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.

George Will’s column, “McCain’s Closing Argument,” appearing today in WaPo and zillions of other newspapers, urges the GOP nominee to make the old ‘virtues of bipartisan government’ argument as his trump card. It’s a clever strategy, and would be more effective if Will had not gone public with it and instead coached McCain to roll it out in the final presidential debate, catching Senator Obama off guard.
McCain will make the argument. He has to, although not only in the debates. He may roll it out even sooner, hoping to get a meme going. The danger for Democrats is that it is an argument that has some appeal for moderates. Will knows Obama will now have a response ready, which will include a couple of key points.
One counter-argument is that there are not two, but three branches of government, including the judiciary, which was conveniently not mentioned by Will. In fact, the ‘virtues of divided government’ argument is misleading for that reason. The only way we could ever have an evenly divided government is for the Supreme Court to have an even number of members, instead of nine.
After eight years of Republican judicial appointments, the U.S. Supreme Court and federal judgeships are already drifting too far to the right. Four or eight more years of GOP domination of the judiciary could be disastrous for women, unions, working people, consumers, the environment and civil liberties.
But it’s not just the judiciary. Eight years of Republican control has also transformed all of the federal departments and agencies into rubber stamps for the worst policies of corporate management, serving the super-wealthy and privileged at the expense of working people. Senator Obama can respond to good effect “What would America look like after 16 years of Republican control of the executive and judicial branches of government?”, with the current meltdown as exhibit “A.”
As the nation’s most widely-read columnist, Will’s real goal in promoting the ‘virtues of divided government’ argument is to generate buzz among the electorate in living rooms and at water-coolers across the nation. No doubt the buzz is already rolling. Democratic candidates, campaigns and ad-makers should be ready with the rebuttal.

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.

So Obama’s haul for August wasn’t $100 million, or even $80 million. I guess they aren’t actually printing money in Chicago.
Too bad.
But Obama did raise $66 million last month, shattering his own record of $55 million from back in February. The campaign added 500,000 new donors, took in contributions from 2.5 million contributors overall, and finished the month with $77 million cash on hand.
All of which is great, but might not be good enough.
Andrew Romano writes this for Newsweek:

The important statistic to look at is the combined amount of cash-on-hand for each candidate and his party (i.e, how much is actually available to spend on getting the nominee elected). Obama may rake in more than McCain, but he also spends more. Plus the RNC, which is handling its nominee’s ground game, vastly outraises the DNC. So here’s the math. In August, the McCain campaign managed to net a record $47 million for its coffers and another $22 million for the party, finishing the month with more than $100 million on-hand–money that it has now turned over to the Republican Party. It has also accepted $84.1 million in public financing from the federal government. Combined with the RNC’s $100 million projected haul over the next two months–all Republican cash now goes to the party, not the campaign–that should leave McCain with about $300 million to spend before Nov. 4. Except for the occasional RNC fundraiser, he barely has to lift a finger to get it. He can spend his time wooing voters instead.

Is this right?
Yes and no.
First, we shouldn’t assume that Obama’s fundraising is going to peak in August — far from it. In fact, we already have some indication of how this new month is going to look for the campaign. The day after Sarah Palin spoke at the Republican National Convention, the Obama camp announced that it had raised $10 million in 24 hours. Today we learned that the campaign raised $11 million at a posh fundraiser in California in the span of a couple of hours last night. A big chunk of that Hollywood money is going into the coffers of the DNC, but at this point, that hardly matters. Even for the Obama campaign $21 million dollars in just two days is astounding. And I’m absolutely positive that the September 26th debate in Oxford, Mississippi will be another jaw-dropping night for fundraising.
Second, part of the reason the McCain camp was able to take the federal money is because the campaign is choosing to outsource its ground operation to the Republican National Committee, which simply doesn’t plan to field a turnout effort as extensive as the one being built by the Obama camp. That choice reflects a definite difference in priorities between the two camps. Republicans are gambling that they can win this election from the top down: controlling news cycles, funding extensive TV advertising, and fielding a 48 hour GOTV program that has been successful in the past. The Obama campaign is waging everything on winning from the ground up: they’re training and organizing volunteers, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters, microtargeting persuadable demographics, and planning to win the election the same way the won the primary — by making sure all their voters show up at the polls. Even still, they’re spending as much as McCain on TV advertising in almost every battleground state (except Pennsylvania and Minnesota) and spending far more than McCain in some states like Virginia.
At this point, I still pretty good about betting money on Obama.

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.

Thomas Frank has a WSJ article , “Get Your Class War On” urging Dems to recognize the GOP’s culture war offensive as a “debased form of class war.” Frank urges Dems to stop already with “the same feeble counterattacks that failed them last time, prudishly correcting misleading GOP advertisements and crying for the recess monitor when the other side plays dirty.” He calls on Dems to reveal McCain-Palin and the GOP as toadies for the fat cats who are responsible for the current meltdown.
Michael Kinsley has a right-on-time Slate.com article documenting the Democrats’ superior record on managing the economy.
Jonathan Haidt attempts to answer a complex question at Alternet.com, “What Makes People Vote Republican?“, and he ignites a heated discussion.
The Campaign for America’s Future launches a project to mobilize public support for making the upcoming presidential debates substantive. In this audio clip of the press briefing, Robert Borosage, Katrina vanden Heuval, James Rucker and Paul Waldman explain The Campaign’s ad series calling for “a debate worthy of a great nation in crisis.”
Waldman’s article “How to Win a Presidential Debate” in The American Prospect ruminates on what endures in the minds of voters after it’s all been said. Hint: It has to do with expectations, zingers and gaffes.
Pollster.com‘s Mark Blumenthal reports on some nasty message testing and push polls that may provide a glimpse into GOP strategy for the next few weeks.
Open Left has a worrisome post “Why We Have Two Weeks To Win Or Lose This Election: Early Voting ” by ‘avenged savant,’ a former administrator of Arizona’s pioneering early voting program, pointing out that voting actually starts on October 1 and John McCain knows how to play the early voting game better than anyone. Hopefully the Obama campaign is on the case. But it may be that voters who make up their mind even before the debates were not persuadable anyway.
Hard to see how David Brooks can credibly endorse McCain after his op-ed yesterday.
Marie Horrigan of CQPolitics reports that recent polls indicate that Sen. Kay Hagan now has an even chance to take Elizabeth Dole’s Senate seat. Horrigan points out that Dole is ranked by the nonpartisan website Congress.org “as the 93rd most effective of the current senators.” The Swing State Project agrees that Dems have a good shot at a pick-up in NC.
Journalists alert: If you’re having trouble crafting some substantive questions for Sarah Palin, The Nation‘s Katha Pollit has some help right here.
With Michigan shaping up as a major battleground state, Carrie Dann at MSNBC’s First Read reports on a Democratic lawsuit against the MI GOP and allegations of an effort to disenfranchise voters whose homes have been foreclosed.
Ruth Marcus’s “True Whoppers” in today’s WaPo raises questions about McCain’s basic integrity and makes an interesting comment on the “lure of false symmetry” for journalists in criticizing campaigns and candidates.

<NOTE: This item is a post from TDS Co-Editor William Galston>
TO: SEN. BARACK OBAMA
FROM: WILLIAM GALSTON
SUBJ: ADJUST OR LOSE
I’ll get right to the point: You are in danger of squandering an election most of us thought was unlosable. The reason is simple: on the electorate’s most important concern – the economy — you have no clear message, and John McCain has filled the void with his own.
This is more than my opinion. The Democracy Corps survey released yesterday proves the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Backed by a wealth of persuasive detail, here is the nub of their conclusion:

In the absence of a coherent change message from Obama, many voters are accepting McCain’s definition, particularly since they want to change Washington and clean up government. As a result, Obama has lost his double-digit advantage over McCain on the right kind of change.

When I say you have no message, here’s what I mean:
First, you are not offering a coherent account of what has gone wrong with the economy – why it is no longer working for average families. People are anxious and bewildered; they want to know why jobs are disappearing, why incomes are stagnating, and why prices are soaring. If you don’t offer an explanation, McCain’s will carry the day by default: the problem is the corrupt, self-interested politicians in Washington; the solution is getting them – and government in general – out of the way.
Second: you are not offering a focused, parsimonious list of remedies for the economic ills you cite. As a result, few if any voters can actually cite a single signature economic proposal you have made. It’s not that you don’t have ideas. If anything, you have too many. At some point, more becomes less, and you are well beyond that point. You need to decide which three or four economic proposals are most important and repeat them relentlessly for the next seven weeks.
Your campaign already contains everything you need to do this. You could offer a focused economic message with four elements: rebuilding the United States, with an infrastructure bank, generating millions of good jobs that can’t be outsourced; creating millions more jobs by leading the world in environmental innovation; significantly reducing the tax burden on average families; and offering health insurance to everyone at a price they can afford. If you say that about your economic plan – and nothing else – from now until November, there’s a good chance your message will get through.
Third: you are not drawing crisp, punchy contrasts between your plans and McCain’s. An example: the centerpiece of his health care plan is the taxation of employer-provided health care benefits. Pound away at that, and let him explain why throwing workers into the individual health insurance market unprotected is such a wonderful idea. And by the way, while your plan would increase coverage, his would do the opposite. Is that the change Americans want?
Fourth: your stump speech is too long and discursive. It shouldn’t last more than fifteen minutes, it should focus on your agenda, not today’s news story, it should feature short, declarative sentences, and it should leave no doubt about what you care about the most. Right now, regrettably, few Americans believe that you feel real passion about their economic plight and are willing to wage a tough fight on their behalf. It’s your job to convince them otherwise, and you don’t have much time to do it.
A message is a thought not only sent, but also received and understood. If your hearers aren’t getting it, it’s not a message. The essence of political speech is functional, not aesthetic. It is a tree judged by its fruit, and the fruit is persuasion. Right now you’re not persuading the people you need to persuade, and nothing else matters.
Fifth: there’s no coordination between an economic message and the rest of your campaign. If you want the focus to be on the economy, that’s what your paid advertising and your surrogates should be doing as well.
Attacking McCain for employing lobbyists is a waste of precious time and resources; it plays on his turf and accepts his definition of the problem. Moreover, It diverts attention from the core issue – 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. So far, while the McCain campaign has gone for the jugular, you’ve gone for the capillaries.
Some Americans won’t support you because they think you’re too young and inexperienced to be president, or that you’re too liberal, or not patriotic enough, or because you might raise taxes, or because you’re African-American. That’s inevitable. The good news is that by themselves, these Americans are not a majority. The bad news is that they might become part of a majority if they are joined by the many Americans who are open to supporting you but are turning away because they don’t hear you speaking to their concerns in a manner that they can understand.
This is not about you alone; it’s a matter of political responsibility. Millions of Americans have invested their hopes and dreams in you, and you owe it to them to campaign effectively, which isn’t happening right now. Yes, the McCain campaign is replete with exaggerations, evasions, and outright fabrications. It’s your responsibility to defeat them, not complain about them. If this means listening to advice you don’t want to hear, and getting out of the “comfort zone,” so be it.
Three months ago, when you were riding high, the McCain campaign was flat on its back. But give McCain credit: when he was told that to win he had to change, he did. He focused, and he accepted a kind of discipline that he had previously resisted. Now it’s your turn.

It is to be profoundly hoped that health care becomes a significant issue in the balance of the presidential campaign, and that due attention is paid to John McCain’s health care plan. Here’s the conclusion of an analysis of that plan in the policy journal Health Affairs:

Achieving Senator McCain’s vision would radically transform the U.S. health insurance system. His plan would alter the nature, source, and financing of coverage for the nearly 160 million Americans who now receive health insurance through their employers. We estimate that twenty million Americans–about one in every eight people with job-based coverage–would lose their current coverage as a result of the change in the tax treatment of coverage. Initially, this loss of job-based coverage would be offset by an increase in coverage in the nongroup market (although not necessarily for the same individuals). Within five years, however, the net effect of the plan is expected to be a net reduction in coverage relative to what would have been observed if the tax treatment of employer-sponsored coverage remains as it is now. The decline of job-based coverage would force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system–the nongroup market–where cost sharing is high and covered services are limited. Senator McCain’s proposal to deregulate this market would mean that people in it would lose protections they now have. These changes would diminish the security of coverage for most Americans, especially those who are not–or someday will not be–in perfect health.

Be forewarned.

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.”