Like John McCain, I’d have to admit that I don’t know a whole lot about economics. Sure, I took a couple of pie-chart economics courses in college way back in the day, and have tried to self-educate myself on the subject ever since. During my DLC days, I probably got too enamored with the New Economy hype, though the technological transformation of our country’s economic opportunities remains important, particularly to progressives who are very invested in the idea that the knowledge and skills of American workers generally have become critical capital assets.
But today I’d like to offer a couple of important reads about the economy, The first is a scary explanation of the current financial crisis from Time magazine, by Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan. The second is a short post by an economist calling him- or herself KNZN, which points out that net job loss figures vastly underestimate the number of people who have actually lost jobs, and may well have taken worse jobs.
The first offering is alarming enough to keep you awake, and the second is short and to the point. We all need an economics tuneup in these perilous days.

One of John McCain’s real assets going into this election cycle was an unusually positive image among political reporters and pundits, dating back to his careful cultivation of them during his 2000 campaign. Indeed, the role of the media in boosting his political prospects was the subject of a much-discussed (among Democrats, at least) book published earlier this year, by David Brock and Paul Waldman, entitled Free Ride.
Well, McCain’s media fan club has been notably shrinking of late, as nicely summarized by Steve Benen on the occasion of Elizabeth Drew’s disavowal of her past positive feelings about the Arizonan:

McCain is certainly losing friends fast, isn’t he? Drew’s condemnation comes just a couple of days after Richard Cohen’s. Which came a couple of days after Stephen Chapman’s. Which followed Michael Kinsley, Thomas Friedman, Sebastian Mallaby, Joe Klein, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Ruth Marcus, Mark Halperin, and Bob Herbert. Even David Brooks is getting there.
All admired John McCain, all held him in the highest regard, and all have been disgusted as McCain has descended into a Republican hack.

There’s still David Broder, I suppose. But by and large, McCain’s support group is now limited to the conservative advocacy media, most of whose members would be a lot happier if they were thumping the tubs for Mitt Romney.
Will this matter in the real world? Hard to say. At a minimum, the MSM’s growing reluctance to give McCain some sort of personal-honor mulligan could exert a slightly restraining influence over the precise depths of nastiness to which his campaign ultimately descends. During the debates, where media ratings typically have an modest but real effect on how voters perceive the performance of candidates, McCain will not benefit like George W. Bush did in 2000 and 2004 from the personal hostility of reporters and pundits towards his opponent.
Team McCain may, of course, simply incorporate media disdain into its panoply of Evil Forces that their candidate is fighting to vanquish, much as they did during the roll-out of the Palin selection. A full-fledged Nixon-Agnew-style assault on the MSM would definitely please “the base,” along with the Fox News types who want to remake the media world in their own image. But that’s a tricky business, which could backfire by making the MSM, long the validator of McCain’s “maverick” street cred, a real and abiding enemy.
The strange thing about this whole phenomenon is the genuine sense of hurt and betrayal exhibited by McCain’s former media friends. It’s been obvious to a lot of us for quite some time that McCain was going to become very McNasty in this general election, as a strategic necessity. It’s what candidates typically do when their party and ideology are jarringly out of step with public opinion–particularly if they are 72 years old and this is their last shot at the brass ring of the presidency.
It says a lot about the McCain Myth that so many smart people thought he’d do less than whatever it took to put himself into a competitive position out of some sort of invincible sense of decency. But now they know better.

Cross-posted from Beliefnet.com.
There’s been a lot of discussion at Beliefnet and elsewhere about the variable impact of cultural issues like abortion in the current presidential campaign. And it’s safe to say most Democrats have concluded that Barack Obama’s prospects for victory depend in no small part on making the contest turn on economic rather than cultural issues.
But it’s not often explained that this presidential election will in fact have greater consequences than most in the past on cutural issues, preeminently abortion, for the simple reason that the U.S. Supreme Court is on the very brink of a conservative revolution that’s been waxing and waning for decades. To put it very simply, the next president will likely be in a position to shape the Court in profound ways. And if John McCain wins, the conservative revolution will prevail, beginning with the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
During a week of heavy airline travel, I finally got around to reading Jeffrey Toobin’s justly acclaimed account of recent developments on the Supreme Court, The Nine.
While usually described as an insider account of life among the Supremes, Toobin’s narrative really concentrates on the steady development, and chronic frustration of, the activist conservative legal movement that began back in the 1970s, which has always been obsessively focused with the goal of overturning Roe. For these determined conservatives, the great outrage of recent decades has been the accession to the Supreme Court of “liberals” appointed by Republican presidents, ranging from Warren and Brennan by Eisenhower, to Blackmun (author of Roe) and Powell by Nixon, to Ford’s one appointment, Stevens, to Kennedy and O’Conner by Reagan, and to Souter by Bush 41.
As Toobin explains, the real watershed moment for conservative legal activists was their successful effort to force the withdrawal of Bush 43’s nomination of Harriet Miers, and the substitution of Samuel Alito, epitomizing their refusal to trust a conservative president to appoint conservative justices, and their demand for unambiguous proof that a prospective Supreme would be willing to reverse past “liberal” decisions, especially Roe.
In an particularly fascinating chapter of The Nine, Toobin shows how very close the Court came to reversing Roe back in 1992, when the defection of O’Conner and (more surprisingly) Kennedy produced the Casey decision that explicitly reaffirmed Roe on a 5-4 vote. Now O’Conner’s gone, and in two decisions involving legislation banning so-called “partial-birth abortion,” Kennedy’s shown himself willing to accept all sorts of legislative undermining of Roe. Three Justices–Thomas, Scalia and Alito–would definitely support an immediate reversal of Roe, and so would Roberts if the votes were there.
That’s why the antiabortion movement specifically, and the Christian Right generally, have made up their minds that John McCain’s election is transcendently important. He’s gone far out of his way to reassure them on judicial appointments–most notably in a May speech at Wake Forest University that adopted every imaginable conservative “dog whistle” on the subject, but also in his Saddleback Forum remarks. The selection of anti-abortion ultra Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate was the clincher.
As Toobin points out, the three Justices most likely to retire during the next four years are Stevens (who is 88 years old), Ginsburg (who has chronic health problems) and Souter (who’s reportedly been wanting to retire for years). These are three of the four “liberals” currently on the Court, and all of them have pretty evidently been hanging on in hopes that the right kind of president would be elected to appoint their successors.
Add it all up, and it’s as certain as anything in politics that the election of John McCain would produce a Supreme Court that will reverse Roe v. Wade, and also consolidate the conservative judicial revolution on a vast array of other subjects, from privacy and civil liberties to employer-employee relations. Indeed, we’d probably have the most judicially active conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s, when the Court battled to block much of the New Deal.
Conservatives understand this, but I’m not sure progressives really do. In the limited realm of abortion policy, it’s pretty clear that anti-abortionists have made gains in recent years due to a status quo that protected most abortion rights, making it difficult for pro-choicers to mobilize voting decisions in their favor.
That could all change this year, and one of the toughest but most important decisions by the Obama campaign will be about whether to make that clear.

The financial meltdown on Wall Street is stimulating some very creative messaging from the McCain campaign. Now, all of a sudden, he and Sarah Palin are depicting themselves as chomping at the bit to get into office and crack down on Wall Street, presumably via some government action.
That’s perfectly understandable from a tactical point of view; the only arrow in Team McCain’s quiver that’s remotely relevant to the current crisis is the threadbare but still effective claim that the Arizonan is a cranky “maverick” who wants to change Washington.
But as both the news media and the Obama campaign are quickly pointing out, McCain’s record on regulation of financial institutions couldn’t be much clearer.
The lede in Michael Shear’s front-page WaPo article today gets right to the heart of the matter:

A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.
Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation’s largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end “reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed” on Wall Street.

Following the same line of argument, Barack Obama yesterday went right after McCain’s record on financial institutions, and tied it to a general philosophy of reflexive deregulation that has been one of the most consistent features of GOP ideology since the 1980s:

Yesterday, Obama seized on what he called McCain’s “newfound support for regulation” and accused his rival of backing “a broken system in Washington that is breaking the American economy.”
In a speech in Golden, Colo., Obama blamed the economic crisis on an “economic philosophy” that he said McCain and President Bush supported blindly.
“John McCain has spent decades in Washington supporting financial institutions instead of their customers,” he told a crowd of about 2,100 at the Colorado School of Mines. “So let’s be clear: What we’ve seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.”

These attack-lines may, of course, get blurred by the he-said she-said dynamics of the presidential campaign, whereby voters tend to accept the credibility of their favored candidate’s claims about underlying facts, actual facts be damned.
But it can’t be good for McCain that the media and the country have forgotten about pigs-and-lipstick and oil drilling and cultural issues for a few days, as the incumbent administration of his own party struggles to avoid a complete financial collapse, at a time when most Americans were already convinced the economy’s in deep trouble.
In a much-discusssed post yesterday, TDS Co-Editor William Galston argued passionately that Obama needs to get out of tactical day-to-day exchanges with McCain and stick to a simple, comparative account of what he would do to address economic concerns versus what we could expect from any Republican president.
I don’t think the financial crisis qualifies as an emphemeral, flavor-of-the-day controversy. It epitomizes the sense of helplessness of Americans whose current and future economic aspirations are being endangered if not squandered by irresponsible behavior enabled by reflexively pro-business, anti-governent, free-market ideology. It’s a subset of the general refusal of conservatives and the GOP to make the interests of middle-class Americans a priority in a rapidly changing, globalizing economy.
Convincing swing voters that John McCain is part of the economic problem rather than its solution, and is so blinded by ideology that he can’t champion “change,” is now crucial for Obama. I think he understands that, and is adjusting his campaign accordingly. But as Galston points out, there’s no longer any margin for error. If McCain is allowed to get to election day perceived as a credible “safe change” option on the economy, instead of a burgler crying “Stop, Thief!” when his own philosophy produces terrible results, then we may be forced to find out whether Obama’s vaunted ground game can make a big difference.

As we all watch anxiously to see what the various maneuvers of the Fed and the Treasury and Wall Street mean for the rest of us, Matt Yglesias has made a simple but profound point that tends to get lost at times like these:

Unlike the guy who runs Lehman Brothers, the guys who clean the bathrooms in the Lehman Brothers office have, as best one can tell, been doing an excellent job. And yet if the company going under results in everyone involved losing their jobs, the guy who runs Lehman will wind up being better off than the guys who clean the bathrooms. This is because in the United States of America, hard work is the way to get ahead.

This probably sounds like Marxist demagoguery to most conservatives, but Matt’s not arguing for a dictatorship of the proletariat; he’s simply drawing attention to the fatuous nature of moral arguments for free-market ideology.
You can make a good argument that capitalism is far and away the best vehicle yet invented by the human race for the creation of wealth, and wealth, up to a point, does typically trickle down enough so that most people can have access to food, shelter and consumer durables. But unregulated capitalism also tends to produce large booms and busts, with the latter wreaking havoc on people without significant capital assets. And this havoc has little or nothing to do with personal merit, hard work, faith, love of family, or other fine bourgeios qualities. To cite the most extreme example, the (roughly) three of ten Americans thrown out of work during the Great Depression didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic, and it’s hard to argue that they were being punished for any collective sins of self-indulgence, either; those generally were found on Wall Street and amongst the free-market ideologues of the Hoover Administration.
Some conservatives today hold a thinly-disguised opinion that the victims of the housing meltdown were pretty much responsible for their own troubles: they accepted mortgages they weren’t sure they could handle, or gambled on ever-higher home prices to keep them ahead through equity borrowing or resale profits. Never mind that real estate speculation is the national pastime, the most prevalent form of asset-building, and the factor that in the early-to-mid 1980s and from the 90s until quite recently, separated the upwardly mobile sheep from the struggling middle-class goats.
But the impact of a broader market meltdown, of the sort we all fear today, is hard to dismiss as a punishment of the morally deficient. Falling stock prices hit the assets of precisely those righteous, organized savers and investors that conservatives laud so consistently. And a credit crunch, not to mention widescale business failures and rising unemployment (compounding the effect of skyrocketing health care premiums and energy costs), devastate all sorts of people living lives that are, according to conservative ideology, the bedrock of western civilization.
It’s hardly a novel observation that government regulations, a social safety net, and the collective will to override markets when they produce perverse economic and social results, have repeatedly saved capitalism from its excesses. But I can’t recall a recent time when there was such a vast and unsustainable gap between the Republican Party’s commitment to the Golden Calf of unregulated capitalism, and its commitment to “traditional morality,” religious and secular, holding that a life lived well should produce a good life.
So we should think about the janitors of Lehman Brothers, and all sorts of good people who will suffer from the financial meltdown without personal fault. And so, particularly, should “values voters.”

John McCain did two noteworthy things in last night’s aggressively low-key Forum on Service event. First, as Steve Benen at Political Animal points out, McCain rediscovered a national service proposal that he had somehow lost during the last few years. It’s no mystery: most conservative activists (with some honorable exceptions like the late William F. Buckley, Jr.) hate the idea of government-enabled non-military service, either on ideological grounds, or because they identify it (and particularly the AmeriCorps program that McCain’s now praising) with Bill Clinton. Now that conservatives have been definitively propitiated by the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate, it’s apparenly safe for him to indulge in a few of his old heresies, however mildly.
More strikingly, McCain expressed all sorts of admiration for “community organizers”–you know, those useless busy-bodies and agitators that drew so much mockery at the recently-concluded Republican National Convention. McCain deflected his running-mate’s derisive dismissal of community organizers as reflecting an understandably defensive attitude towards criticism of her own experience as mayor of a very small town. This does not, of course, offer much of an excuse for Rudy Giuliani’s nasty, sneering references to community organizers in his “keynote” address the same night as Palin’s speech.
The idea, of course, that McCain can shrug off attacks on Obama and his background made at the RNC as something he had nothing to do with is an insult to anybody who understands how modern party conventions work. His campaign controlled every word said from the podium. And in the extremely unlikely event that Giuliani or Palin somehow ad libbed the remarkalby well-coordinated sneers about community organizers, McCain didn’t have to wait more than a week to make it clear he didn’t agree.
There’s plenty of grounds for suspicion that we’re seeing a pattern here of McCain pretending to take the high road while his surrogates and campaign take the low road. At least with his nasty series of recent attack ads, he’s been forced by law to “approve the message” explicitly. But make no mistake, he’s approved every message, implicitly or explicitly, uttered in his name.

Listening to conservatives right now is a fascinating exercise in cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, many of them are convinced that Sarah Palin has revolutionized not only this election, but American politics and even our cultural life. She’s said to have single-handedly reversed the terrible prospects of congressional Republicans, for example. John McCain can barely stand to be out of her presence.
But on the other hand, she’s still a poor, downtrodden victim, “the object of the most vicious and concerted smear campaign in modern American history,” as one of the bloggers at PowerLine puts it. And the latest whine, predictably articulated by Michael Gerson in his Washington Post column, is that “liberals” are smearing her religion, making her not just a victim, but a martyr.
Like most of the whining about poor (yet triumphant) Palin, Gerson’s piece does not deign to offer a single example of or source for the alleged attacks on Palin’s faith, beyond a sneer about “reporters” asking Palin’s pastor if she’s ever spoken in tongues. “[L]iberals have been drawn, helpless and mesmerized — like beetles to the vivid, blue paradise of the bug zapper — toward criticizing Sarah Palin’s religion,” he says. And then Gerson is off to the races, with several hundreds words of abuse for the “secularists” who don’t know that charismatic Christianity is a big deal these days. The clincher is Gerson’s identification of these unnamed liberals with those who derided the early Christians.
Who? Where? Can we get a name here? A direct quote? Has Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Nancy Pelosi, or David Axelrod mocked Palin’s religion?
As for those “reporters” who asked if Palin had spoken in tongues, how, exactly, does this represent persecution? Sarah Palin is the first self-identified Pentecostal Christian to appear on a national party ticket. Simple questions about the nature of her faith are no more unnatural than the questions asked of Jimmy Carter back in 1976 about his “born-again” evangelicalism, or the questions posed to John F. Kennedy in 1960 about his support for church-state separation. And if Gerson’s right, and pentecostalism is far more typical of Americans than the “liberal Episcopalianism” he sneers at, why should she be offended by non-derisive questions, and hide her light under a bushel?
Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running-mate touched off some of the most excited celebrations on the Christian Right that we’ve seen since the election of Ronald Reagan. Fine, but they can’t have it both ways, touting her as a revolutionary, redemptive figure in American politics and then complaining the minute someone notices that her views on the nexus of politics and faith seem to be central to her appeal to conservatives.
As a Christian myself (though one of those “liberals” that Gerson and other conservatives contemptuously dismiss, in what I might choose to construe as a vicious attack on my religion), Gerson’s column and many others like it exemplify one of the most unsavory characteristics of contemporary conservative Christianity: self-pity combined with vengefulness. The best example is the ludicrous annual rite of “War on Christmas” whining, where Christians who have never suffered a moment of real discrimination in their lives complain about department store signs and launch boycotts to force compliance with their tender sensibilities.
Throughout the history of the Christianity, people have actually suffered and actually died for their faith in Jesus Christ. I seriously doubt that many conservative Christians in America share the phony sense of persecution that their “spokesmen” like Michael Gerson encourage them in, or view themselves as martyrs. Nor should they or anyone else buy into this effort to turn Gov. Sarah Palin into St. Joan of the Tundra, even as she is said to vanquish all foes in her colossal path.

Today’s 9/11 commemorations have created a temporary lull in the McCain campaign’s Fall Offensive of whining about the alleged victimization of Sarah Palin and smearing Barack Obama with tactics that might embarass Karl Rove (if it weren’t his own proteges directing the whole effort). And the Offensive is now so over-the-top that even some conservatives are having second thoughts about it.
Over at National Review’s The Corner blog yesterday, Kathryn Jean Lopez, usually among the most reliable cheerleaders for the ideological and party Cause, expressed unhappiness over the Victim Card, recalling that Palin herself hadn’t liked what she called the “perceived whine” over media sexism by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Lopez’ piece concludes with this interesting prophecy:

[B]efore this election is over, some 25-year-old press aide, or political ally, or candidate is going to innocently refer to the Obama campaign with the phrase “the pot calling the kettle black.” And if GOP complaints about Democrat sexism continue, by then we’ll have lost the moral high ground in the whining wars.

Later in the day, at the same site, Ramesh Ponnuru echoed Lopez’ revulsion:

[T]he Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mongers. Don’t they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness?

On the other hand, there seemed to be no particular concern at The Corner about Team McCain’s broader campaign of substance-free smears against Obama. But to his credit, Ross Douthat, as enthusiastic a Palin booster as you can find, thought the “lipstick” and “sex-ed” ads went over the line and showed weakness rather than strength:

[T]he sex-ed ad…feels more appropriate to a failing, flailing right-wing campaign than a confident, rising conservative ticket….
And even if aspects of the sex-ed claim are technically defensible, the whole thing just feels bullshitty and gross – like a parody of a culture-war ad. I have no problem with campaigning on culture war issues, and God knows Obama has vulnerabilities, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, and this ad falls into the second category.

Since there’s no particular reason to expect the McCain-Palin campaign to clean up its act anytime soon, it will be interesting to see if Whine-and-Smear continues to draw occasional expressions of conservative regret.

One of the more annoying facets of the Cult of Palin that’s been erected over the last two weeks has been the interminable whining by the McCain campaign and the entire conservative commentariat over the alleged “personal attacks” on the vice presidential nominee. Sure, some Democrats and some media observers challenged her qualifications for the high office, but that’s no more “personal” than the identical criticism we would have heard from Republicans had Obama chosen, say, Tim Kaine or Kathleen Sebelius as his running-mate–or for that matter, the identical criticism of Obama’s own credentials. But as part of their longstanding effort to tie the “elitist” Obama to the “elitist” media, Team McCain and its own media allies have artfully filled the airwaves with charges that Democrats and “the liberal media” have sneered at Sarah Palin, her family, her home town, her religion, and–in an unfamiliar pose for conservatives–her gender.
In a Washington Post column today, Michael Kinsley rightly describes the whole thing as a fraud, calling out David Brooks and Bill Kristol by name for making the plenary “elitist snob” charge based on nothing more than random comments by Bill Maher and Marty Peretz, hardly opinion-leaders in the “liberal media” and far from spokesmen for Barack Obama.
This effort to make Gov. Palin some sort of St. Joan of the Tundra being persecuted for her family and faith is especially galling at a time when the McCain campaign, right out in public and with the candidate’s own stamp of approval, is taking a very low road in its attacks on Barack Obama. The latest despicable ad charges him with wanting to subject toddlers to “comprehensive sex education,” referring to Obama’s suggestion that children be taught how to avoid sexual predators.
This ad was the McCain campaign’s response to a wonky Obama speech on education, in which the Democratic nominee belied conservative attacks on him as the captive of teachers unions and bureaucrats by calling for an expansion of charter schools and the institution of merit pay for teachers.
Next time a Republican politician or pundit waxes indignant about imaginary smears against Sarah Palin, he or she should be asked about that McCain ad and others like it. As the Good Book would put it, they have beams in their eyes.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist