It’s been obvious for a while that attacks on Barack Obama for favoring “redistribution of wealth” and other “socialist” beliefs is the final gambit of the McCain-Palin campaign. They’re reached this essentially ridiculous position for a variety of reasons:
(1) It’s highly congenial to conservative “base” voters, who think virtually all Democrats are “socialists,” and who also view much of the New Deal/Great Society legacy as “socialist.”
(2) It’s also arguably persuasive to some swing voters, who may not like or trust either candidate, and are trying to figure out who represents the greatest risk.
(3) It intersects with the McCain campaign’s heavily tax-and-budget based approach to the economy, which it is intensifying in the absence of anything much to say about what he would do to deal with the actual economic crisis the country faces.
(4) It also intersects with the sleazier aspects of the McCain/GOP/conservative assault on Obama, aimed at painting him as a dangerous radical who “pals around with terrorists” and is secretly close to anti-American, black nationalist, and perhaps even Jihadist Islamic elements.
So anything Obama’s ever said and done that can be twisted into support for “redistribution of wealth” is being avidly promoted by the GOP. The latest example is a 2001 Chicago public radio intereview in which Obama the law professor discusses the reluctance of the judicial branch to engage in “redistributive” efforts.
This is really, really a reach, as Obama legal advisor Cass Sunstein explains at The New Republic. Obama was in fact articulating approvingly a conservative legal theory about the hamhanded nature of direct judicial intervention into social policies that don’t involve fundamental rights:

In answering a caller’s question, he said that the court “is just not very good at” redistribution. Obama added, with approval, that the Constitution “is generally a charter of negative liberties.”
Obama’s principal claim–about the institutional limits of the courts–was made by many conservatives (including Robert Bork) in the 1960s and 1970s: Courts should not attempt to guarantee “positive” rights, or interpret the Constitution to redistribute wealth. Obama is squarely rejecting the claim that was made by many liberal lawyers, professors, and judges at the time–and that is being made by some today.

So this latest attempt to show that Obama’s a “socialist” is almost completely bogus.
But facts aside, there are two other reasons these sort of attacks aren’t getting much traction.
First of all, most Americans generally understand that there are a variety of longstanding and very popular policies in this country that involve “redistribution of wealth” to some extent or other. Certainly Medicare and Medicaid aren’t “pay as you go” programs. Nor is public education. And the basic principle of progressive taxation is inherently redistributive.
Second of all, we are at a point in U.S. history when upper-income and corporate complaints about “redistribution” are going to fall on an awful lot of deaf ears, given the consequences of regressive conservative economic policies over the last eight years. As I noted in an earlier post about progressive taxation, a majority of Americans right now appear to actually support the use of the tax code to redistribute wealth from the rich to lower-and-middle class folk, which is what Obama is unfairly being accused of covertly supporting.
In general, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attack lines on “redistribution” and “socialism” are poorly timed, as were earlier efforts to brand Obama as an “extreme liberal.” This is one election cycle where given the choice between the economic policy status quo and a more liberal approach, “change” is the preferred option regardless of how it is mischaracterized with alarmist terms.

Amidst sinking poll numbers for his running-mate, and considerable criticism of his choice of Sarah Palin from conservatives, John McCain’s “amazed” at all the buyer’s remorse. So amazed, in fact, that he’s engaged in a bit of hyperbole in describing Palin’s qualifications:

John McCain called out fellow Republicans who have questioned running mate Sarah Palin’s credentials Tuesday.
“What’s their problem?” McCain asked during an interview with radio host Don Imus.
“She is a governor, the most popular governor in America,” McCain said. “I think she is the most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president.”

Now that’s an interesting claim. If McCain means Palin is the most qualified of all recent vice presidential candidates, then he’s saying she more qualified than former White House Chief of Staff, Congressman, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney; former Congressman and Senator Al Gore; and his own reputed favorite for vice president, Joe Lieberman.
If he’s saying she’s the most qualified Governor to run recently for vice president, well, that’s another thing. The last sitting Governor to appear in the second spot on a major-party ticket was Spiro T. Agnew in 1968. Palin may well be more qualified than ol’ Ted, who we now know was accepting brown bags stuffed with cash from road contractors before, during and after his first Veep bid.
Want to guess the last time a sitting Governor ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket? 1924, when William Jennings Bryan’s younger brother, Charlie, then Governor of Nebraska, ran with John W. Davis in one of the great electoral disasters of the twentieth century.

Byron York of National Review spent some time at a McCain rally in Northern Virginia, and came away with a very revealing look at the strange relationship between the GOP base and, well, objective reality.
Wonder why McCain and Palin are still beating the Joe the Plumber drum despite the abundant evidence that the whole “story” is a complete scam? York explains it:

In recent days, the Joe the Plumber phenomenon has taken on a deeper meaning for McCain’s audiences…. [H]e is a symbol of their belief that Barack Obama is going to raise their taxes, regardless of what Obama says about hitting up only those taxpayers who make more than $250,000 a year. They know Wurzelbacher doesn’t make that much, and they know they don’t make that much. And they’re not suspicious because they believe that someday they will make $250,000, and thus face higher taxes. No, they just don’t believe Obama right now. If he’s elected, they say, he’ll eventually come looking for taxpayers who make well below a quarter-million dollars, and that will include them.

York goes on to explain at some length that these base voters are angry at “the media” for “investigating” the facts about Joe the Plumber. Stands to reason, if you think about it: Who cares about “facts” when Joe was really unveiling the deeper truth that Obama wants to raise his taxes no matter what he’s saying about it?
There’s a lot of this “thinking” going at present, and McCain and Palin are clearly responding to it. “Obama’s a socialist!” we hear over and over from grassroots conservatives. He would not only raise taxes on the middle class, but would give “welfare” to deadbeats who don’t pay income taxes, through refundable tax credits. And his “socialized medicine” plan would crucify small businessmen (sic!) like Joe (sic!) the Plumber (sic!).
In reality, Obama’s tax plan would place rates pretty much where they were under the Clinton administration, when the economy created not only the most astonishing number of very wealthy people in American history, but the first mass upper middle class in human history. Refundable income tax credits for people with no income tax liability, but with payroll tax liability (the larger tax burden for a majority of working Americans) was an idea once championed by that well-known socialist Ronald Reagan, and initially pioneered by another lefty, Richard Nixon. Obama’s health care plan is based on expanding private health insurance, against the advice of a clear majority of Democratic health care wonks who favor a single-payer system. And small businesses are generally exempted from its coverage mandates.
But once you have decided that Barack Obama’s actual proposals are irrelevant to what you “know” are his “real” intentions, all these objections are just annoying distractions from truthiness. And hence the fury at the news media for “protecting” Obama with facts that are actually lies.
No wonder the McCain-Palin campaign continues to serve up half-truths and outright lies about Obama, or that the really crazy stuff–Obama’s a secret Muslim, or secret terrorist, or an agent of the Antichrist–seems to lurk right under the surface at every GOP grassroots gathering.
I did a radio show recently in which another guest–a Republican as it happened–suggested that McCain’s handlers know his candidacy is doomed, and are focused on keeping the base excited in order to put a floor under his numbers and avoid a down-ballot landslide. I was skeptical at the time, but the theory is beginning to make sense. The truthiness-gone-wild at the core of the GOP effort, which makes the smears of past Democratic candidates look like patty-cake, isn’t working among persuadable voters, and McCain doesn’t have the resources to outshout the Obama campaign with a parallel-universe story line about the candidates, even if the fundamentals of the election weren’t so damning to his case.

After writing my last two posts, about the ludicrous Joe the Plumber scam and the probably-bogus “tightening presidential contest,” I had a dark thought. What if McCain somehow pulls this out? My God, it’ll be attributed to Joe the Plumber! And we’ll see a lot more of this kind of stupid stunt in the future.”
Due to the eternal popularity of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy (after this, therefore because of this), which confuses coincidence with causation, copy-catting questionable political gimmicks is a very common phenomenon.
A good example was the “abolish the car tax” message adopted by 1997 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jim Gilmore (the very man who’s running a hopeless Senate campaign against Mark Warner this year, after a brief and largely invisible presidential bid). Gilmore went on to crush Democratic rival Don Beyer (a car dealer, ironically), and for several years, Republicans running in virtually every state that had any sort of tax on automobiles made “abolishing the car tax” a centerpiece of their campaigns. Someone finally noticed that it wasn’t working much of anywhere, and the mania finally abated.
In retrospect, there were plenty of reasons Gilmore won in 1997, but it was far too easy to focus on the gimmick and go with it.
An even more vivid example of questionably successful gimmickry, similar in its fundamental stupidity to the Joe the Plumber furor, occurred in my home state of Georgia in 1992. A Republican warhorse, Paul Coverdell, was running against incumbent Democratic Senator Wyche Fowler. For most of the campaign, Fowler maintained a large and steady lead in the polls. One day, according to the legend, a beehived grandmother from South Georgia named Margie Lopp called up Coverdell HQ and sang them a campaign jingle she had composed.
Now Margie’s jingle was not only content-free (its deepest line was : “Let’s put Paul Coverdell in the Senate and put Wyche Fowler out!”), but gratingly annoying in a bad nursery rhyme sort of way. For whatever reason, the Coverdell campaign made it the sole sum and substance of about ten thousand radio and television ads. Political observers universally mocked it, and even Coverdell’s staff later admitted they were flooded with calls from supporters complaining about it.
But lo and behold, on Election Night, Coverdell ran surprisingly well, and though Fowler ran ahead of him, an archaic Georgia law requiring a majority of the general election vote for victory knocked the incumbent into a rare runoff. I’ll never forget watching local election coverage from the Coverdell party, where a gaggle of young Republicans were defiantly singing the Lopp classic. Coverdell went on to win the runoff (thanks mainly to a predictably small turnout), and headed to the Senate, where his main accomplishment was quarterbacking the Senate Republican fight against health care reform. Post hoc ergo poster hoc: Margie beat Wyche Fowler, and indirectly, Hillary Clinton.
As it happens, Coverdell’s win, despite the polls, wasn’t that surprising. Aside from the weird 50% requirement, Georgia was beginning its big trend towards the GOP about then (Bill Clinton won the state very narrowly in the presidential contest that year). And Fowler, a good and relatively progressive Democrat, had a bad habit of personally antagonizing key voting blocs (his hostile interaction with gay/lesbian activists led a significant number of Atlantans to vote Libertarian, feeding Fowler’s non-majority). My guess is that Coverdell didn’t win so much as Fowler lost. But like Gilmore’s car-tax gimmick, Coverdell’s Lopp jingle was the most obvious factor that accompanied his surprise win.
I recently ran across a semi-academic article quoting Coverdell campaign staff as suggesting that the jingle boosted their candidate’s name ID in an insidious way. I suppose this is the same theory by which some advertisers deliberately screen obnoxious ads that consumers at least remember (a theory I try to fight by, for example, swearing I will never buy insurance from GEICO until it not only kills but apologizes for its interminable “caveman” series). But it’s a dubious proposition at best.
There’s an interesting denouement to this saga. Coverdell died suddenly in 1999, and Roy Barnes appointed then-Democrat Zell Miller to the Senate seat. Miller had to face the voters for the remainder of Coverdell’s term in 2000, and his Republican opponent, Mack Mattingly (the very man that Fowler beat in 1986 to get to the Senate in the first place) dutifully brought Margie Lopp on board to compose a jingle. Mattingly lost decisively.
Maybe I’m looking at this whole thing in the wrong way. If John McCain does pull an upset, and Joe the Plumber gets the credit, then quite likely a whole host of future GOP politicians will slavishly imitate the stunt, with contrived and even imaginary “real people” exemplifying the sturdy folk virtues and heartland values of conservatism. I can’t imagine a better formula for big Democratic gains in the future.

Gaze in awe:

John McCain hung his final presidential debate performance on an Ohio plumber who campaign aides never vetted.
A day after making Joseph Wurzelbacher famous, referencing him in the debate almost two dozen times as someone who would pay higher taxes under Barack Obama, McCain learned the fine print Thursday on the plumber’s not-so-tidy personal story: He owes back taxes. He is not a licensed plumber. And it turns out that Wurzelbacher makes less than $250,000 a year, which means he would receive a tax cut if Obama were elected president.

The selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate isn’t looking like such an aberration anymore.
But the really weird thing today is that McCain and his backers are still talking about Joe the Plumber as though his story is not only legitimate, but iconic. As I noted yesterday, this is a particularly extreme example of the eternal Republican effort to put a middle-class face on fisal policies designed to relieve the wealthy of tax liabilities. Having found their white-male-from-Ohio poster boy for regressive taxes, they aren’t going to let go of him even though he’s pretty much a fraud. Indeed, some are even using ol’ Joe to reinforce the mood of self-pity and victimization that has infected conservatism so profoundly this year. Here’s the reliably obnoxious Michelle Malkin:

Obama-Biden simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic ticket as socialist overlords. And so a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.
The left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.

So here’s a guy who gets himself on televison (and right-wing talk radio) by making up an imaginary identity for himself and confronting a presidential candidate with a pack of lies. John McCain refers to him twenty-one times in a debate, as though his gripping tale of fiscal woe provides the irrefutable evidence of Obama’s socialist perfidy. And anyone who has an issue with that is a “thug.”
Why not just design an avatar and name it “White Working Class Voter” and parade it across the airwaves? Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what Joe the Plumber has become.

You couldn’t say it any better than did Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman, when he responded to the shared lament of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin while she was being interviewed on his radio program that the MSM was trying to shut her up. Bookman replies:

No, Gov. Palin, the media don’t want you to shut up. To the contrary, every media outlet in the country is begging you to appear on their show. If you want to go on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Late Edition, if you want to hold your first actual press conference, if you want to join the free-for-all tomorrow night spinning the aftermath of the presidential debate, the media would welcome you with open arms.
Speak, Sarah. Speak. If you care so much about this great country, tell the McCain campaign to stop stifling you and speak.
And yet she doesn’t. The “pitbull with lipstick” runs and hides.

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.

As the McCain campaign has ramped up its attacks on Barack Obama for his connection with William Ayers, Democrats have debated various ways to fight back.
Here’s a really good approach, written by Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman. The author is not an Obama spokesperson, and even thinks Obama should have condemned Ayers more forcefully than he did. But he very dramatically exposes the shameless hypocrisy and dishonesty behind the McCain attacks. His argument is calm, reasoned and logical enough to convince moderates but is at the same time sharp and powerful enough to use in even the most free-swinging debates with McCain campaign spokespeople.
Here’s how Chapman starts off:

Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology — and who has never shown remorse or admitted error? When the candidate in question is Barack Obama, John McCain says no. But when the candidate in question is John McCain, he’s not so sure.
Obama has been justly criticized for his ties to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, who in 1995 hosted a campaign event for Obama and in 2001 gave him a $200 contribution. The two have also served together on the board of a foundation. When their connection became known, McCain minced no words: “I think not only repudiation but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people.”
What McCain didn’t mention is that he has his own Bill Ayers — in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk-show host, Liddy spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him.

Was Liddy really a dangerous criminal extremist who advocated violence? Here’s how Media Matters for America summarizes his record:

Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in “if necessary”; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a “gangland figure” to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap “leftist guerillas” at the 1972 Republican National Convention (The murder, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the Watergate break-ins were.)
During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents…On one show he said “Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests. … Kill the sons of bitches.” On another he recommended shooting ATF agents in the groin.

How close are McCain and Liddy? As Chapman says:

At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy’s home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator’s campaigns — including $1,000 this year.
Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as “an old friend,” and McCain sounded like one. “I’m proud of you, I’m proud of your family,” he gushed. “It’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”

Chapman concludes his column as follows:

Given Liddy’s record, it’s hard to see why McCain would touch him with a 10-foot pole. On the contrary, he should be returning his donations and shunning his show. Yet the senator shows no qualms about associating with Liddy — or celebrating his service to their common cause.
How does McCain explain his howling hypocrisy on the subject? He doesn’t. I made repeated inquiries to his campaign aides, which they refused to acknowledge, much less answer. On this topic, the pilot of the Straight Talk Express would rather stay parked in the garage.
That’s an odd policy for someone who is so forthright about his rival’s responsibility. McCain thinks Obama should apologize for associating with a criminal extremist. To which Obama might reply: After you.

If anything, the truth is that McCain’s connection to Liddy is vastly more direct and troubling than Obama’s serving on a foundation board with Ayers. After all, Obama forcefully repudiated Ayers violence while McCain essentially justifies Liddy. To be sure, there are many other ways to challenge the McCain attacks floating around right now, but this approach has a lot to offer. Dems can post it on web discussions, send it to editors and commentators or use it in face-to-face debates. It offers compelling proof that McCain’s embrace of this line of attack is a cynical desperation move and not a sincere political argument.