So if you’re online you probably know the House defeated the financial bailout bill by 23 votes. I just saw a floor trader on CNN predict a drop in the Dow of somewhere between 1000 and 1500 points.
There will presumably be some consideration of a second vote on the same bill in hopes that enough Members who hoped to vote “no” while the package passed will reconsider; a net flip of 12 would be necessary. If that doesn’t work, then it’s back to the drawing board, though it’s hard to imagine a new compromise that would attract both Democratic and Republican votes.
One straw in the wind is talk about Democrats putting their own package together that could pass with little other than Democratic votes (95 Dems voted “no”).
Any way you slice it, this is an astounding repudiation of George W. Bush and John McCain by their own party. Better than two-thirds of House Republicans voted against the bill.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
UPDATE II: With Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) beginning at sundown today, it’s unlikely anything can happen in Congress until Wednesday. House Democrats just held a press conference to rebut the silly idea that the defeat was attributable to hurt Republican feelings about a floor speech made by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Barney Frank commented that if House Republicans could produce twelve members who voted against the bill on these grounds, he’d personally go spend time with them and “tell them how great they are” if it would convince them to reverse their votes.
So there you have it: more than two-thirds of House Republicans voted against a bill their own leaders had signed off on, sponsored by their own president, and endorsed by their presidential candidate as a matter of urgent national importance, and even of patriotism. Yet it’s the fault of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi! Gaze in awe.

As we all await the House vote on the financial bailout legislation, there was some other interesting political news over the weekend beyond the bailout negotiations and the debate: 33 ministers used their pulpits Sunday to demand votes for John McCain as part of an organized effort to defy IRS regulations against tax-exempt religious organizations expressing candidate preferences.
I wrote about this over at BeliefNet. I won’t cross-post it, because I was speaking from a religious perspective, but here’s a link if you are interested.

As we continue to await news of the latest round of negotiations on the financial bailout, John McCain has already taken credit for saving the day, and is now unsuspending his campaign and headed to Oxford, MS, for the presidential debate he tried to delay.
The evidence his campaign offers for this astonishing claim is that House Republicans are now represented in the negotiations.
Since said House Republicans object to the basic structure of the agreement reached yesterday by a bipartisan group of House and Senate banking committee members, it’s a little strange to suggest that enabling them to blackmail their way into the negotiations represented some sort of breakthrough. And if they somehow do succeed in driving the “deal” in their favored direction of capital gains cuts and deregulation, and away from Democratic demands that taxpayers secure an equity position in bailed-out companies, along with limits on executive pay, then you can confidently expect a revolt among congressional Democrats that will be larger and more significant than the McCain-assisted hissy fit from the Right yesterday.
Any way you want to slice it, the idea that Washington is closer to a consensus deal than it was the moment John McCain suspended his campaign on Wednesday and went blundering into the bailout negotiations is ridiculous. McCain did indeed get his photo op, and probably got some brownie points from conservatives for implicitly backing their point of view. But it’s quite clear that people in Congress today are not watching him ride off in triumph and gratefully saying to each other: “Who was that masked man?” More likely, they’re happy to see the back of him.

Well, it’s basically Close of Business in the eastern time zone, and if anyone has a clear idea of what’s going on in Washington, they’re keeping it to themselves.
Yes, there was an “agreement in principle” involving senior members of the House and Senate banking committees that appears to cover a lot of the demands Democrats have been making for changes in the Paulson Plan, including a “‘phased” approach to distributing bailout money.
But now the crafters of that agreement must go into negotiations with Paulson himself. And in the meantime, House Republicans are threatening a revolt against the basic principle of government purchases of bad securities.
And it’s totally unclear what, if anything, of substance came out of the “summit” that John McCain demanded with Bush, which Obama reluctantly attended. And it’s also unclear whether McCain, having inserted himself into the middle of this delicate process, is planning to help herd Republicans along or blow the whole thing up so he can claim to put it back together again.
Nobody knows, either, whether McCain is going to show up at tomorrow night’s debate, though he is planning all sorts of media appearances.
I’ll write more when there’s more to write about. It’s a day as mysterious as yesterday was weird.

Yesterday was quite a trip through the Twilight Zone, eh? To sum it all up, it was a day when an Address to the Nation by the President of the United States warning of imminent economic collapse was pretty much a minor footnote.
At this point today, there are a lot of important things we don’t know. Will a bipartisan deal on a financial system bailout be announced, as key negotiators have hinted? Will John McCain or Barack Obama be “players” or photo-op-bystanders in any deal? Will investors respond positively to news of massive new subsidies? Will homeowners get any protection? Will banks continue to fail, and will credit continue to shrink?
Will there be a presidential debate tomorrow night, and if so, will Barack Obama debate an empty chair, as so many candidates for offices high and low have done in the past when their opponents refuse to debate? (Though normally, the non-debating candidate is one with a big lead).
While we don’t have answers to any of those questions, we did learn, or re-learn, an important thing about John McCain yesterday. For all his talk of “honor,” the man really is willing to do just about anything for political advantage. He’s a “maverick” against decency.
Consider yesterday’s events. Barack Obama personally and privately called up McCain and proposed a joint “statement of principles” on the financial bailout, to be worked on in secrecy by staff. McCain agreed, and then, without a word of notice to Team Obama, unilaterally announced his campaign suspension, his demand that the debate be postponed, and his challenge to Obama to accompany him to Washington to get into the middle of the negotiations.
Clearly, no one in Washington had asked for McCain’s help in the negotiations; since he’s missed every single roll call vote for five months, his colleagues may have well forgotten that he’s a member of the Senate. There are, in fact, just two possibilities about this stunt: either it was, as Barney Frank suggested, an incredibly reckless act that threatened the negotiations, or if there was any value to McCain’s involvement, it could have all been done in private, away from the cameras.
Meanwhile, McCain refused to sign onto a statement of five principles proposed by the Obama camp, though he did agree to a completely empty statement of concern about the financial crisis. This morning, as Tim Fernholz of TAPPED reports, at the Clinton Global Initiative event (an appearance that somehow did not qualify for cancellation), McCain articulated four of the five proposed principles as his own, in some cases using the exact words of the Obama proposal.
This, my friends (as McCain would say), is a pattern of unmistakably weasely behavior, made no more palatable by the fact that is was all trumpeted as exhibiting the candidate’s selfless commitment to “country first.”
A lot of Democrats yesterday thought the disingenuous nature of McCain’s histrionics would be obvious to voters, and would hurt him badly. I’m not so sure about that, but no one should be surprised at any tactic this campaign descends to from here on out.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The political world is afire right now with reaction to John McCain’s announcement that he was “suspending” his campaign in order to return to Washington and participate in negotiations over the Paulson Plan. And oh, by the way, McCain also called for delaying Friday’s first presidential candidates’ debate.
But according to the most accounts, today’s surprises reallly began with Obama contacting McCain this morning to propose a joint “statement of principles” on the bailout.
If I had to guess, McCain’s “dramatic” announcement was intended to steal Obama’s thunder in showing willingness to pursue a joint-candidate approach to the crisis. Since both candidates are senators, and would be leaving the campaign trail to vote on a bailout plan anyway, the practical effect of the McCain announcement would seem to be to inject the candidates directly into the negotiation process. McCain may also be trying to place himself at the head of the parade by taking credit for Republican concessions (e.g., on executive pay) that are already happening. The effort to get the debate delayed, at a time when foreign policy discussions might seem an irritating diversion, was probably just gravy to Team McCain.
The bigger mystery to me is the original Obama gambit. It’s unclear whether it was offered in expectation of a “no” answer, or inversely, to ensure that McCain didn’t find a way to separate himself from a bailout plan that might prove to be very unpopular. And none of us at this moment knows that a joint “statement of principles” might look like.
In any event, McCain seems to be getting the lion’s share of attention for his public counter-move to Obama’s original move. Whether that ultimately helps or hurts hiim remains to be seen.

It’s richly ironic that in the midst of a national obsession about the condition of the U.S. economy, we’re about to have a presidential candidates’ debate limited to foreign relations issues.
You’d have to figure that Team Obama is trying to develop ways for their candidate to insert pithy references to the financial meltdown in a discussion otherwise dominated by Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and Georgia, Pakistan and al Qaeda, and so forth. But so long as the moderators cooperate, Obama may have a more direct opportunity to keep economic worries on the front-burner: by talking about the signal failure of Republicans to help Americans manage the transition to a truly global economy.
After all, as Bill Galston pointedly observed in his recent open letter to Obama published here at TDS, the “core issue” on the economy is “a Republican approach to the economy, shared by Bush and McCain, that shafts ordinary Americans and does nothing to help them deal with the challenges of global competition.”
Obama should take every opportunity to argue that the financial meltdown is simply exhibit Z in the long pattern of GOP mismangement of globalization. They’ve given us massive public and private debt, job losses, income losses, and benefits erosion, all supposedly essential to keep the macroeconomic fundamentals sound. And now those fundamentals have been destroyed, giving policymakers the wonderful choice of either risking a Great-Depression-level economic collapse, or providing upwards of a trillion dollar in corporate subsidies.
It’s really not that hard a case to make, and it can be presented in a tone of cold anger at the idea that Republican policies should be given still another chance to work. McCain’s implicit argument that cracking down on budget “earmarks,” or fighting lobbyists (those not already on his campaign payroll), or enacting still more tax cuts, or still more trade agreements, will take care of our economic problems is now obviously and absurdly inadequate to the challenges we now face. His erratic, almost panic-stricken reaction to the financial meltdown itself isn’t very reassuring, either, given his heavy dependence on an aura of principled leadership. Indeed, in a remarkable column yesterday, conservative pundit George Will all but suggested that McCain’s behavior on this issue disqualified him to serve as commander-iin-chief.
So: Obama need not appear to change the subject of the debate on Friday to remind voters of the political implications of the current economic mess. The GOP’s inability or refusal to manage globalization in the national interest is without question one of the preeminent foreign policy issues of the campaign. Let McCain brag that he’s brought us to the brink of “victory” in Iraq, or rattle sabers at the Iranians or the Russians. What’s happened to America’s economy in the last eight years has been a huge strategic disaster for U.S. leadership and security, crystallized in the current reality that we’re probably about to (explicitly or implicitly) raise taxes in no small part to keep our foreign creditors from plunging us into a long depression.
Let’s hope Obama sees this opportunity to present a meta-message on the global economy on Friday, and seizes it.

It’s been said a lot lately that Tina Fey was born to do impressions of Sarah Palin. I don’t know about that, but I do know that The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle was born to write the ultimate, definitive smackdown of all the incessant conservative whining about Sarah Palin’s critics being a horde of godless, tofu-eating, Ivy-educated elitists who hate Real Americans.
Cottle’s target was a particularly annoying rant by Ralph Peters about the righteous rage Real Americans (like him, of course) should all feel at any and all criticism of “Our Sister Sarah” by “the leftwing elite.”
Take it away, Michelle!

Oh blah blah blah. In this tiresome piece we see a near perfect distillation of the cheap, shameless culture warfare that conservatives are so fond of employing: An attack on Sarah Palin is an attack on all hard-working, god-fearing, authentic Americans! When Dems and “mediacrats” criticize Palin, they are mocking every red-blooded red-stater in this great nation.
Now I appreciate the effectiveness of insulting stereotyping as much as the next pundit, but I’m getting exceedingly tired of hearing about how much I scorn Sarah Palin because she is a hick chick from a hick state who didn’t go to Harvard. Please. I grew up in freaking Southeast Tennessee, in a smallish suburb of Chattanooga known as Hixson. (That’s right, pronounced hick-son.) I have spent more time at mudbogs, tractor pulls, county fairs, pig-roasts, dirt-bike races, and Wal-Marts than most of the anti-elite conservative whiners flapping their gums and wringing their hands over poor disrespected Sarah. I attended public high school, and the bulk of my classmates had Appalachian accents so thick they make Palin sound like a network anchor. The boys were hunters. The girls–myself included–had absolutely enormous hair. If any of my friends wasn’t a Christian, she had the good sense not to mention it to the rest of us, lest we try to save her soul at the countless revivals, church camps, and youth retreats we all attended….
Just like Ralph Peters, I KNOW Sarah Palin. Hell, in my younger days, I WAS Sarah Palin. (Well, minus being a crack shot.) The difference is I don’t fetishize my regular-gal roots and assume they make me special–much less qualified to run the country. And while I have indeed witnessed my fair share of cultural snobbery from some of my better-credentialed, coastal colleagues over the years, I’m not so defensive about where I come from that I feel the need to champion a wildly unqualified fellow hick whose politics I disagree with as a way to get back at everyone I know who has ever made a sniffy comment about big hair or small towns.
Memo to Ralph & Co.: Get over yourselves and stop lumping everyone who grew up in non-elite circles into some persecuted ball of burning, self-righteous resentment…. Some of us, in fact, don’t give a rat’s ass where [Palin] comes from. We’re too busy worrying about where she and McCain want to take us all next.

As it happens, my own background is pretty similar to Cottle’s. So I am particularly delighted that she spoke so eloquently on behalf of the rest of us birthright rednecks who are extremely tired of the unmitigated gall of people like Ralph Peters, who presumes to speak for us, and then, if we happen to think he’s full of crap, tells us we must have gone to Yale and hate Jesus.

Yesterday I noted that some conservatives are urging Republicans to oppose the Paulson Plan while hoping that Democrats provide the votes to actually enact it. But there’s a Democratic backlash a-building as well.
The blogospheric Left is increasingly committed to full-scale opposition, viz. this post from Atrios:

Look, right now the choice is, Bush’s Plan, or Something Else. Kill Bush’s Plan now, worry about Something Else later.

Markos Moulitsas is arguing for a delay in any bailout plan until after the elections. And here’s how fellow Kossack Meteor Blades assesses the general situation:

Democrats, in general, and Senator Barack Obama, in particular – as the new head of the Democratic Party – should trash this outrageous dictatorial bailout and stop listening to the advice of those who led us into this mess – including some fellow Democrats of prominence. They shouldn’t tinker on the edges of the administration’s proposal. Their substitute plan should put the pain on the pin-striped grifters where it belongs instead of on those Americans who have been repeatedly victimized by them.

There’s also a lot of talk analogizing the political psychology of the bailout plan, and the choices it presents to Democrats, to the Iraq War Resolution and/or FISA.
But heartburn about the Paulson Plan is not limited to the blogospheric Left. Here’s Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute in an op-ed today:

Rather than be stampeded into hasty action, Congress ought to deliberate long enough to make sure that Main Street doesn’t pay for Wall Street’s sins.

Marshall also links to his (and my) former colleague Rob Shapiro’s remarks on Marketplace yesterday, pointing out that the cost of the bailout would have a devastating effect on the policy options available to the next president.
While Democratic resistance to quick approval of the Paulson Plan is growing, there’s considerable confusion in terms of Democratic strategy. Virtually everyone supports Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to secure substantive changes in the legislation; Paulson has already accepted a couple of key changes, including mortgage foreclosure relief and equity acquisition in bailed out institutions (this latter point being critical to potentially reducing the ultimate net cost to taxpayers). But such changes could also undermine Republican support for the plan, pinning Democrats with responsibility for enacting it, and raising the obvious questions as to why Dems don’t just craft a plan to their own liking and present Paulson and Bush with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
In any event, Democrats don’t appear to be just rolling over in a panicked reaction to last week’s market disaster, and letting a Wall Street guy toss three-quarters-of-a-trillion dollars at his old friends, along with foreign investors, with virtually no strings. We’ll soon know just how tough they are willing to be in what will be an extremely momentous series of decisions that could not only affect the November 4 elections, but what happens afterwards for years to come.

When I became Managing Editor and principal blogger at TDS, I resolved to try very hard not to write about college football, which I did often in the autumn at my previous New Donkey haunts. I have to break the self-imposed rule today on the news that the Voice of the Georgia Bulldogs, Larry Munson, is retiring after 42 years on the air. After all, it’s a major story at the International Herald-Tribune.
But I’ll try to give this news some Georgia political context.
When Munson broadcast his first Georgia game in September of 1966, the state had just experienced its first racially integrated high school football game (Carver vs. North Fulton, which I attended as a member of the North Fulton marching band). Jimmy Carter was a lame-duck state senator who had recently lost his first statewide campaign, and who would soon vote in the legislature (charged under an archaic constitution to make the choice) to elect arch-segregationist Lester Maddox to the governorship. Sam Nunn was two years away from his first election to the Georgia legislature. Newt Gingrich was a graduate student at Tulane. Martin Luther King, Jr., was alive and well. John Lewis had been replaced earlier in the year by Stokely Charmichael as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Commitee (SNCC).
It was a very different time.
But the weird thing is that Munson was already a broadcast veteran by then, having been the Voice of the Wyoming Cowboys and of the Vanderbilt Commoderes before arriving in Georgia. He started doing football broadcasts when Harry Truman was a doomed appointed president, and Joe McCarthy was a little-known freshman senator from Wisconsin.
I know nothing about Munson’s politics, if he has any. And he achieved national fame with his hysterical calls of key positive moments in Georgia football history. But those of us who listened to him week-in and week-out know him for his exceptionally paranoid style: every Georgia opponent was a behemoth; no Georgia lead was ever big enough; no trailing margin was ever surmountable; and the clock always moved too slowly when we were ahead and too quickly when we were behind. In other words, Larry Munson sounded just like a generation of Democratic political pundits, right up until the day he retired.
Munson’s initimable voice will be missed. But I’m hoping his inveterate pessimism about Georgia football will prove inappropriate this year, much as I hope Democratic pessimism about the November 4 election is as archaic as the riviting fear Dawg fans once had when a Ray Goff team faced Steve Spurrier.