Throughout this long presidential campaign, there’s been endless discussion of race as a factor. But until recently, such talk revolved around hard-to-assess white fears about Barack Obama’s racial identity, along with efforts to conjure up the ancient hobgoblin of the Scary Black Man via images of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Now, in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis, racism has entered the campaign conversation from an unexpected direction. In the fever swamps of conservatism, there’s a growing drumbeat of claims that the entire housing mess, and its financial consequences, are the result of “socialist” schemes to give mortgages to shiftless black people whose irresponsibility is now being paid for by good, decent, white folks.
Some of this talk is in thinly-veiled code, via endless discussions on conservative web sites (though it spilled over into Congress during the bailout debate) attributing the subprime mortgage meltdown to the effects of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was aimed at fighting the common practice of mortgage “redlining” in low-income and/or minority areas (basically, a refusal to make any mortgages, regardless of the creditworthiness of individual applicants, in such areas).
In truth, the CRA didn’t require lending to unqualified applicants (though it did provide that applicants’ credit-worthiness could be established through means more sophisticated that standard credit scores), and in any event, CRA doesn’t even apply to the non-bank lenders responsible for the vast majority of bad mortgages. (Sara Robinson has a very useful primer on CRA at the OurFuture blog).
A closely associated and even more racially tinged element of the conservative narrative on the financial crisis focuses on lurid claims about the vast influence of ACORN, a national non-profit group active in advocacy work for low-income Americans. Among its many activities, ACORN has promoted low-income and minority homeownership, mainly through personal counseling. More to the point, though it’s unrelated to any of the claims about ACORN’s alleged role in the financial crisis, the group worked with Barack Obama back in his community organizing days on the South Side of Chicago.
Now as it happens, I’ve never been a huge fan of ACORN, mainly because its ham-handed voter registration efforts in recent years have supplied Republicans with their only shred of evidence that “voter fraud” is a legitimate concern in this country. But ACORN, a relatively marginal group, had no real influence over toxic mortgage practices, which again, to state the crucial point, had little to do with CRA-enabled loans to low-income and minority homeowners. Google “ACORN financial crisis” and you’ll be treated to an amazingly huge number of articles and blog posts on the subject, virtually all of them from conservatives. None of them, so far as I can tell, establish that the group has had any significant involvement in mortgage decisions, mainly because most subprime loans were made in areas where ACORN activists would never set foot. ACORN is being singled out by conservatives for a leading role in the crisis simply because it’s crucial to the whole CRA/Socialist/Minorities/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/Obama narrative about the financial crisis. And that narrative is not simply all over the internet: it’s common on the airwaves as well, from Lou Dobbs to an assortment of “analysts” at Fox.
While some conservatives are careful not to get too explicit about the racial underpinnings of this argument, others aren’t. As usual, we can rely on Ann Coulter to expose the raw id of conservative sentiment, as in a post on the financial crisis with the title: “They Gave Your Mortgage To a Less Qualified Minority,” which deliberately played off the theme of a famous Jesse Helms campaign ad demonizing affirmative action.
Here’s Coulter’s take on the alleged impact of CRA:

Instead of looking at “outdated criteria,” such as the mortgage applicant’s credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named “Caylee.”

Nice. The coda of Coulter’s “argument” plows some very familar furrows:

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.
Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.

There you have it: once again, rich liberals in league with shiftless minority “welfare recipients” are sticking it to Joe Sixpack.
Coulter’s uninhibited take seems to be closer to what we are now seeing and hearing among grassroots conservatives, whose anger is now visibly spilling onto the campaign trail, than the more circumspect “analysis” of her more “responsible” colleagues.
It shouldn’t be that surprising. Let’s say you are a classic Main Street conservative, a white middle-class man near or past retirement age. You own your home, you pay your bills. Maybe at some point you benefitted from a government-subsidized or underwritten home loan. Maybe you were lucky enough to do your own modest real estate speculation in the mid-80s or mid-90s or early 00’s, when it all worked. Maybe you even have a defined-benefit pension that insulates you from the immediate effects of the stock market collapse. But still, you’ve played by the rules, and are entirely innocent. And now the whole economy is collapsing around you, and worse yet, many hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars are being tossed around Washington to “bail out” everybody but you. Two kinds of explanations are being offered to you for what went wrong. One involves an impenetrable haze of financial jargon about the securitization of mortgages and derivative instruments and hedge funds, which only a handful of people in the country can even pretend to understand. The other is Ann Coulter’s. What are you going to believe?
Perhaps it’s an ironic sign of social progress that today’s emerging racist stereotypes involve minorities getting behind on their mortgage payments, rather than “welfare queens” using change from their food stamps to buy vodka (the famous Ronald Reagan anecdote) or black men impregnating their girlfriends to live off those bountiful welfare payments. But it’s still disgusting. As Rick Perlstein has righteously argued, it’s a blood libel on people who exert no real power in this country.
As the foregoing meditation indicates, I’m less inclined to blame those fist-shaking angry Main Street conservatives at McCain’s rallies than the conservative “thinkers” who promote racist stereotypes as part of a broader effort to deflect responsibility anywhere, everywhere, than towards the corruption and ideological manias of their own leaders.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Grassroots conservatives have been fed a steady, toxic diet in recent weeks, on talk radio, on Fox, and in the blogs, of a narrative that suggests “Obama’s ACORN” (with the complicity of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) created the financial crisis, is benefitting massively from the bailout, and is now trying to steal the election. This is a race-based Unified Field Theory that connects everything these folks fear and hate, and they want John McCain to talk about it, instead of all this bushwa about greedy lobbyists and bipartisanship.
On a broader front, this may represent the ultimate climax in the original and central dilemma of the McCain campaign: how to stay “bipartisan” and mavericky while channeling the passions of the conservative base. The whole contrived balancing act could well be blowing up, at McCain’s own rallies.

Yesterday I posted a brief notice about a “Memo to the next president” under the auspices of the Progressive Policy Institute, arguing for public financing of congressional elections and redistricting reform as first-order priorities after November 4.
Today I did a somewhat different post for The Hill’s Congress Blog that explicitly makes the case for why this sort of agenda makes particular sense for Barack Obama.

As you may have gathered by now, John McCain’s big October Surprise on the policy front, the mortgage buyout proposal that he sprang during the second presidential debate, is not going over well much of anywhere.
While the proposal bears a superficial resemblence to earlier Democratic proposals for homeowner relief, its structure makes it both vastly more expensive for taxpayers, and grossly more generous to the most imprudent–and in some cases predatory–lenders. Conservatives just hate it, as evidenced by an acid-tongued editorial from National Review today, which noted the McCain plan would displace the much more modest Frank-Dodd legislation, which just took effect on October 1:

We never thought we would defend the Frank-Dodd legislation, which we bitterly opposed last summer. But it looks downright prudent compared to what McCain has proposed. McCain’s plan is a full bailout for lenders, and it cannot do much more than the Frank-Dodd bill without letting “ruthless borrowers” and other reckless types off the hook.

Kaboom.
Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama is going after McCain’s proposal with a big sledgehammer. According to Ben Smith’s account at Politico:

On the stump in Dayton, Obama continued to drill McCain’s mortgage plan.
McCain would have “the government — meaning taxpayers, meaning you — buy up bad mortgages,” he said.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pick up the tab for the very folks who helped to create this crisis,” Obama said. “That’s the problem with Sen. McCain’s risky idea.”
“Banks wouldn’t take a loss, but taxpayers would take a loss. It’s a plan that would guarantee that you, the American taxpayers, would lose,” he said.
“It’s not just that Sen. McCain’s bailout rewards irresponsible lenders. It’s that this bailout would make it more likely that those lenders would keep up their bad behavior.”
The plan, Obama said, “punishes taxpayers, rewards banks and won’t solve our housing crisis. This is the kind of erratic behavior we’ve been seeing out of Sen. McCain.”

Note the words “risky” and “erratic” and “irresponsible” in Obama’s speech. At a time when McCain, contrary to what his campaign was saying as recently as Tuesday night, is trying to question Obama’s character via a vast inflation of his relationship to William Ayers, Obama’s returing fire on the character front through McCain’s most recent policy proposal.
But hey, there’s a silver lining to McCain’s latest fiasco. According to Ross Douthat, the Republican nominee is so breathtakingly incompetent at developing a compelling message that he’s free to just start pulling stuff out of his posterior:

Frankly, McCain has done such a lousy job selling the domestic policy proposals he’s put forward that he’s more or less free to change them however he wants at this point. It would have been better if he had changed them dramatically and publicly on Monday, after the bailout passed and the market kept tanking, but before the debate itself. But the next time the stock market has a really bad day (i.e., tomorrow), he should “huddle with his advisers” and announce that in light of the epic crisis, he’s going to postpone his entire domestic agenda (such as it is) for, say, two years in favor of a short-term but expensive stimulus package aimed directly at the middle and working class.

Douthat actually refers to his own idea for McCain as “aggressive pandering to the middle class,” which doesn’t sound very mavericky to me. But he may be right that the poor reception accorded the most recent rabbit McCain tried to pull out of his hat shouldn’t keep him from going back to the hutch and looking for another one. If he does, though, he shouldn’t expect much support from most conservatives.

When John McCain conducted a not-very-effective interview with the Editorial Board of the Des Moines Register a couple of weeks ago, the respected Republican strategist (and longtime associate of McCain’s) Mike Murphy had this to say on the Swampland blog, after discussing the interview itself:

What the Hell was McCain even doing there in the first place?….Obama is going to win Iowa.
….So, 35 days left and McCain is in Iowa? Why put McCain in the wrong state, at the wrong place? No surprise the result is the wrong message and the wrong tone.

Now there are 25 days left, and where’s McCain going to be this Sunday? Davenport, Iowa.
Via Chris Orr, here’s an explanation offered by the McCain campaign to the Washington Post’s Dan Balz:

Mike DuHaime, McCain’s political director, said internal campaign polling does not make the electoral map look as bad as some public polls suggest. For example: Asked why, if he has given up on Michigan, McCain has not given up on Iowa, a state that looks strong for Obama in public polls, DuHaime said because the campaign’s polling has Obama’s lead in the low single digits.

Hmmm. Them must be some mighty odd “internal polls.” FiveThirtyEight.com lists nine surveys of IA since the beginning of September. Six showed Obama with a double-digit lead. The only one showing a close race is from the Big Ten outfit three weeks ago, which just started polling last month, and has no track record. In fact, per RealClearPolitics, there hasn’t been a published poll showing McCain ahead in Iowa since the beginning of the year. That’s not the case with a number of other states that McCain seems to have conceded.
Polls aside, there are four big reasons that virtually everyone outside the McCain campaign has been assuming Obama would carry the state this year: (1) Iowa had one of the country’s strongest pro-Democratic trends in 2006, producing a gubernatorial landslide, a Democratic takeover of the state legislature, and pickups of two U.S. House seats (one against the previously invulnerable Jim Leach, who’s now endorsed Obama); (2) Barack Obama built a powerful organization in the state prior to the Caucuses, which is still in place; (3) McCain skipped the Caucuses in both of his presidential campaigns, which Iowans consider a deadly insult; and (4) McCain has also stubbornly opposed federal subsidies for ethanol, an issue so important to Iowans that a long line of presidential candidates in both parties (including George W. Bush) have flip-flopped on it precisely because of its importance in Iowa.
So I’m with Murphy: I don’t know what’s up with McCain and Iowa. Maybe he has a major weakness for corn dogs and potluck dinners.

The Progressive Policy Institute’s putting together a series of “memos to the next president” arguing for this or that initiative as a top priority. They are by design neutral as to the identity of said president.
I’ve contributed a piece arguing that the next president should make reform of congressional elections, through public financing of campaigns, and redistricting reform, a top priority, to build some sense of real momentum about “changing Washington.” Though it’s cast in terms of being applicable to either candidate, I do think this makes particular sense for Obama, who needs to quickly mobilize public opinion for “real change” before or while undertaking tough initiatives like universal health care. That’s all the more appropriate now that there’s so much doubt about the fiscal “room” he will enjoy to do anything big.
Check it out here.

Those of you who read TDS’ Swing Voter roundtable earlier this year will remember that there’s a lot of disagreement about how to define swing voters. But such disagreements tend to shrink in the course of actual campaigns, as, gradually, the universe of potentially persuadable and motivatable voters converges with “undecideds.”
In his Wall Street Journal column today, Karl Rove, casting about for reasons to be optimisitic about John McCain’s campaign, suggests that there are “probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968.”
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver decided to test Rove’s assertion with actual data. Using the “unaccounted for voter” percentage in the last Gallup Poll (chosen because it’s been around forever), Silver compares that to the number at roughly the same date in earlier election cycles, and concludes:

In the Gallup tracking poll that straddled October 1st, 8 percent of voters were unaccounted for. This figure is significantly higher than 2004, an unusually partisan election in which just 2 percent of voters were unaccounted for. But, it was no higher than 2000 or 1976, and lower than in 1988. On average, since 1936, 6.8 percent of voters were unaccounted for in the Gallup poll as of October 1st, as compared this year’s 8 percent; the difference is not statistically significant.

To determine “persuadable” voters, Silver looks to the Pew Research poll’s numbers for people who have “decided against” one or the other candidate, indicating they are not open to further persuasion. The results are pretty much the same as with “undecideds”:

[A]s of Pew’s most recent survey from late last month, 42 percent of voters said they had decided against Senator McCain, and 37 percent said they’d decided against Senator Obama. This leaves 21 percent of voters who are theoretically open to either major party candidate. We can compare these to the Pew numbers released in Early October 1992, Late September 1996, Early October 2000, and Early October 2004….
This year’s numbers are right in line with past elections, again with the mild exception of 2004, when an unusually high fraction of the electorate had ruled out either George Bush or John Kerry. And remember, more voters have decided against McCain than Obama. The candidates to exceed the 42 percent of voters who have thus far said “no how, no way, no McCain” were George Bush, Sr. in 1992 (46 percent), Bob Dole in 1996 (44 percent), and John Kerry in 2004 (45 percent), all of whom lost their elections.

It’s possible, though not likely, that the undecided or persuadable vote could go up or otherwise change at some point between now and election day. But its current size and shape is not, contra Karl Rove, grounds for belief that Obama’s current lead may not be as significant as everyone thought.

Recent public opinion dynamics have favored Democrats, to be sure, leading, in conjunction with the curent economic disaster, to some predictions of a 1932-style Democratic landslide. But as Chris Bowers points out at Open Left today, we’re in an era where the margin of error, and of victory or defeat, is much smaller than in the past.
Here’s Chris’ analysis on the limits of the swing vote and its implications.

8.5% is the maximum victory: First, as I warned on Monday, please keep in mind that an 8,5% national victory is the maximum. In the last sixteen national elections (U.S. House and Presidential), the largest victory was Bill Clinton’s 8.51% victory in 1996. The simple fact is that no one wins by double digits anymore. This goes for the large Republican victories in 1988 (President–7.72%), 1994 (5.9%), and 2002 (4.6%). It also goes for the large Democratic victories of 1992 (President–5.56%), 1996 (President–8.51%) and 2006 (7.9%). “Landslides” are now 5-8% national victories, not anything larger. Given that a very real percentage of Democrats and Independents won’t vote for him because he is black, it was always absurd to think that Obama was going to break this mark. When Obama reached an 8% national lead, the only place for him to go was down.

Chris is right, in terms of recent precedents, and if that bothers Democrats hoping for a gigantic Obama landslide, it should be comforting in case McCain catches a break and moves ahead between now and November 4. The probability of any particular electoral outcome is not that far outside the MoE of most polls. It will likely be a close race, in popular votes at least, no matter what happens. And that’s why all the Obama campaign’s tactical advantages in money and the “ground game” may matter so much. But Democrats should avoid getting too caught up in either the highs or lows of the polls.

There’s a fascinating new study of the most recent presidential campaign advertising expenditures by state, released today by an outfit called the Wisconsin Advertising Project (based at the University of Wisconsin in Madison).
The analysis covers advertising expenditures (not actual airings) during the week of September 28-October 4, and includes RNC buys, a major component of the McCain campaign’s effort. It doesn’t include ad spending by “independent” (i.e., 527) groups, but a separate part of the analysis suggests that such spending is significantly down from 2004, and isn’t a large factor in most battleground states at this point (the only striking 527 spending figure is $914,000 spent by the pro-McCain group Vets for Freedom in California).
Overall expenditures were $17.5 million for Obama and $11 million for McCain. That’s double the level of spending for the first week of September. Nearly all of McCain’s ads were negative, while only about a third of Obama’s ads were negative.
But the more interesting numbers are about where the two campaigns are targeting their paid media resources. In a number of the more obvious battleground states (OH, PA, CO, NM, NV, WI and MI, where McCain did one large ad buy before shifting resources out of the state), Obama’s overall 3-2 spending advantage was roughly reflected in state expenditures. But Obama outspent McCain by more than 2-1 in MO and NH, by more than 3-1 in FL, VA, and IN, and by well over 8-1 in NC. All told, in FL, VA, IN, and NC–all states that went for Bush by comfortable margins in 2004–Obama spent about $6.1 million last week, as compared to about $1.5 million for McCain.
The only two battleground states where McCain outspent Obama were IA (by about a 3-2 margin) and MN (a 5-1 margin), both Kerry states, albeit narrowly, in 2004. Obama’s been steadily in the lead in IA throughout the race, and has led in almost every poll of MN, though sometimes by small margins.
It’s obvious from these numbers that McCain is gambling that an improved national position (without which, of course, he’s going to lose in any event) will pull him across the line in places like VA, IN, NC, and perhaps even FL, without a major expenditure of money, while Obama is using his overall advantage to play aggressively in states won by Bush in 2004. Florida’s a particular dilemma for McCain: almost nobody thinks he can win without that state, but it’s a very expensive place to compete.
None of these figures, of course, include money spent for “ground game” registration and turnout efforts, and in “new media,” both areas where Obama is almost universally thought to have an advantage everywhere.
I realize this analysis is just a one-week snapshot that may not accurately convey the ultimate picture of the “ad wars” in the battleground states. But it does help illustrate the extent to which Obama is not only in the lead, but on the offensive. This matters, since early voting has already begun or is about to begin in many of these states, and undecided voters are beginning to focus and make up their minds.
And from a strategic point of view, it can’t be a good sign for McCain that he seems to be spending more money and time in Iowa, which he’s almost certainly already lost, than in NC, where he absolutely must win.

I and others here at TDS will probably have more to say tomorrow on tonight’s second presidential debate, but for the moment I will just mention some surprises.
Number one was McCain’s decision to spring a new mortgage buyout/renegotiation proposal. I’m sure we’ll find out more details soon, including some that make the proposal less ambitious than it sounds. But it had to create some vast heartburn in ConservativeWorld. Remember that Republicans in Congress and in the administration fought tooth and nail, and successfully, during the bailout negotiations to fight a Democratic proposal to let bankruptcy judges have mortgage rate and principal renegotiation powers. Now McCain’s talking about a wholesale renegotiation system that will go far beyond people in bankruptcy. Go figure.
Number two, of course, was McCain’s failure to follow the strategy that his campaign and his running-mate had signled as its last, best hope to win: attacking Obama’s “radical” views and associations. Over at The Corner tonight, there was considerable apoplexy that the names “Ayers” and “Wright” didn’t come up. Maybe McCain’s decided to let others make that case, while pretending he has nothing to do with it.
Number three, which was probably less a surprise than a disappointment, was how boring the whole thing was, and how poor a job Tom Brokaw did as moderator. Aside from his tiresome hectoring about time constraints, and his arbitrary decisions about who got follow-up questions, Brokaw seemed to have picked the blandest questions imaginable from the many at his disposal. One question that he chose and then amplified was heavily loaded, stipulating a gigantic Social Security crisis that most Democrats deny.
Number four, which was a pleasant surprise, was how Obama managed to get across a couple of important but complex points despite struggling against the many attacks McCain threw into his path. One was about the national marketplace for health insurance that McCain would create, which would have the effect of allowing insurers to evade current state regulations on preexisting conditions and mandated coverage generally. This is a really big deal (He probably shouldn’t, however, have cited the home state of his running-mate, banking paradise Delaware, as an analogy).
Surprise number five is that unless I somehow missed it, McCain did not utter the word “maverick” (or for that matter, refer to his mavericky running-mate). This omission undoubtedly ruined a lot of debate drinking games. On the other hand, those who were playing a drinking game based on the number of times McCain said “My friends” were unconscious by the mid-point.

Something potentially important happened on the campaign trail today. Via Marc Ambinder, this is a snippet from prepared remarks for Sarah Palin today in Florida:

John McCain and I will protect the entitlement programs that Americans depend on – and above all, Social Security. No presidential election cycle is complete without the Democratic candidate coming down here to Florida to try to stir up fear and panic on this issue. And if you expected any better from the guy who promised to get rid of “old-style politics,” you’re in for a disappointment – because Barack Obama has exploited this issue the way he exploits so many others.
So, let there be no misunderstanding: John McCain has always kept his promises to America, and as president, he will keep America’s promise to our senior citizens.

Methinks she protesteth too much. John McCain strongly supported Bush’s wildly unpopular partial-privatization scheme in 2005. He’s been evasive about his Social Security proposals during the current campaign (unlike Barack Obama, BTW), but he did allow as how he thought the fundamental pay-as-you-go financing system for the program was “an absolute disgrace,” and his budget and economic plans make gigantic savings from “entitlement reform” a very big deal.
Moreover, this very week, the McCain-Palin campaign issued a “clarification” on its health care plan suggesting that it would be financed with $1.3 trillion in unspecified savings from Medicare and Medicaid.
So how trustworthy does McCain sound on “protecting entitlements?” That Palin paused from her attacks on Obama’s associations with William Ayers to raise the subject in senior-heavy Florida indicates that Team McCain is very nervous on the subject, and for good reason. But “just trust us” is not the most compelling counter-argument.