hillary Clinton or, even, John McCain. What they can't seem to do is get past the idea of a president who's, finally, younger than they are.
There are all sorts of holes in my theory, not the least of which is that 70-somethings also supported Hillary over Barack, unless you consider that she was less young than he is.
But all intraparty criticism I hear about him regards his "inexperience." Even though Hillary doesn't have a whole lot more. "But she's got Bill.' Sure. And now he's got Joe Biden, who's got more national experience than any of them. So your point is... ?
Striking further, I think the Baby Boom isn't ready to go out on George W. Bush. I don't blame them. Despite the Clinton fatigue that may have made enough people (at least five on the Supreme Court) ready for a change in 2000, and despite what Bush has done to the country for the past 8 years, there are still enough of them who want another chance to make it right.
Strictly speaking, Obama is a Baby Boomer too -- as I am, if only by six weeks. But the bulk of the Baby Boom is now 50 or older, and most of the anger I hear and see is from Democrats over 50. And I think there's an objection -- not based on race, not even based on gender -- but based on age. Baby Boomers have had to accommodate themselves to doctors younger than they are, even CEOs (and managers) younger than they -- but where they've got a choice, in a voting booth, they have a real problem voting for a president younger than they are.
It's ageism in reverse. I still hope they come around to supporting Obama in November. But now that I've realized this, it changes the way I view their opposition to an Obama presidency -- less with incredulity and more with empathy and, yes, pity.
n listening to The Brian Lehrer Show this morning, a caller just said that she hated Michelle Obama's speech, that it was "too yearning, too sing-song." She wanted a harder edge; in fact, she admitted, she wanted Hillary Clinton.
Now, as I've said before, I like Hillary, I'll continue to vote for her as senator as long as she chooses to serve, and if she'd been the nominee, I'd be voting for her in November. But Hillary isn't a great speechmaker. She's got like two notes, and nowadays she uses them to pretty good effect, depending on the audience (she didn't use to), but otherwise, she generally gives a speech the way John McLaughlin sings lullabies.
I thought Michelle Obama's speech was superb. I thought Ted Kennedy's appearance was superb. It was great television, it was great political theater. If I could have had anything from the first night of the Democratic National Convention, it would have been a little more on pointing out Republican hypocrisy on the issues. That, I think, is the best way to make the intellectual case against that party and its nominee -- much as I appreciate the need for the gut-level, too-many-houses-to-remember charactizations, too. Campaigning that McCain would be four more years of Bush only goes so far; I don't think most McCain leaners think that, for the simple reason that he isn't Bush. But he's been a hypocrite in all his flip-flopping on issues. And the Republican positions overall are hypocritcal. (Tax cuts for the elite; support the troops, until they come home; compete globally by gutting education, etc. etc. etc.)
And I'm sensitive to the criticism that an "all Obama, all the time" convention only lends credibility to the charges of arrogance and that this is a coronation. So, if I were planning this schedule, now that "family night" is over, where it was all about the personal anyway, I'd make Tuesday and Wednesday night far more substantive. Which, given the speakers, I imagine it will be.
Speaking of Hillary and her speech tonight: she has a high bar to hit here, partly through no fault of her own, partly from her own fault. Why John McCain decided to run a number of ads (at least two so far) that use her statements from the primary race about Obama BEFORE she has a national audience to rebut them (and McCain) -- and same with Biden -- is beyond me. Seems kind of stupid. And as everyone points out, there's a whole bunch of Republicans on video that are going to make great ads for Obama after the GOP convention.
But it has also occurred to me and others: if Hillary had won the nomination, what statements from Obama's own mouth would McCain be using in advertising against her? I can't think of anything, but then I didn't get too much up in arms about either of their statements about each other, chalking it up to electioneering. So maybe there were a few and I didn't notice. But I'd still like to know the answer.
One thing that occurs to me about Biden as VP is that this really would be a very different administration than what we've seen for 8 years, which is really what Barack Obama is arguing for. Sure, Joe Biden has more seniority in the Senate than all but four of his colleagues there (since he's been in the Senate since he was 30). More important, however, is that Biden has always spoken his mind about what's right for his constituents or for America, and he's notoriously not a favorite of the K Street lobbyists for this very reason. In fact, he's listed as the "poorest" Senator in the Senate, despite his years of service and opportunities for, shall we say, "financial self-aggrandizement" (whereas John McCain is the "richest" -- because he married money).
But it's not whether Obama represents change -- he obviously does, unless you haven't seen our currency -- or whether Biden doesn't. The change comes in "how" the government operates, and the first step of that is nominating a VP who will argue forcefully within an administration for his point of view but not insist upon it, and maybe even speak out publicly when he is of a different mind. That's the way our early Republic worked, and if an Obama-Biden administration have some public dust-ups over policy proposals in the next four years, but can continue to respect each other and work together, that's one sign of a change in Washington, no doubt about it.
The charge that, by responding in tone and content to McCain's low-road attacks, Obama is going back on some pledge not to "attack" his opponent, here's what he actually said on November 10, 2007 (emphasis added):
"Our moment is now. I don't want to spend the next year or the next four years re-fighting the same fights we had in the 1990s. I don't want to pit Red America against Blue America. I want to be President of the United States of America.
"And if those Republicans come at me with the same fear-mongering and swift-boating that they usually do, then I will take them head on. Because I believe the American people are tired of fear and tired of distractions and tired of diversions. We can make this election not about fear, but about the future. And that won't just be a Democratic victory; that will be an American victory."
Finally, and probably most importantly, in July McCain claimed, "I have a perfect voting record from organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and all the other veterans service organizations." One problem with that: the VFW and American Legion don't compile congressional voting records.
Even more seriously, among those that do, McCain has a dismal record for veterans. According to the Disabled American Veterans, he has supported their issues only 34% of the time. Obama, on the other hand, has voted with disabled vets 89% of the time -- almost as much as McCain has voted with George W. Bush.
Another veterans group that tracks voting records, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, gives McCain a "D" -- since he voted to support their issues only 58% of the time. Obama supported this group's favored legislation 89% time, earning a B-plus.
More information (and from which I culled this information) is here, from the Central Shenandoah Valley News Leader.
o it's Joe Biden. I'm fine with that. Actually, pretty pleased. He's had his own gaffes, will have others, but nothing compared to McCain's outright lies, flip-flops, evasions, gaffes and misstatements. More on one of the latest ones in a minute.
Since ABC and other networks broke the news sometime after midnight that Obama had picked Biden, I'm wondering if the text message that went out around 3 a.m. was trying to get out in front of early morning reports or a subtle reference to the phone call that comes in at 3 a.m. Probably the former — but it's interesting to think of Mark Penn's cellphone beeping at 3 a.m. with the news that the U.S. senator with the most actual experience in foreign affairs was joining the Obama ticket.
So here — from the Chicago Sun-Times — is the extent of the "scandal" around the Obamas' house in Chicago. Sounds like a good deal, getting it for 85% of the listing price, but hardly a sweetheart deal. Fifteen percent off the original listing price isn't unheard of at all, and probably doesn't even come close to the deal I got on my apartment 8 years ago.
"A few months after Obama became a U.S. senator, he and Rezko's wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a doctor in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood — a deal that has dogged Obama the last two years. The doctor sold the mansion to Obama for $1.65 million — $300,000 below the asking price. Rezko's wife paid full price — $625,000 — for the adjacent vacant lot. The deals closed in June 2005. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko's wife $104,500 for a strip of her land, so he could have a bigger yard."
T
he fact that McCain can't remember how many houses he owns — whether to live in, for investment purposes, or whatever — is a hilarious turn of events. It'll die down during the conventions, I expect, although several of the speakers at this next week's Democratic National Convention should build on that point further.
Did McCain & Co. really think no one was ever going to ask this question, if only for background purposes? And is it that hard to figure out — even if the answer is "We have one home we live in, one we use for my work in Virginia, two vacation homes, and then we have some investment properties" as some pundits have suggested as a possible answer. (That's still not exactly the right tone to set if labeling your opponent an out-of-touch elitist is your gameplan, but at least you don't look like Ritchie Rich or Scrooge McDuck.)
What I thought was even more inept, however, was the statement put out by the McCain campaign after Obama and surrogates made note of McCain's too-rich-to-know-how-rich statements. "Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people "cling" to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a deba
