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.

Mine probably weren’t the only eyebrows raised at the news that former Maryland Lieutenant Gov. Michael Steele is playing Barack Obama in John McCain’s preparations for his first presidential debate on Friday. Steele’s preeminent qualification seems to be that he’s African-American.
Now it’s true that MI Gov. Jennifer Granholm is playing a similar sparring-partner role for Joe Biden in his prep for debating Sarah Palin. But this is almost certainly attributable to the need to deal with the Lazio Factor–the famous 2000 precedent whereby Rick Lazio seemed to condescedingly bully Hillary Clinton in a classic gender-inflected dynamic.
It’s not exactly clear what the racial analogy to the Lazio Factor might be, unless Team McCain is concerned their candidate will slip up and address the relatively youthful Obama as “boy” or something.
In any event, if McCain just had to have an African-American stand-in, I’m with Jon Chait: why not Alan Keyes, who has himself debated Obama (not to mention McCain)?

The general expectation this week is that the Paulson Plan for avoiding a worldwide financial meltdown, with an uncertain number of modifications, is going to pass Congress overwhelmingly, and recede into the background in the presidential campaign.
I don’t know about that.
Every Democrat should read Patrick Ruffini’s post from yesterday at NextRight. He is, I strongly suspect, perfectly reflecting the game that Republicans, including Team McCain, want to play with the Paulson Plan:

Republican incumbents in close races have the easiest vote of their lives coming up this week: No on the Bush-Pelosi Wall Street bailout.
God Himself couldn’t have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration. That’s why I want to see 40 Republican No votes in the Senate, and 150+ in the House. If a bailout is to pass, let it be with Democratic votes. Let this be the political establishment (Bush Republicans in the White House + Democrats in Congress) saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt (more than the Iraq War, conjured up in a single weekend, and enabled by Pelosi, btw), while principled Republicans say “No” and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress….
In an ideal world, McCain opposes this because of all the Democratic add-ons and shows up to vote Nay while Obama punts.
History has shown us that “inevitable” “emergency” legislation like the Patriot Act or Sarbanes-Oxley is never more popular than on the day it is passed — and this isn’t all that popular to begin with. All the upside comes with voting against it.

Ruffini is exactly right about the politics of this issue, especially for Republicans. Think of this as like one of those periodic votes on raising the public debt limit. It has to pass, of course, but there’s zero percentage in supporting it for any one individual. The speculative costs of the legislation actually failing are completely intangible and ultimately irrelevant, while the costs it will impose are tangible and controversial from almost every point of view. For McCain and other Republicans, voting “no” on Paulson without accepting the consequences of that vote is the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe: it will please the conservative “base,” distance them from both Bush and “Washington,” and let them indulge in both anti-government and anti-corporate demagoguery, even as Democrats bail out their Wall Street friends and big investors generally. You simply can’t imagine a better way for McCain to decisively reinforce his simultaneous efforts to pander to the “base” while posing as a “maverick.”
Democrats are right to demand significant substantive concessions before offering their support for the Paulson Plan. But just as importantly, they need to demand Republican votes in Congress, including the vote of John McCain. If this is going to be a “bipartisan” relief plan, it has to be fully bipartisan, not an opportunity for McCain to count on Obama and other Democrats to save the economy while exploiting their sense of responsibility to win the election for the party that let this crisis occur in the first place.

The announcement yesterday by John McCain that he favored the firing of SEC Chairman Christoper Cox was interesting, to say the least. Some may not realize that Cox has long been a major conservative hearth-throb, mentioned, in fact, as a potential running-mate for McCain himself not that long ago.
Indeed, Cox–then a California congressman–got some national attention back in 2000 as the consensus “movement conservative” favorite to become George W. Bush’s running-mate.
He was selected to chair the SEC in 2005 precisely because he was certain to be a pro-business deregulator in the post. Here’s an assessment at the time by Stephen Labaton of the New York Times:

In Republican and business circles, William H. Donaldson has been viewed as the David Souter of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a disappointingly independent choice who sided too frequently with the Democrats.
President Bush, hearing complaints about Mr. Donaldson’s record from across the business spectrum, responded on Thursday by nominating Representative Christopher Cox, a conservative Republican from California, as a successor whose loyalties seem clear. And unlike the Supreme Court, where Justice Souter has a lifetime appointment, the S.E.C. provides the White House with an immediate opportunity to tip the balance of the five-person commission in a more favorable direction.
Mr. Cox – a devoted student of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism – has a long record in the House of promoting the agenda of business interests that are a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s political and financial support.
A major recipient of contributions from business groups, the accounting profession and Silicon Valley, he has fought against accounting rules that would give less favorable treatment to corporate mergers and executive stock options. He opposes taxes on dividends and capital gains. And he helped to steer through the House a bill making investor lawsuits more difficult.

Can’t say Cox didn’t come through as promised, eh?
One has to wonder if McCain would have dared call for Cox’s firing if he hadn’t definitively nailed down conservative activist support with his Veep selection of Sarah Palin. As it is, there’s still some grumbling on the Right about McCain’s opportunism in blaming poor ol’ Chris Cox for the financial crisis.