Running on empty

October 6th, 2008

With nothing in their political bank account to bring to America’s table, no actual strategy to rely on and an increasingly skeptical public thanks to the erratic twists and turn of their campaign, the McCain camp is going for the lowest common denominator — character assassination.

There ya go again, John — looking backwards!

If John really DID read that Bible of his, he’d understand that throwing stones while living in a glass house is a Very Bad idea. As Ari Melber in the Washington Independent put it: “Desperate and risky — given the corrupt skeletons in McCain’s closet.”

The new mantra Mac is using to turn his election possibilities is “dishonorable.” In doublespeak, that means that he is [POW, five years in one room, yadda ad infinitum, yawn] honorable. Ummmm … only in his own mind, like our Dubby.

The Barracuda hit Obama on both Ayers, and the Reverend Wright [where Lieberman insists John won't go] today, saying, “Okay, so Florida, you know that you’re going to have to hang onto your hats, because from now until election day it may get kind of rough.”

But the Big O had anticipated the move and put forth a website and presentation in which we can all come to grips with the Keating Five mess, and see the kind of character the Pub “maverick” brings to his own glass house[s.]

DO PASS THIS LINK AROUND !

As well, Palin’s Troopergate scandal looms, as intimidation and legal maneuvers to keep the information from the public dissolve. We will know about this well before the election; and it won’t matter a whit to the Faithful. But there are fewer of those than there are forward-looking citizens, and disenchanted ones as well, looking for something different than what they’ve endured for decades. Here in the Pea Patch you wouldn’t know that, listening to admirers of Caribou Barbie — but that’s what the numbers tell us.

Really, feel free to believe that, dearhearts. While nothing’s sewn up with a month of surprises ahead, with the Bradley effect [covert racism being pushed in the Pub framing,] and the GOP working like demons to scuttle the vote, Pub ledelines like, “McCain can still pull it out,” tell us the truth of this — he’s lost it. And he’s lost it big.

Mac’s ground team is not only dispirited, it’s surly … here’s an excellent article with reflection of what’s going on in my area; you’ll find the national numbers in this link, too.

Abandoning Michigan was the death knell; these events are usually managed gently and below public notice, giving party operatives and candidates a chance to adjust. The Michigan GOP are furious with McPooped’Em.

Seriously — with the mirror of his own mythology crumbling, I don’t know how Mac still forges ahead [although Jon Stewart may have hit the mark with this Gollum reference;] desperate old demons in his mind, I’d presume. Stay the course stuff. Over the weekend, he did the unthinkable, a month out in the campaign — he slunk back to Sedona to contemplate his prospects.

In case you missed it, here’s Tina Fey’s send-up this week on SNL [Looooved the flute!]

In other news, we have no appreciable space program now; when you sit with that a moment, you have to bow your head and let go all the mythology about America’s greatness — we will have to rebuild that greatness now, piece by piece, policy by policy. Perhaps Dubby and Uncle Dick could help us by breaking up rocks, wearing orange jump suits? Ahhhhh — dare to dream!

The bonus section deals with the shakeup in global markets, the bailout, some progressive news in the mortgage situation and a letter Obama wrote more than a year ago asking for oversight on the mess we’re in.

Jude

McCain’s Medicare Suicide
Jonathan Chait, TNR
06.10.2008

Jon has a meaty, substantive post about about today’s Wall Street Journal’s report that John McCain proposes to cut Medicare and Medicaid. I’ll leave the substance to Jon for now, and point out that John McCain proposes to cut Medicare and Medicaid in an election year. You can’t do that. That, alone, is enough to cost you an election. If Ronald Reagan did that in 1984, he might have lost.

Now, this may not seem like such a big deal given that McCain’s campaign seems to be on the verge of death anyway. His candidacy at this point is like Rasputin — having already been poisoned, shot multiple times, and clubbed, it has now been bound and thrown into an icy river. The election isn’t over, but this development doesn’t bode well for McCain. ++

It’s Over: Why Bill Ayers Won’t Save John McCain
Wolfson, The New Republic

Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it. The campaigns themselves can’t afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can’t say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn’t going to save John McCain. The race is over.

John McCain’s candidacy is as much a casualty of Wall Street as Lehman or Merrill. Like those once vibrant institutions, McCain’s collapse was stunning and quick. One minute you are a well-respected brand. The next you are yelling at the messengers of your demise as all around you the numbers start blinking red and stop adding up.
McCain’s road was difficult to begin with: the President of his party has had record-low approval ratings for two years and the number of Americans who say the country is heading in the wrong direction is stratospheric. He also had the misfortune to be pitted against an exceptional candidate running an extremely well-executed campaign.

Still, before Wall Street’s collapse Senator McCain was ahead. His approval ratings remained high, his VP pick had generated excitement and interest, and his campaign operatives were capable, on any given day, of winning news cycles and giving their opponents fits. And then the underpinnings of American capitalism begin to sink — and with them sunk McCain.

An election dominated at its inception by the war in Iraq is now overwhelmingly focused on the economy. More than half of voters in polls say that the economy is their top concern and Senator Obama enjoys double digit leads among voters asked who can better fix our economic mess. Put simply, there is no way Senator McCain can win if he continues to trail Senator Obama by double digits on the top concern of more than half of voters.

State polls are beginning to reflect this. If the election were tomorrow, Obama would win all of the states John Kerry carried and add Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio and Florida. Barack Obama is campaigning in Indiana, which last went for a Democrat in 1964 and North Carolina, which has gone for a Democrat only once in thirty-four years. At the same time John McCain has pulled out of Michigan and Sarah Palin has been forced to visit Nebraska.

This dynamic is very unlikely to change. John McCain’s goal in the first debate was to discredit Senator Obama as a credible Commander in Chief and elevate the issue of foreign policy and national security. He didn’t come close. Absent a domestic terror attack the economy will remain the number one issue in the race, and there is little Senator McCain can do to make up his gap with Senator Obama on it. Oh, Senator McCain will try to make issues of Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko and Rev. Wright, and that might hurt Senator Obama around the margins — but it will not prevent him from winning. The economy is simply bigger than the rogues gallery that John McCain is conjuring up.

Why is this? Why won’t the swiftboat tactics work this year?

Its easy to lose sight of it in the day to day coverage, but the collapse of Wall Street in the last weeks was a seminal event in the history of our nation and our politics. To put the crisis in perspective, Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush’s failures in Iraq undermined his party’s historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.

Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role of government for a century. In 1980 voters sided with Ronald Reagan and Republicans that government had become too big and intrusive. Then the economy worked in the Republicans’ favor. Today the pendulum has swung in our direction. Republican philosophies have been discredited by events. Voters understand this. This is a big election about big issues. McCain’s smallball will not work. This race will not be decided by lipsticked pigs. And John McCain can not escape that reality. The only unknowns are the size of the margin and the breadth of the Democratic advantage in the next Congress. ++

A Pal Around McCain
Harold Meyerson, WaPo
Monday, October 6, 2008

“There’s no question that we have to change the subject here,” a senior Republican operative told The Post’s Michael D. Shear in a story published Saturday.

The “subject” in question is the economy and how to fix it. As Americans have taken their eye off the ball — that is, off John McCain’s sterling qualities of character and command — by focusing on the economy, Barack Obama has surged into the lead nationally and in many key battleground states.

So long as the candidates talk about that pesky economy, McCain’s handlers have realized, McCain will continue to swoon. Thus the campaign has announced that it will go on the attack again on the momentous topics of Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the onetime Weatherman who has been a University of Illinois education professor for nearly two decades.

Campaigning on Saturday in Colorado, Sarah Palin accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists” by associating with Ayers, citing as her source a New York Times story from that morning. In fact, the story concluded that the Obama-Ayers “relationship” consisted of both men attending the board meetings of two Chicago organizations and that there had been no contact between the men, other than bumping into each other on the sidewalk (they live in the same neighborhood), since Obama went to the U.S. Senate in January 2005.

The story of Obama’s interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago’s civic establishment. In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by the Annenberg Foundation — a group that distributes the wealth of the estate of Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Britain. It was only then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago’s education-policy elite. (Mayor Richard Daley, that known radical, told the Times that he had consulted Ayers on education issues for years.)

Go join your city’s establishment, and see what it gets you.

But if the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates’ associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain’s own economic guru.

Gramm was always Wall Street’s man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm’s piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm’s relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm’s short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain’s current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America “a nation of whiners.”

If we are to believe his managers, McCain will charge into tomorrow night’s debate seeking to “change the subject” from the economy to Obama’s dangerous liaisons. It’s not, however, likely to be a winning tactic. Obama will argue that in a time of deepening economic crisis, the public deserves a debate in which the candidates focus on their ideas for recovery rather than tendentious attacks on their rival’s presumed associates. If pressed, though, he can mention that it is McCain’s senior economic adviser who has diminished American solvency and power beyond the wildest dreams of anti-American terrorists. ++

McCain’s Exit from Michigan Highlights His Failures
Bill Gallagher, BuzzFlash
Mon, 10/06/2008

Detroit — John McCain does get it. The election is about judgment. On the defining issues for the presidential candidates — America’s role in the world, the economy and the selection of a vice presidential candidate, voters, particularity those previously undecided, are now concluding they don’t trust McCain’s judgment.

That trend is most evident here in Michigan — a state the Republicans said was critical for victory in November. Yet, last week, the McCain campaign abruptly surrendered, effectively ceding 17 electoral votes to Obama.

Just a couple of months ago, McCain decided to put his message and judgment on the line with nine campaign stops in the state after he wrapped up the nomination in April. He spent $7.9 million on TV ads. Underscoring the importance of the state, McCain set up his Midwest headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

McCain was everywhere on the tube claiming he alone could lead the nation to the economic promised land reached by ending the manna of Congressional earmarks. His experience as a POW in Vietnam shaped him as the only man who can assure “victory” in Iraq and protect us in from terrorists.

The Republicans were licking their chops. Michigan was in play. “Barack Obama has had trouble getting traction in the Wolverine State,” Nate Silver wrote in The New Republic. Silver, like many other pundits, is locked in the thinking of the 20th century.

They still focused on Macomb County, the conventional bellwether of the state, the home of the Reagan Democrats. National pollsters and political analysts have studied ad naseum the blue collar and nominally Democratic suburban area northeast of Detroit where Ronald Reagan racked up huge majorities and other Republicans candidates have done well since.

The residents of Macomb County are often stereotyped as beer swilling, gun loving hunters, social conservatives unlikely to ever support an African-American candidate for president — the dubious but persistent political prognosis often found in the mainstream media.

John McCain and Sarah Palin made their first post-convention appearance in Macomb County. They drew a huge, enthusiastic crowd, which included many retired autoworkers, NRA members and just plain god-fearing folks, Catholics and evangelicals alike.

Last month, fortified with Macomb County political grog, the Republicans were giddy over their prospects in Michigan and they figured they had other help from the Democrats.

Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 8.9% and the bleak statistic grows as the auto companies bleed rivers of red ink struggling to survive. Foreclosures are rampant now hitting one in every 20 homes in the state.

Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm’s approval ratings have sunk to a Bushian 20%. Kwame Kilpatrick, the crooked, now jail-bound, former Detroit mayor was an ongoing embarrassment and national joke. An inept troupe of clowns runs the Michigan Democratic Party.

McCain saturated the airwaves with ads touting his stance against earmarks and how that brave posture will revive the economy. Other spots had Obama ignoring the brilliance of the surge in Iraq and McCain was portrayed as the great military mind with the will and experience to win the war.

In Macomb County, one of those son-of-SwiftBoaters groups ran an ad where Obama is heard praising Kilpatrick long before his criminal troubles were known. Rousing the rednecks and religious right, spiced with race, would bring rapture to the Republicans in November — or so they thought.

Obama stood his ground, spending $7.5 million on TV ads and his campaign made major thrusts into Oakland County, the center of wealth in Michigan. The Republican bliss in the swampy fields of Macomb County didn’t phase the Obama campaign. They had their sights on more valuable crops.

Time Magazine’s Amy Sullivan had a keen eye on the state’s political landscape in a piece she wrote in late July. “The battle for Michigan is coming down to leafy, affluent Oakland County, a once solidly Republican bastion that has grown more Democratic in recent years,” Sullivan wrote.

Recognizing the real bellwether, Sullivan noted, “Oakland is one of the new battlegrounds of 2008 — a handful of counties that weren’t pivotal a decade ago but are where the election will be lost or won this year. Though nearby Macomb County gave rise to the Reagan Republicans nearly 30 years ago, it is the more upscale Oakland that holds the key to Michigan now.”

Obama found the keys to that kingdom striking at McCain’s economic policies, his plan to tax health care benefits, his open-ended commitment to keep spending $10 billion dollars a month in Iraq and his inescapable entwinement with George W. Bush.

Obama’s message resonated and one recent poll gave him a 13-point edge statewide and the lead in Oakland County. Obama’s policy and political judgments drove McCain out of Michigan.

McCain’s campaign departure, however, was curious both in timing and manner. Usually campaigns based on their internal polling will see the handwriting on the wall but gradually withdraw to save face, keeping up the morale of the faithful while never acknowledging certain defeat. Keep hope alive.

Not McCain. His campaign announced the surrender, cancelled TV spots and campaign appearances and left the Democrats shocked and the Republicans livid. “I don’t know what McCain was thinking,” a fuming L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland County executive and long time Michigan Republican party chieftain told the Detroit Free Press. “He’s a general who left the battlefield in the middle of the fight.” Ouch!

Patterson knows what leader McCain’s unconditional surrender and rapid retreat from Michigan could mean for local Republicans, especially in two very tight Congressional races. “I’m disappointed in his behavior; he’s thrown a lot of good Republicans under the bus,” Patterson lamented, “If 20,000 people stay home in Michigan on Election Day because our commander has raised the white flag, that could change a lot of races.”

Beyond the ludicrous, the last McCain ad still on the air here is one from the Republican National Committee denounced Obama for supporting the $700 billion federal bailout of Wall Street financial markets. McCain, too, voted for the measure.

In the debate this week and beyond, McCain will keep trumpeting the troop surge as the key to pacification in Iraq. In fact, the reduction of violence there hinges on sectarian segregation and political accommodations rather than the size of the army of occupation.

Patrick Cockburn of Britain’s The Independent, the most experienced Western reporter in Iraq recently wrote, “As American commander in Iraq General Petraeus’ main asset was his astute sense of Iraqi politics rather than any new military strategy.” Cockburn reports at the end of the Bush presidency, 138,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, a “higher figure than the number in Iraq before the surge.”

McCain clings to the ridiculous notion that the Iraq war was a good idea. Cockburn has better judgment: “General Petraeus’s oft declared uncertainty about future stability in Iraq is genuine. It is the Iraqi Shia and their Iranian backers, not the Americans, who are the true victors in the Iraqi war.”

McCain’s anecdote for the ailing economy is absurd. In the face of 160,000 jobs lost in September, the worst month in 5 years and 760,000 jobs lost so far this year, the Republican candidate talks about tax cuts and miniscule spending cuts.

When the bleak job figures came out, McCain issued a statement, admitting finally that the “our nation’s economy is on the wrong track” (two weeks after he said the “fundamentals of the economy are strong”) and offered his prescription. “I will reverse out-of-control spending, end the wasteful and corrupting practice of earmarks, and get the budget back in balance,” McCain promised.

Incredibly, he also claims he can do that while cutting taxes by an estimated $3.3 trillion. Last week, the national debt topped $10 trillion, the result of the Republican’s disastrous borrow-and-spend policies. Even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has belatedly shown some responsibility. “I’m not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money,” he told Bloomfield Television.

McCain carps incessantly about earmarks and pretends eliminating them will offset the cost of his proposed tax cuts. All earmarks together, amount to less than ½ of 1 percent of federal spending. Captain McCain wants to fix the leaky tap in the galley of the fiscal ship of state while he ignores the gapping hole in the bow. How’s that for sound judgment?

Sarah Palin remains the poster child for John McCain’s failed judgment. The Alaska Governor survived the vice presidential debate by ignoring the questions and responding with every inane bromide drilled into her head.

She came off as peppy and personable as well as just plain goofy, spouting canned gibberish. Palin mugged for the camera and winked like a barfly at a Wasilla watering hole after downing a six-pack of Busch Light.

People who believe Sarah Palin is fit to become president of the United States fall into only two categories: Kool-Aid sipping, blind partisans marching in lock step with anything Karl Rove designs and fools.

The Republicans are desperate as the economy tanks. The pitiful Palin now says Obama is “unfit” to be commander-in-chief and claims he was “palling around with terrorists.”

The remainder of their campaign will be nothing but personal attacks on Obama and predictable fear mongering. John McCain’s derailed his Straight Talk Express, now choosing to ride the dark politics of slurs and lies to his impending political demise. ++

Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city council member who works as a television reporter in Detroit.

bonus

Stocks Fall Sharply on Credit Concerns
MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM, NYT
October 6, 2008

More blind alleys besides Wall Street
Paul Sheehan, Sidney Morning Herald
October 6, 2008
[thanks, Christine]

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz: Bail Out Wall Street Now, Change Terms Later
Democracy NOW

Naomi Klein: Wall St. Crisis Should Be for Neoliberalism What Fall of Berlin Wall Was for Communism
Democracy NOW

Countrywide Mortgages To Be Modified To Provide Relief
CHRISTOPHER WILLS, HuffPo
October 6, 2008

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Facing a lawsuit over deceptive mortgage practices, Bank of America Corp. is agreeing to pay more than $8 billion to modify hundreds of thousands of loans to keep people from losing their homes.

Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America said Monday it will modify troubled mortgages with up to $8.4 billion in interest rate and principal reductions for nearly 400,000 customers of Countrywide Financial Corp., the troubled mortgage lender it acquired last summer.

The announcement arrived after the Illinois attorney general’s office said Sunday that the bank was modifying loans for customers in 11 states.

Some borrowers stuck with Countrywide customers might qualify for having to pay nothing but interest for a decade. Even people who can’t afford to keep their homes with such changes will be able to get help moving to a new home.

“This is going to provide a tremendous amount of relief,” said Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

Her office and officials from California negotiated the settlement; Illinois and California sued Countrywide earlier this year. Nine other states have also joined the settlement, and other states could sign on, said Deborah Hagan, chief of Madigan’s Consumer Protection Division.

In California alone, the settlement will offer $3.5 billion in relief. For Illinois, that would translate to $190 million.

“Countrywide’s lending practices turned the American dream into a nightmare for tens of thousands of families by putting them into loans they couldn’t understand and ultimately couldn’t afford,” California Attorney General Jerry Brown Jr. said in a statement Sunday.

The other states joining the settlement are Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Washington.

Bank of America said it will launch the new mortgage aid program in December.

In a statement, Barbara Desoer, president of Bank of America’s mortgage, home equity and insurance services, called the plan “a comprehensive program that provides more solutions than ever before to assist troubled borrowers and put them back on the path to sustained home ownership.”

The mortgage aid includes revising customers’ payments so they don’t exceed 34 percent of income. Other options include reducing interest rates and adjusting principal so that borrowers don’t wind up actually losing equity under some payment plans.

Countrywide will not charge loan modification fees and will waive prepayment penalties.

Madigan said she hopes the settlement could serve as a model for steps that other lenders could take to make up for misleading mortgage practices. She stressed that the agreement involves no tax money but will help people keep their homes and keep money flowing to lenders

“This settlement will help homeowners stay in their homes, which ultimately helps investors and also helps communities,” said Madigan, a Chicago Democrat. ++

“Dear Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson”
Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish
Sunday, October 5, 2008

I posted this rather prescient letter from Obama to Bernanke and Paulson last March. The letter itself is dated March 22, 2007. As with Obama’s warnings about the possible consequences of occupying Iraq, I think this letter is worth considering as we face the consequences of the financial mortgage-rooted meltdown in the credit markets and consider the two candidates. Money quote:

We cannot sit on the sidelines while increasing numbers of American families face the risk of losing their homes.

And while neither the government nor the private sector acting alone is capable of quickly balancing the important interests in widespread access to credit and responsible lending, both must act and act quickly…

[A] consortium of industry-related service providers and public interest advocates may be able to bring quick and efficient relief to millions of at-risk homeowners and neighborhoods, even before Congress has had an opportunity to act. There is an opportunity here to bring different interests together in the best interests of American homeowners and the American economy. Please don’t let this opportunity pass us by.

Remember: from March 2007. Wouldn’t it be great to have a president who actually anticipated problems rather than grappled with them after the fact? Read the full letter here. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves