SmartRemarks

In the wake of Sarah Palin’s revival of the unconscionable smear that Obama is “palling around with terrorists” (and Joe Lieberman’s shameful abandonment of any and all scruples by defending that smear as raising “legitimate questions”—about the candidate who put his own progressive cred on the line to endorse Joe in Connecticut’s 2006 Senate race!)…

…this public statement is worth sharing. It’s reasonably well documented at this point that Obama’s relationship with Ayers was a relatively casual professional one, and that Obama does not support the vandalism the Weather Underground committed decades ago. What’s not getting heard is that there’s nothing wrong with Bill Ayers, period. While Ayers himself is keeping his profile prudently low, 900-plus fellow educators and scholars are speaking up to make that point:

We write to support our colleague Professor William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is currently under determined and sustained political attack. Ayers is a nationally known scholar, member of the Faculty Senate at UIC, Vice President-elect of the American Educational Research Association, and sought after as a speaker and visiting scholar by other universities because of his exemplary scholarship, teaching, and service. Throughout the 20 years that he has been a valued faculty member at UIC, he has taught, advised, mentored, and supported hundreds of undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D. students. He has pushed them to take seriously their responsibilities as educators in a democracy – to promote critical inquiry, dialogue, and debate; to encourage questioning and independent thinking; to value the full humanity of every person and to work for access and equity. Helping educators develop the capacity and ethical commitment to these responsibilities is at the core of what we do, and as a teacher he has always embraced debate and multiple perspectives.

…

The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—“unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans. His participation in political activity 40 years ago is history; what is most relevant now is his continued engagement in progressive causes, and his exemplary contribution—including publishing 16 books— to the field of education. The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of “exposés” and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue. Like crusades against high school and elementary teachers, and faculty at UCLA, Columbia, DePaul, and the University of Colorado, the attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought. They serve as warnings that anyone who voices perspectives and advances questions that challenge orthodoxy and political power may become a target, and this, then, casts a chill over free speech and inquiry and the spirit of democracy.

To right-wing ideologues still trying to refight the battles of the ’60s, of course, there’s no room for forgiveness. (Except for the players who were demonstrably on the wrong side, like John McCain’s “good friend,” ex-con G. Gordon Liddy.) Those people will never vote for Obama anyway; they’re too determined to stay on the wrong side of history. For reasonable people open to considering actual relevant information, however, it’s important to offer opposition to the kind of widespread propaganda this election season has brought forth.

Tags: Bill Ayers, Gordon Liddy, McCain, Obama, Palin

Well, she absolutely had what it takes to win… if this had been an eighth-grade student council debate. Going up against a grown-up, though, Sarah Palin was mismatched.

An event like this is all about the image you convey to those inexplicably undecided voters out there—the crowd that hasn’t been following the race closely, beyond a few broad brushstrokes they’ve picked up from TV, but that nevertheless can swing an election. And with that goal in mind, just like last week, the two candidates tonight had mirror-image goals going into the evening. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Biden, debate, Election 2008, McCain, Palin

Another business day, another bank failure. (Excuse me: “stock-swap transaction.”) Yet Congress seems paralyzed, leaving the financial crisis unresolved.

This morning John McCain was bragging (prematurely) about how he’d brought House Republicans on board to pass a bailout package. This afternoon, of course, the bill failed to pass… and McCain promptly pointed his finger at Obama for failing to get the Democrats in line… even while saying, in the very same speech, “now is not the time to fix the blame.”

Nevertheless, scapegoating is what everyone in the beltway spent the afternoon doing… even though both the support and the opposition to this bill was genuinely bipartisan (roughly 33% of Republicans for it, 66% against; 60% of Dems for it, 40% against). Both sides worked diligently all weekend on a compromise bill, and genuinely thought they had reached one this morning. As MSNBC’s Chuck Todd reportedly observed, the real dividing line was not party at all, but fear of voters: the clearest pattern was that members with safe seats voted for the bill, while those facing serious challenges in November voted against it. (And the opposition may not succeed even in that narrow sense, at least for the GOP, as it inspires one of the party’s most loyal and “rock-ribbed” demographics to lose faith.)

Thus the stock market suffered its biggest single-day point loss ever, making $1.2 trillion of value disappear in a puff of panic, and lots of lots of baby boomers watched their retirement portfolios get markedly smaller. Meanwhile the credit freeze continues to demonstrate that it’s real, not just hypothetical, as not only commercial paper sales but even routine auto loans, student loans, and corporate payrolls begin to fell the pinch. And it’s spreading beyond the U.S., too, to the U.K., Belgium, Germany and beyond. As the Guardian so elegantly put it, Panic Grips World’s Markets.

NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini wrote, last February, about “The Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: The Twelve Steps to Financial Disaster.” The entire piece is long but well worth reading (summary here). It’s interesting (in a morbid sense) to note that eleven of the steps he warned of have now come to pass, and the twelfth appears to be well under way. At the end of the day:

“A near global economic recession will ensue as the financial and credit losses and the credit crunch spread around the world. Panic, fire sales, cascading fall in asset prices will exacerbate the financial and real economic distress as a number of large and systemically important financial institutions go bankrupt. A 1987 style stock market crash could occur leading to further panic and severe financial and economic distress. Monetary and fiscal easing will not be able to prevent a systemic financial meltdown as credit and insolvency problems trump illiquidity problems. The lack of trust in counterparties – driven by the opacity and lack of transparency in financial markets, and uncertainty about the size of the losses and who is holding the toxic waste securities – will add to the impotence of monetary policy and lead to massive hoarding of liquidity that will exacerbates the liquidity and credit crunch.”

The bill rejected today was arguably better than nothing, and certainly better than Bush and Paulson’s original no-strings-attached proposal, but it was still far from perfect. The chief “compromise” forced on it by the House Republicans, even if not enough to satisfy them, hardly helped; the “insurance plan,” far from being a more “market-oriented” approach, would actually create a much more massive liability for the government with less profit potential for the taxpayers. Whether inspired by fear of voters or a long-held quasi-religious faith in The Market, too many legislators seem inclined to cut off America’s nose to spite its face.

So what now? We (read: our representatives) are left with only two choices. One: do nothing. Two: come up with something better.

Fortunately, there are arguably better solutions out there. Perhaps (major surge of optimism, anyone?) today’s events will inspire our legislators to take a look at some of them. Re-regulating the financial markets to require (and allow) a relatively orderly deleveraging, as I wrote a few days ago, would be one important step. Professor Roubini, he of the frighteningly accurate prognostications, discusses several other possibilities, emphasizing that:

“…purchasing toxic/illiquid assets of the financial system is not the most effective and efficient way to recapitalize the banking system. Such recapitalization — via the use of public resources — can occur in a number of alternative ways: purchase of bad assets/loans; government injection of preferred shares; government injection of common shares; government purchase of subordinated debt; government issuance of government bonds to be placed on the banks’ balance sheet; government injection of cash; government credit lines extended to the banks; government assumption of government liabilities.”

Roubini points readers to a “10-Step Plan to Resolve the Financial Crisis” that he published last week. Prominent among these steps is a modern equivalent to the Home Owners Loan Corporation that was so crucial during the Great Depression—a means of securing the value of otherwise endangered mortgages without trying to re-inflate the housing bubble.

He also notes an IMF study (.pdf) showing that out of 42 banking crises around the world, the government managed to recapitalize markets in the vast majority of them without buying up bad assets. One of the most successful examples was Sweden’s handling of its 1992 crisis, which economist Brad DeLong discusses in some detail as an instructive example:

It might work like this. Congress:

• grants the Federal Reserve Board the power to take any financial firm whatsoever with liabilities and capital of more than $25 billion that is not well capitalized into conservatorship
• requires the Federal Reserve Board to liquidate any financial firm in its conservatorship when it judges that the firm is insolvent (paying off in full or not paying off in full the liabilities of the firm at its discretion), unless
• the Federal Reserve Board finds that preservation as a going concern is in the interest of the taxpayer, in which case Congress
• grants the Federal Reserve Board the power to transform equity stakes in the firm into junior preferred stock at par value and then transfer ownership and custody of the firm to the Treasury
• requires the Federal Reserve to terminate conservatorship if the firm becomes well-capitalized once again.

Perhaps the available options wouldn’t be so unpopular, and Congress wouldn’t be so afraid to own the legislation, if they’d made some effort to frame it as something other than a “bailout” from the start: say, a “stabilization plan.” Certainly, public opinion seems to shift dramatically depending on how the situation is described… underscoring that even after saturation media coverage, most people just honestly don’t understand what’s going on.

Public opinion aside, doing nothing is not a viable option. The system will not fix itself: if this crisis has demonstrated anything, it’s that unregulated capitalism will devour its own young before exercising voluntary restraint, however prudent. One can only hope that our legislators, of both parties, come to their senses long enough to do something that makes them worth voting for in five weeks, rather than letting the problems accelerate. Otherwise, as Ezra Klein writes, “It is further proof that we have a calcified political system incapable of responding to either long-term threats or short-term crises.” (Or, as Paul Krugman put it, “a banana republic with nukes.”) Any vicarious satisfaction “Main Street” may get from watching Wall Street crumble under those circumstances would be very cold comfort indeed.

(…Hmm. I notice that I haven’t written anything about comics or pop culture in over a week. Can’t imagine why that would be!…)

Tags: bailout, economy, financial crisis, McCain

So, tonight, an estimated sixty million people watched John McCain turn in a debate performance that probably left his campaign wishing he’s stuck to his promise to stay away, and that will surely cost him a few more points in the polls.

I write this before having exposed myself to any mass-media spin or blogosphere analysis:  this is straight unadulaterated personal reaction. I went to a public screening of tonight’s presidential debate at the Chicago History Museum, in an auditorium that was packed to capacity. It was, no question, a room chock-full of Obama supporters… but we didn’t have to grant the hometown guy a handicap to see him come out ahead.

Before the debate began, there was an hour-long panel discussion with a group of journalists and political scientists. It was interesting: not only the panelists but, I’d wager, most of the audience were dedicated political junkies. We’d been following the details of the campaign for months. We could, as the discussion made clear, anticipate what both candidates were likely to say, how they were likely to say it, and how they meant to position themselves by saying it that way. It was also clear that what we wanted to hear was not necessarily the same as what we expected to hear or what the candidates “needed” to say. It left me wondering… who exactly was the real target audience for this debate? Who constitutes the population that approaches such a thing in genuine suspense, not as political theater but as a source of information that could actually influence their votes? Certainly, the media covering it was and is even more jaded than those of us in the auditorium. Are there really that many genuinely undecided, “low-information” voters out there?

Then we settled in for the actual debate…

…and the best I can say for McCain is that, well, he had definite moments of lucidity.

In between them, though, were broad stretches where he was barely coherent—stringing non sequiturs together, interrupting himself with odd anecdotes, randomly repeating lines, and dropping (what were no doubt scripted to be memorable) sound bites with dull thuds at inapropos moments.

There were points where I found myself wincing in embarrassment for him. (The effort to pronounce Ahmadinejad?) McCain was clearly trying to paint his opponent as naive and unprepared, but he was the one who came across as unready and unsure of himself. He was the addled grandpa you humor and listen to because he has some interesting life stories, but whom you wouldn’t  trust to make any important decisions.

Obama, by contrast, was smart, sharp, and on point. He answered Lehrer’s questions clearly and directly. He understood all the issues. He responded to McCain’s attempted attacks in a matter-of-fact way, not returning cheap shot for cheap shot but instead keeping things serious:  e.g., the way he pointed out McCain’s absurd caricature of what it means to negotiate with adversarial heads of state. And he made some painfully accurate points about the way McCain’s current rhetoric doesn’t match his record, and about the urgent need to take a big-picture approach to setting national priorities and restoring America’s reputation in the world.

Of course, despite all this, 30% of the population out there will still be die-hards who insist that McCain was distinguished and dignified and the clear winner. We can safely ignore them. To the extent that the hypothetical audience I was wondering about really exists, though? To the extent that anyone was still undecided?… Well, I certainly can’t imagine that McCain won any of them over tonight.

Updated to add:

And the instant poll results seem to agree with me:

CBS News and Knowledge Networks conducted a nationally representative poll of approximately 500 uncommitted voters reacting to the debate in the minutes after it happened.

Thirty-nine percent of uncommitted voters who watched the debate tonight thought Barack Obama was the winner. Twenty-four percent thought John McCain won. Thirty-seven percent saw it as a draw.

Forty-six percent of uncommitted voters said their opinion of Obama got better tonight. Thirty-two percent said their opinion of McCain got better.

Tags: debate, Election 2008, McCain, Obama

So, what did John McCain accomplish with his grand gesture, as he swept into Washington Thursday to “help” his colleagues in Congress work out a deal on how to approach the economic crisis? Well, he went to the high-profile meeting he’d insisted that Bush call, at which…

…he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.

Meanwhile, the tentative deal Congressional leaders had already announced that morning dissolved around him. (The “Agreement on Principles” Senate Banking chair Christopher Dodd had released was far from perfect—including nothing at all on how to value the “toxic” corporate assets, nor on what sort of new regulations are necessary—but it did include valuable progress on formal oversight of the process, on taking equity shares in return for public funds, and on limiting executive compensation, all steps in the right direction. Of course, at last report, Bush was still threatening to veto any bill with that last item in it.)

From all reports Sen. Obama took a more active role in the discussion than did Sen. McCain. The real obstacles, however, came from the House Republicans, seeing an opportunity to distance themselves from Bush on an unpopular measure. At what cost? Well,

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

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

And needless to say, the Democratic leadership isn’t about to let any version of the Bush/Paulson plan reach the floor unless the GOP is backing it. Even though Hank Paulson reportedly went down on one knee and pleaded with Nancy Pelosi.

So what was the takeaway? Well, after the meeting McCain’s campaign issued a statement saying,

“We’re optimistic that Sen. McCain will bring House Republicans on board without driving other parties away, resulting in a successful deal for the American taxpayer.”

Yet somehow, at the same time, McCain’s friend and ally…

[Sen.] Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – said Thursday night that McCain joined House Republicans in opposing [the compromise] proposal.

I guess where McCain stands is anybody’s guess at this point. Maybe McCain will show up to explain himself in Mississippi tonight. Or maybe not.

—

Meanwhile, just to keep the pot boiling…

In a move initiated by scholars from the University of Chicago, 166 economists from across the political spectrum, including three Nobel Prize winners, released an open letter opposing the Bush/Paulson plan, criticizing its fairness, its ambiguity, and its long-term effects. Of particular note is this remark:

“I suspect that part of what we’re seeing in the freezing up of lending markets is strategic behavior on the part of big financial players who stand to benefit from the bailout,” said David K. Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies liquidity constraints and game theory.

That’s a sobering thought—that Paulson and his former industry colleagues may be deliberately spreading FUD to save their own hides.

Then again, lest we grow too cynical, there’s ample evidence that things really are growing worse, not just on Wall Street but on “Main Street” (and as an aside, I’m already torn between appreciating the frequent use of that metaphorical contrast as a sign of growing public awareness of American class conflict, and being sick to death of its sheer repetitiveness and mind-numbing lack of imagination). But, the point: as the New York Times reports, mortgage lending and small-business credit has already entered a “lockdown”:

For nonfinancial firms during the first three months of the year, the outstanding balance of so-called commercial paper — short-term IOUs that businesses rely upon to finance their daily operations — was growing by more than 10 percent from a year earlier, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Moody’s Economy.com. From April to June, the balance plunged by more than 9 percent compared with the previous year.

This week, the rate charged by banks for short-term loans to other banks swelled to three percentage points above the most conservative of investments, Treasury bills, with the gap nearly tripling since the beginning of this month. In other words, banks are charging more for even minimal risk, making credit tight. …

[In one midwestern city], as people try to refinance mortgages to hang on to homes and extend credit cards to pay for gas for their job searches, the local credit union is saying no.

And as you’ll surely have heard before reading this, the big news last night was that Washington Mutual went under. The nation’s biggest S&L became the biggest bank failure ever, as it was taken over by the FDIC and promptly sold off to JPMorgan Chase at fire-sale prices. (Customers, of course, are assured that business will go on as usual. At least one lesson learned in the Depression seems to have stuck.)

What are the side effects from all this? Well, even without a bailout—but possibly even moreso with one, given the effect on the Treasury—the rest of the world (i.e., the countries that buy our bonds and pay our bills) is getting more than a little nervous. The news from China late Wednesday was that Chinese regulators had told their banks to stop lending to U.S. financial institutions; by Thursday the Chinese government was categorically denying the report; yet by late Thursday, after the WaMu news broke, it was announced that “China’s banks are limiting foreign- exchange transactions with U.S. and European financial companies on concern tighter global credit markets will cause more failures.” Make of it what you will. Meanwhile, the German Finance Minister has accused “Anglo-American capitalism” of “endangering global stability,” and warns that “the US will lose its superpower status in the global financial system.”

Certainly, it’s not hard to imagine that if our foreign creditors lose confidence and decide to cut their losses rather than continuing to prop up U.S. capital markets, then in order to keep the country nominally solvent in the face of massive federal deficits (made even larger by the bailout under discussion), the Fed would have no choice but to monetize the debt (read: print money in very very large batches). At which point the dollar would stop being the global reserve currency, its exchange value would drop through the floor, inflation would skyrocket, more banks would fail, more jobs would disappear, and American standards of living would quickly evoke the 1930s.

The Bush years have vividly shown us the logical endpoint of the mania for deregulation begun in the Reagan era. Play the game without a ref, and everybody winds up getting injured.

Yeesh, and I started out thinking that this would just be a quick “news survey” post. Interesting times, indeed…

Tags: bailout, economy, George W. Bush, McCain, Paulson

So the word is that Bush is planning a prime-time address to the nation tonight about the financial crisis. Better late than never in terms of talking to the public, I suppose, but I think it goes without saying that whatever he has to offer might just as well go without saying. His credibility these days is somewhere south of the average late-night infomercial host, after all.

Meanwhile, McCain is trying to use the situation as an excuse to back out of Friday night’s debate with Obama. Because, you know, in times of crisis it’s not like people need to hear from those who aspire to make decisions for them, right? Somehow I don’t see this move gaining much traction with the public.

At any rate, here’s where things stand:

There is a real risk of a broadening credit freeze that would weigh down businesses and jobs across the country. Not a guaranteed outcome, by any means, but a legitimate risk.

However, the fact remains that the parties most directly on the brink of disaster—and in line to benefit most directly from a bailout—are not “Main Street” businesses or banks, but the big Wall Street financial houses (like Hank Paulson’s alma mater Goldman Sachs) that are overexposed to the kind of unregulated “toxic waste” securities that they themselves and their political allies worked enthusiastically to create.

Thus, the finance industry’s bargaining position here amounts to putting a gun to its own collective head and saying “give me what I want or I’ll shoot!” If it wants cooperation, especially in the face of tremendous pushback from the general public, the industry—and the administration, both personified by Paulson—really has no choice but to accept the kind of reasonable quid pro quos that economists and politicians are talking about, including but not limited to:

• Equity shares in any companies getting help, to keep the reigns in the hands of the government and help make the taxpayers whole
• Strict limits and “clawbacks” on the compensation of the millionaire executives who created this situation
• Stringent oversight of how and where public funds are spent, rather than just handing carte blanche to Paulson (or anyone else)

However, these are not the only conditions that should be imposed. It’s worth remembering that the grand total of “toxic waste” securities out there on the balance sheets has a nominal value in the tens of trillions, even as its actual value is impossible to determine; in comparison $700B is a drop in the bucket, and indeed it’s not at all clear how Paulson even arrived at that figure. Thus, the open question is whether any version of this proposal will actually work to stabilize the markets (in contrast to earlier and smaller band-aid efforts over the past year or so)… or simply turn into more money dumped down a hole, its only effect to bankrupt the treasury and cripple the federal government.

In light of that paramount concern, there are several other prerequisites that should be imposed as part of any bailout legislation. (A hat tip here to Karl Denninger at the site FedUpUSA; the site’s rhetoric may be a bit overheated, but the quiality of the research and analysis is impressive.) It seems clear that one of the key underlying causes of the current crisis was the SEC’s 2004 move to deregulate the debt-to-net-capital ratios firms were required to maintain, which until that point had a cap of 12-to-1. In the intervening years firms pushed their ratios to unprecedented levels—as high as 40-1 at Merrill Lynch, 80-1 at Fannie and Freddie—creating a situation where even a slight drop in underlying values could topple the whole highly leveraged house of cards. Another factor was allowing firms to use controversial “mark-to-market” pricing for Level 3 assets (the kind of securities under discussion), despite the fact that there was no liquid market for such assets, essentially inviting inflated, frankly imaginary nominal valuations.

The combined result was trillions of dollars (supposedly) of assets on balance sheets, with no regulated exchange, no central clearing house, no margin supervision, to keep things in line and ensure a minimum level of trust between parties in financial contracts. Under those circumstances, it’s understandable why people are unwilling to lend, buy, or sell. The case can be made that no matter how much money you pump into the system at this point, it won’t circulate effectively unless and until a basic level of trust has been restored.

How can that be done? Where can one look for underlying value? Paulson seems to be looking at the top of the market: to prop up the value of the questionable assets themselves by providing a buyer of last resort. As already discussed, though, the government doesn’t have enough revenue on hand to do this in any comprehensive sense, and even if it did it would just be propping up a collective fiction.

On the other hand there’s the bottom of the market, the real estate that underlies most of these derivatives (beneath multiple levels of leverage). The problem there is that housing prices are falling for real and legitimate reasons. Many people simply can’t afford to pay their mortgages, in the wake of lost jobs or health-care emergencies or adjusted ARMs that they can’t refinance as expected. Others, upside-down on properties they bought at the top of the market, are simply making the rational decision to walk away rather than continue paying more than their homes are worth. And as noted in my previous post, most experts agree that housing values still have some way to fall. Even now, in most parts of the country median prices are well above the traditional “three times household income” rule of thumb that has traditionally marked the affordable middle-class mortgage. Even if it were possible to keep housing values artificially high, then, rather than letting them revert to the historical mean, doing so would only serve to exacerbate the real problem.

The true solution is to find a way to deleverage the “toxic waste” that writes its value down to rational levels without causing a downward spiral of panic selling and bankruptcies. What Congress should do to achieve this, before approving any bailout funds, is threefold:

• Insist on a return to the 12-1 leverage ratio, stepped down gradually over a period of months leading up to a hard deadline, with frequent progress reports. This will help restore public confidence, especially in those firms that are (relatively) less excessively leveraged.
• Eliminate the mark-to-market fictions used to hide losses, and require all firms to make full disclosure to CUSIP (the securities clearing system) of the formulae used to value their Level 3 assets, so that prospective investors can judge the legitimacy of any claimed values.
• Require all over-the-counter derivatives to be moved to a formal exchange, cleared by the Options Clearing Corporation or an equivalent, again by a date certain—or written down to zero.

These steps would gradually but decisively reduce the uncertainty about the value of the questionable securities out there—while still providing the opportunity to recapture and declare as much legitimate value as possible, rather than simply imploding the system with a rush to the bottom that may let that value go to waste and create undesirable ripple effects. This approach would get the bad debt out of the system, preserve the good debt, and put the credit markets back on a rational footing. And it would prevent taxpayer money from being invested in any securities that are genuinely worthless.

There may be even better, or additional, steps that Congress could take toward the same ends. If so, I have yet to read about them anywhere. There’s been considerable talk about the need for new regulation, but very little discussion of what kind, or how or when it should be imposed. Thus far, the steps outlined above seem to offer the best available answer.

Tags: bailout, economy, financial crisis, George W. Bush, McCain, Paulson

What?  No, not like that!  Ick.  Get your mind out of the gutter.

What this is about is her polling numbers. In the past week, to put it succinctly, they have tanked. On September 11, people viewed her “favorably” 17% more often than “unfavorably”; by September 17, that spread had reversed to 1% less favorable than unfavorable. That’s quite a swing.

It’s interesting to observe that September 11 was the day her interview with Charlie Gibson aired, the first opportunity the public had really had to see how she handles herself off-script. (“Bush Doctrine? What’s that?”) The McCain campaign doesn’t seem inclined to let her do that any more. Indeed, they’re even dispatching their own people to speak for her and take over the spin about the investigation of her “troopergate” scandal. (And didn’t that label already get used during the Clinton years, BTW? Are we reduced to recycling -gate based scandal names now?)

Just for fun, here’s a chart of the drop. (Notice that McCain’s own favorable/unfavorable numbers aren’t doing too great either!)

Tags: Election 2008, McCain, Palin, polling

It’s been interesting times since Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain’s running mate two weeks ago—political theater at its highest and lowest. Coming in the wake of the Republican Party’s rebuke of any of McCain’s even remotely moderate policy leanings in its hard-right official platform, it was little surprise that the party also pushed him away from his preferred choices for a running mate, someone like Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge, and forced him to choose the more ideologically doctrinaire Palin in order to shore up the “base” of the GOP, the die-hard 28-percenters who still support Bush.

And it’s no surprise at all that the party has completely ignored McCain’s earlier vows to keep the campaign itself dignified and serious. From the repeated lies about Palin’s record regarding the “Bridge to Nowhere” and other earmarks, to the sleazy attack ad distorting Obama’s record on sex education, to the faux outrage over Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” remark, any pretense of dignity is long gone.

I find it disappointing that the McCain campaign is stooping to such bottom-feeding, Rovian tactics… disappointing, yes, but not at all surprising. He’s not even pretending to take the kind of stands he ran on eight years ago, and anyone who still imagines that he could be any kind of “maverick” in office with the GOP power structure cracking the whip like this just hasn’t been paying attention.

What I find really interesting, though, and indeed genuinely surprising, are two other trends. One, from all appearances the only people (in public or in the larger media) really buying into the sycophancy toward Palin are the hard-right ideologues, the diehard Bush supporters who would never have voted for Obama under any circumstances anyway but now have a fresh face they can support with more enthusiasm than they had for McCain himself. (I think any recent shift in the polls is largely due to Palin bringing a lot of the lunatic fringe off the fence and back into the “likely voter” camp; and even so the recent evidence of a “swing” seems largely due to overcounting Republican voters.)

Two — and this is the reassuring thing, in the wake of much wailing and gnashing of teeth and armchair strategizing from the blgosphere last week provoked by the fear that Palin might be a “game changer” — the media’s not playing along this time. Its enchantment with McCain seems to have worn off since his campaign dragged the media itself into the line of fire, and suddenly everywhere you turn someone’s calling out his misleading, deceptive, diversionary, and generally sleazy tactics for what they are. And it’s not just liberal pundits like Paul Krugman. I mean, when such a died-in-the-wool creature of the Beltway establishment as Time’s Joe Klein starts complaining that you’re taking cheap shots, you know you’ve crossed a line. Or Jim Lehrer calling the campaign “dishonest” and “dishonorable.” Or the Associated Press. The hosts of The View. Even Bill O’Reilly (!). Really, pretty much everyone is talking about about how McCain’s reputation for “straight talk” has derailed.

That’s the narrative that’s emerged in the last few days, and that’s the narrative the rest of the public, aside from the true believers, is going to pick up. Both Obama and McCain promised to run a different, more serious kind of campaign. Only one of them is sticking to it.

Tags: Election 2008, McCain, media, Palin