The Media Play the Race Card on Obama

The news media have been shamefully stoking the idea that the only way Barack Obama could possibly lose the presidential election is if American racists have their way. Indeed, the fact that Obama isn’t leading in polls by a wide margin “doesn’t make sense … unless it’s race,” says CNN’s Jack Cafferty.

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg says Obama is losing among older white voters because of the “color of his skin.”

Many journalists are so committed to the racism-explains-everything line they are labeling any effective anti-Obama ad as an attempt by John McCain to “viciously exacerbate” America’s “race-fueled angst,” in the words of one New York magazine writer.

For example, a McCain ad noted that Franklin Raines, the Clinton-appointed former head of Fannie Mae who helped bring about the current Wall Street meltdown, advised the Obama campaign. Time’s Karen Tumulty gasped that because Raines is black, McCain is playing the race card.

Why, she wants to know, didn’t McCain attack Obama’s even stronger ties to the even more culpable former Fannie Mae chairman, Jim Johnson, who had to resign from Obama’s vice presidential search team because of his sketchy dealings with mortgage giant Countrywide Financial? “One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black,” Tumulty suggests.

Or another reason might be that the McCain campaign was saving that attack for its next ad, which is what happened.

According to critics, McCain’s “celebrity” ads featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were nothing but tawdry race-baiting because they subliminally played on white America’s fear of black men violating the delicate flowers of white American womanhood. You’d think a cognitive warning bell would have gone off the moment anyone started suggesting that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are icons of chastity.

This spectacle is grotesque. It reveals how little the supposedly objective press corps thinks of the American people — and how highly they think of themselves … and Obama. Obama’s lack of experience, his doctrinaire liberalism, his record, his known associations with Weatherman radical William Ayers and the hate-mongering Rev. Jeremiah Wright: These cannot possibly be legitimate motivations to vote against Obama, in this view.

Similarly, McCain’s experience, his record of bipartisanship, his heroism: These too count for nothing.

Racism is all there is. Obama wins, and America sheds its racial past. Obama loses, and we’re a nation of “Bull” Connors.

Much of the argument for the centrality of race in this election hinges on the so-called Bradley effect. In 1982, Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’ black mayor, was polling well among white voters in the race for California governor. Bradley lost, suggesting that large numbers of whites had lied to pollsters about their intention to vote for him.

I have no doubt that the Bradley effect is real. But the Bradley effect does not reflect racism; it captures voters’ fear of appearing racist. There’s no reason to assume those who lie to pollsters are racists. But for Obama supporters and the media, poll results are some kind of sacred, binding covenant. If voters don’t keep their promise, the media have no problem seeing racism at work.

The media’s obsession with race in this election is probably fueling the Bradley effect. Repeating over and over that voting against Obama is racist only makes non-racist people embarrassed to admit that they plan to vote for McCain.

Another rich irony is that the only racists who matter in this election are the ones in the Democratic Party. News flash: Republicans aren’t voting for the Democratic nominee because they’re Republicans. A new AP-Yahoo News poll claims that racial prejudice is a significant factor among the independents and Democrats Obama needs to win, specifically among Hillary Clinton’s primary voters. According to the pollsters’ statistical modeling, support for Obama may be as much as 6 percentage points lower than it would be if there were no white racism.

I’m skeptical about those findings, as well as the overemphasis on race generally. But to the extent that race is a factor, here’s the richest irony of all: Obama’s problem is with precisely those voters the Democratic Party claims to fight for, working- and middle-class white folks. Of course, Democrats can’t openly complain that their own vital constituency is racist.

If the media were more objective, we’d be hearing a lot more about the racism at the heart of the Democratic Party. (Imagine if the black nominee this year were a Republican!) But such objectivity would cause too much cognitive dissonance for a press corps that defines “racist” as shorthand for Republican and sees itself as the publicity arm of the Obama campaign.

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Biden Bucks His Equity Talk

Two weeks ago, I explored the gap between Barack Obama’s rhetoric on pay equity and the reality of how he pays women in his Senate office. While Obama preaches equal pay for equal work, he does not practice it on Capitol Hill.

Well, it turns out that his running mate, Joe Biden, is even worse.

Based on calculations using Senate pay records posted by LegiStorm.com, a political transparency organization, between October 1, 2007 and March 31, 2008, Obama’s 28 male staffers divided among themselves total payroll expenditures of $1,523,120. Thus, Obama’s average male employee earned $54,397 on an annualized basis.

Obama’s 30 female employees split $1,354,580 among themselves, or $45,152, on average.

Among Obama’s top five highest-paid — and likely most senior — employees, one was female. Among his top 20, seven were women.

All told, for every dollar that Obama paid his average male staffer, his female counterpart made just 83 cents.

As for Biden, his 14 male staffers split a total payroll outlay of $1,077,128.40. So, Biden’s average male employee earned $76,937.74 per annum.

Biden’s 27 female employees divided $1,517,874.47, or $56,217.57, on average.

Among Biden’s top five highest-paid aides, one was a woman. Among the top 20, 11 were women.

All told, for every dollar that Biden paid his average male staffer, his female equivalent made only 73 cents.

This number is significant. Not only does Biden discount women by more than a quarter per dollar paid to men, on average. Biden collides into the standard by which his own campaign berates major companies for alleged pay discrimination.

Beneath the website banner “Fighting for Pay Equity,” Obama-Biden’s women’s issues page complains that, “Despite decades of progress, women still make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. A recent study estimates it will take another 47 years for women to close the wage gap with men at Fortune 500 corporate offices.”

Biden actually pays his average female employees four cents less than the level that triggers outrage on his own campaign’s website!

Nevertheless, Obama and Biden have the gall to go after McCain on this topic. The Democrats Monday launched an ad in Ohio in which Lilly Ledbetter, a Supreme Court litigant on pay equity, attacks McCain because he “opposed a law to give women equal pay for equal work. And he dismissed the wage gap, saying women just need education and training.”

McCain told the Associated Press last April 23: “I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems…This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private-enterprise system.”

Far more important is that McCain actually follows Obama and Biden’s gospel on this issue, almost to a fault.

McCain’s 17 male staffers split $916,914, thus averaging $53,936. His 25 female employees divided $1,396,958 and averaged $55,878.

On average, these figures show, women in John McCain’s Senate office make $1.04 for every dollar a man makes — a full 31 cents higher than Biden pays. (For detailed figures see this chart. I outline my methodology in my previous piece.)

In short, when it comes to implementing pay equity on Capitol Hill, the Democratic nominees talk a great game. However, in a three-way match-up, McCain earns the gold medal while Obama and Biden score silver and bronze, respectively.

To hear Obama and Biden taunt McCain on this issue is like being at the Beijing Olympics and hearing 200-meter butterfly medalists Cseh Laszlo of Hungary (silver) and Matsuda Takeshi of Japan (bronze) tell America’s gold-plated Michael Phelps to go take swimming lessons.

By Deroy Murdock

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Villain Phil

(NRO)  Barack Obama wants to tell a tale about turbulence in the financial markets, and like any good melodrama this story needs a villain. Sen. Obama believes he has found his mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash in the person of Phil Gramm, the candid-to-a-fault former senator from Texas who presided over a major reform of American banking laws a decade ago. Obama here displays a signal failure to understand the convulsions in the markets. And he also fails to identify the guilty parties — which is odd, since some of them used to sign his paycheck back in his community-organizing days and others are among his most important political donors.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 passed the Senate with 90 votes (8 against, 1 absence: John McCain, who supported the legislation) and was signed into law by Bill Clinton. It had little to do with the issues at play in the current crisis: lending standards and the amount of debt banks can take on relative to their equity. The upshot of the Gramm legislation is that it allows financial services companies to diversify their lines of business: Commercial banks can engage in investment banking, banks can offer brokerage services, and you can have an IRA at the same place you have your checking account.

What we have here is a case of what economist Paul H. Rubin calls “folk economics” — value-laden myths that do not reflect financial realities.

It is not at all clear what, if anything, Gramm’s legislation has to do with the current difficulties in the market, other than the fact that Democrats instinctively recoil when they hear the word “deregulation.”

Gramm-Leach-Bliley did not create securitization and collateralized debt obligations. It did not change the rules for banks’ leverage ratios. If anything, Gramm-Leach-Bliley mitigated some risks by allowing financial companies to diversify their businesses, and it is the most diversified firms that are best weathering the storm. Which makes sense: An investment portfolio is more stable the more diversified it is. The firms that have spectacularly imploded have mostly been non-diversified commercial banks, like Countrywide, or pure investment banks, like Lehman Brothers. But the broadly diversified megabanks are enduring — taking a hit from housing, sure, but they have other lines of business to sustain them. And we should not forget: Without the Gramm-Leach-Bliley reforms, Bank of America would have been legally forbidden to take over Merrill Lynch — very possibly leaving taxpayers on the hook for that one, too. Morgan would not have been able to buy Bear Stearns without Gramm’s reforms.

Much more problematic than Gramm-Leach-Bliley is the Community Reinvestment Act, a bit of legislative arm-twisting much beloved by Sen. Obama and his fellow Democrats. One of the reasons so many bad mortgage loans were made in the first place is that Barack Obama’s celebrated community organizers make their careers out of forcing banks to do so. ACORN, for which Obama worked, is one of many left-wing organizations that spent decades pressuring banks and bank regulators to do more to make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets, or credit. These campaigns often were couched in racially inflammatory terms. The result was the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA empowers the FDIC and other banking regulators to punish those banks which do not lend to the poor and minorities at the level that Obama’s fellow community organizers would like. Among other things, mergers and acquisitions can be blocked if CRA inquisitors are not satisfied that their demands — which are political demands — have been met. There is a name for loans made to people who do not have the credit, assets, income, or down payment to qualify for a normal mortgage: subprime.

The bankers cannot blame CRA entirely; they made a lot of bad bets on rising home prices. But CRA did influence lending standards across the banking industry, even in those institutions that are not strictly liable to its jurisdiction. The subprime debacle is in no trivial part the result of lending decisions in which political extortion trumped businesses’ normal bottom-line concerns.

Along with these bad loans, the underlying problem is that there was a bubble in the price of housing — a bubble caused in no small part by politics, in the form of an easy-money/easy-credit policy from the Fed.

It was politics, too, that created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, enabled them to dominate the mortgage market, and implicitly took upon American taxpayers the risks of those business while the rewards were enjoyed, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, by largely Democratic political opportunists, who then gave generously to Democrats, the top recipients of their largesse being: Chris Dodd, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. And it was politics that unwisely nationalized Fannie and Freddie without resolving the underlying moral hazard — private profit, public risk — that makes those institutions problematic. From this Senator Obama takes away the lesson that there has been a failure of the market, and that what is needed is more politics. In this analysis Obama is as wrong as it is possible to be.

The only reason there are returns on investments is that there is risk involved. Obama talks as though the government can create new regulations that will remove risk from the markets. It cannot. Investors sometimes make bad decisions. Businesses sometimes borrow too much money. “Some of these investment banks look like hedge funds, they’re so leveraged,” says one longtime Wall Street hand. But the markets are addressing that problem, too, in their own brutally Darwinian way: That’s why Bank of America is acquiring  Merrill Lynch on the cheap.

Phil Gramm is a fine foil for Obama: a conservative Texan with a furry accent and an unsympathetic demeanor. He’s the perfect symbol — and Obama’s campaign is rooted in nothing but symbolism. The reality is the thousands of dollars in donations from Fannie Mae executives sitting in Obama’s campaign coffers. If Obama wants a villain, he doesn’t have far to look.

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OBAMA: LUCIFER IS MY HOMEBOY

(AC) – It’s another election season, so that means it’s time for Democrats to start uttering wild malapropisms about the Bible to pretend they believe in God!

In 2000, we had Al Gore inverting a Christian parable into something nearly satanic. Defending his nutty ideas about the Earth during one of the debates, Gore said: “In my faith tradition, it’s written in the book of Matthew, where your heart is, there is your treasure also.” And that, he said, is why we should treasure the environment.

First of all, people who say “faith tradition” instead of “religion” are always phony-baloney, “Christmas and Easter”-type believers.

Second, Jesus was making almost the exact opposite point, saying: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth,” where there are moths, rust and thieves, but in heaven, because, Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

I guess that’s the kind of mix-up that can happen when your theological adviser is Naomi Wolf.

Then in 2004, Democratic presidential candidate and future Trivial Pursuit answer Howard Dean told an interviewer that his favorite part of the New Testament was the Book of Job. The reporter should have asked him if that was his favorite book in all three testaments.

And now in 2008, we have Democrats attacking Sarah Palin for being a Christian, while comparing Obama to Jesus Christ. (And not in the sarcastic way the rest of us do.)

Liberals have indignantly claimed that Palin thinks the founding fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which is Olbermannic in the sense that (a) if it were true, it’s trivial, and (b) it’s not true.

Their claim is based on a questionnaire Palin filled out when she was running for governor of Alaska in 2006, which asked the candidates if they were “offended by the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance.” Palin answered: “Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me, and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.”

As anyone can see, Palin was not suggesting that the founding fathers “wrote” the Pledge of Allegiance: She said the founding fathers believed this was a country “under God.” Which, um, it is.

For the benefit of MSNBC viewers who aren’t watching it as a joke, the whole point of the Declaration of Independence was to lay out the founders’ breathtaking new argument that rights came not from the king, but from God or, as the Declaration said, “Nature’s God,” the “Creator.”

That summer, in 1776, Gen. George Washington — a charter member of the founding fathers — rallied his troops, saying: “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves. … The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of the army.”

So Washington not only used the phrase “under God,” but gave us one of the earliest known references to the rights of the “unborn.” That’s right! George Washington was a “pro-life extremist,” just like Sarah Palin.

There is no disputing that a nation “under God” was “good enough” for the founding fathers, exactly as Palin said.

Meanwhile, on the House floor last week, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee compared Palin to Pontius Pilate — and Obama to Jesus. Cohen said: “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor.” Yes, who can forget the Biblical account of how Jesus got the homeless Samaritan to register as a Democrat in exchange for a carton of smokes!

Rep. Cohen would be well-advised to stay away from New Testament references.

As anyone familiar with the New Testament can confirm for him, there are no parables about Jesus passing out cigarettes for votes, lobbying the Romans for less restrictive workfare rules or filing for grants under the Community Redevelopment Act. No time for soul-saving now! First, we lobby Fannie Mae to ease off those lending standards and demand a windfall profits tax on the money-changers in the temple.

David Freddoso’s magnificent new book, The Case Against Barack Obama describes the forefather to “community organizers” like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — the famed Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky is sort of the George Washington of “community organizers.” If there were an America-hater’s Mount Rushmore, Saul Alinsky would be on it. He tried to hire Hillary to work for him right out of Wellesley. A generation later, those who had trained with Alinsky did hire Obama as a community organizer.

In Freddoso’s book, he quotes from the dedication in the first edition of Alinsky’s seminal book, “Rules for Radicals,” where Alinsky wrote:

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: From all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

I suppose it could have been worse. He could have dedicated his book to George Soros.

Even liberals eventually figured out that they shouldn’t be praising Satan in public, so the Lucifer-as-inspiration paragraph was cut from later editions of Alinsky’s book. (But on the bright side, MSNBC adopted as its motto: “Who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which.”)

That’s exactly what happens to most Democratic ideas — as soon as they are said out loud, normal people react with revulsion, so Democrats learn to pretend they never said them: I was NOT comparing Palin to a pig! I did not play the race card! I did not say I would meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions!

Sarah Palin might be just the lucky break the Democrats need. As a staunch pro-lifer, Palin could give Democrats an excuse to steer away from topics they know nothing about, like the Bible, and onto a subject they know chapter and verse, like abortion.

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From the Fact Check Desk: Obama’s New Spanish Language TV Ad Es Erróneo

(PP) – Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has launched a new Spanish-language TV ad that seeks to paint Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as anti-immigrant, even tying the Republican to his longtime conservative talk-radio nemesis Rush Limbaugh.

As first reported by the Washington Post, Obama’s ad features a narrator saying: “They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with…the intolerance…they made us feel marginalized in this country we love so much.”

The screen then shows these two quotes from Limbaugh:

“…stupid and unskilled Mexicans”
—Rush Limbaugh

“You shut your mouth or you get out!”
—Rush Limbaugh

The narrator then says, “John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote…and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families. John McCain…more of the same old Republican tricks.”

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has launched a new Spanish-language TV ad that seeks to paint Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as anti-immigrant, even tying the Republican to his longtime conservative talk-radio nemesis Rush Limbaugh.

As first reported by the Washington Post, Obama’s ad features a narrator saying: “They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with…the intolerance…they made us feel marginalized in this country we love so much.”

The screen then shows these two quotes from Limbaugh:

“…stupid and unskilled Mexicans”
—Rush Limbaugh

“You shut your mouth or you get out!”
—Rush Limbaugh

The narrator then says, “John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote…and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families. John McCain…more of the same old Republican tricks.”

There are some real factual problems with this ad, which is titled “Dos Caras,” or two faces.

First of all, tying Sen. McCain – especially on the issue of immigration reform – to Limbaugh is unfair.

Limbaugh opposed McCain on that issue. Vociferously. And in a larger sense, it’s unfair to link McCain to Limbaugh on a host of issues since Limbaugh, as any even occasional listener of his knows, doesn’t particularly care for McCain.

Second, the quotes of Limbaugh’s are out of context.

Railing against NAFTA in 1993, Limbaugh said, “If you are unskilled and uneducated, your job is going south. Skilled workers, educated people are going to do fine ’cause those are the kinds of jobs NAFTA is going to create. If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people, I’m serious, let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do — let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work.”

Not one of his most eloquent moments, to be sure, but his larger point was that NAFTA would mean that unskilled stupid Mexicans would be doing the jobs of unskilled stupid Americans.

I’m not going to defend how he said it, but to act as if this was just a moment of Limbaugh slurring Mexicans is not accurate. Though again, certainly if people were offended I could understand why.

The second quote is totally unfair. In 2006, Limbaugh was mocking Mexican law, and he wrote:

“Everybody’s making immigration proposals these days. Let me add mine to the mix. Call it The Limbaugh Laws:

“First: If you immigrate to our country, you have to speak the native language. You have to be a professional or an investor; no unskilled workers allowed. Also, there will be no special bilingual programs in the schools with the Limbaugh Laws. No special ballots for elections. No government business will be conducted in your language. Foreigners will not have the right to vote or hold political office.

“If you’re in our country, you cannot be a burden to taxpayers. You are not entitled to welfare, food stamps, or other government goodies. You can come if you invest here: an amount equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage. If not, stay home. But if you want to buy land, it’ll be restricted. No waterfront, for instance. As a foreigner, you must relinquish individual rights to the property.

“And another thing: You don’t have the right to protest. You’re allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our President or his policies. You’re a foreigner: shut your mouth or get out! And if you come here illegally, you’re going to jail.

“You think the Limbaugh Laws are harsh? Well, every one of the laws I just mentioned are actual laws of Mexico today! That’ how the Mexican government handles immigrants to their country. Yet Mexicans come here illegally and protest in our streets!

“How do you say ‘double standard’ in Spanish? How about: ‘No mas!’”

But even if one is uninclined to see Limbaugh’s quotes as having been taken unfairly out of context, linking them to McCain makes as much sense as running a quote from Bill Maher and linking it to Obama.

Asked for backup as to how Obama could link McCain to Limbaugh, the campaign provided this interview with McCain refusing to condemn the Minutemen from from the Kansas City Star:

Q:  ‘Are they a good thing?  The Civil Defense Corps, do you think — do they help in the immigration fight, or not?’

A:  ‘I think they’re citizens who are entitled to being engaged in the process.  They’re obviously very concerned about immigration.’

Q:  ‘Are they helpful?’

A:  ‘I think that’s up to others to judge.  I don’t agree with them, but they certainly are exercising their legal rights as citizens.’

Asked about the “lies” they’re accusing McCain of telling, the Obama campaign provided evidence that McCain in July 2008 told La Raza that he would have voted for the DREAM act, a bill that provides scholarships for the children of illegal immigrants, even thought he earlier in the campaign season said he would have voted against the bill.

Let’s delver further into this.

In the November 2007, Myrtle Beach Sun-News, McCain said of the DREAM Act, which he had cosponsored in the past, “I think it has certain virtues associated with it. And I think other things have virtues associated with it. But the message is they want the borders secured first.”

The newspaper noted that McCain said he’d vote against a temporary worker program, even though he supports the idea. “I will vote against anything until we secure the borders,” he said. “There is no way we’re going to enact piecemeal immigration reform.”

Before La Raza, McCain was asked by a young Latina if he’d support the DREAM Act, and he said, “Yes. Yes.”

The full exchange, however, goes like this:

QUESTIONER: Hi. I’m a part of One Dream 2009 and I am one of the 6 million who either have an undocumented parent or is undocumented and I wanted to know if you would support humanity all around the world and support our Dream Act that we are trying to pass.

MCCAIN: Yes. Yes. Thank you. But I will also enforce the existing laws of a country. And a nation’s first requirement is the nation’s security, and that’s why we have to have our borders secured. But, we can have a way and a process of people obtaining citizenship in this country. And, we cannot penalize people who come here legally and people who wait legally. And so, that’s a fundamental principle on which we have to operate. Thank you.

The Obama campaign also provided a number of seemingly conflicting comments McCain has made about offering greater funding for education programs in the No Child Left Behind act — telling the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in June that he “would fully fund those programs that have never been fully funded,” while not suggesting any greater funding for the bill when he’s talked about education in front of whiter audiences.

That ignores the fact that McCain has suggested reallocating the way the $23 billion for NCLB is spent.

McCain has changed his rhetoric and his emphasis when discussing immigration after almost losing the GOP presidential nomination because of it.

He now says the borders must be secured before anything else happens. And in that, he’s opened himself up to charges of flip-flopping, though the Obama campaign is quoting him selectively and unfairly to make their points.

The greater implication the ad makes, however, is that McCain is no friend to Latinos at all, beyond issues of funding the DREAM act or how NCLB money is distributed. By linking McCain to Limbaugh’s quotes, twisting Limbaugh’s quotes, and tying McCain to more extremist anti-immigration voices, the Obama campaign has crossed a line into misleading the viewers of its new TV ad. In Spanish, the word is erróneo.

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‘A Servant’s Heart’

Sarah Palin killed. And more than killed.

(WSJ) – Much has been said about her speech, but a few points. “The difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick” is pure American and goes straight into Bartlett’s. This is the authentic sound of the American mama, of every mother you know at school who joins the board, reads the books, heads the committee, and gets the show on the road. These women make large portions of America work.

She has the power of the normal. Hillary Clinton is grim, stentorian, was born to politics and its connivances. Nancy Pelosi, another mother of five, often seems dazed and ad hoc. But this state governor and mother of a big family is a woman in a good mood. There is something so normal about her, so “You’ve met this person before and you like her,” that she broke through in a new way, as a character vividly herself, and vividly genuine.

***

Her flaws accentuated her virtues. Now and then this happens in politics, but it’s rare. An example: The very averageness of her voice, the not-wonderfulness of it, highlighted her normality: most people don’t have great voices. That normality in turn highlighted the courage she showed in being there, on that stage for the first time in her life and under trying circumstances. Her averageness accentuated her specialness. Her commonality highlighted her uniqueness.

She seemed wholly different from, and in fact seemed a refutation to, all the men of Washington at their great desks who make rules others have to live by but they don’t have to live by themselves, who mandate work rules from which they exempt Congress, for instance. They don’t live by the rules they espouse. She has lived her expressed values. She said yes to a Down Syndrome child. This too is powerful.

***

What she did in terms of the campaign itself was important. No one has ever really laid a glove on Obama before, not in this campaign and maybe not in his life. But Palin really damaged him. She took him square on, fearlessly, by which I mean in part that she showed no awkwardness connected to race, or racial history. A small town mayor is kind of like a community organizer only you have actual responsibilities. He wrote two memoirs but never authored a major bill. They’ve hauled the Styrofoam pillars back to the Hollywood lot.

This was powerful coming from Baberaham Lincoln, as she’s been called.

By the end, Democrats knew they had been dinged, and badly. After the speech they descended on cable news en masse with the dart-eyed, moist-browed look of the operative who doesn’t believe his talking points. They seemed like they were thinking, “I’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.” Actually they haven’t seen it before in that Palin is something new, but they have seen it before in terms of what she said.

Which gets me to the most important element of the speech, and that is the startlingness of the content. It was not modern conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-ism. It was not a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from the America of 1980.

It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too big, Obama will “grow it”, Congress spends too much and he’ll spend “more.” It was for low taxes, for small business, for the private sector, for less regulation, for governing with “a servant’s heart”; it was pro-small town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.

This was so old it seemed new, and startling. The speech was, in its way, a call so tender it made grown-ups weep on the floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart. But this election is a wild card, because America is a wild card. It is not as it was in ’80. I know where the Republican base is, but we do not know where this country that never stops changing is.

***

It all left me wondering if this campaign is about to take on a new shape, with the old time conservatism on one side, and a smoother, evolved form of the old style liberalism on the other.

It doesn’t get more dramatic, or dramatically drawn, than that.

***

I don’t like the new media war. I don’t like what it has the potential to do to the election, and the country.

The media overstepped. The Republican party resented it. GOP strategists saw a unifying force rising: anger in the base. They too had seen this movie before. They slammed the media. The media shot back: “You’re attacking us for doing our job!”

How did the media overstep? By offending people by going so immediately and so personally into issues surrounding Mrs. Palin’s family. They did not overstep by digging, by deep reporting, by investigating Palin’s professional record.

Campbell Brown of CNN did nothing wrong for instance in pressing a campaign spokesman on Palin’s foreign policy credentials. She was unjustly criticized for following an appropriate and necessary line of inquiry. But endless front page stories connected to Mrs. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin, whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter’s circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.

In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect dive she made Wednesday night.

We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.

But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.

I am worried they won’t. A friend IM’d the day after Palin’s speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. “Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!,” he wrote. “The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out.” He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

***

It is starting to look to me like a nation-defining election. And in this it seems almost old-fashioned. 1992 for instance didn’t seem or feel nation-defining, not as I remember it, nor did 2000. 1964 did, and ’80 did, but they both ended in landslides. Landslide is not what I’m seeing here.

Where are the Democrats going to go? I suspect to foreign policy. In politics it used to be called Tolstoy: war and peace. McCain-Palin will mean more war, Obama-Biden will mean peace.

This campaign is about to become: epic.

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Edwards’ Cover-up Cost Clinton the Nomination

Aides Say She Would Have Won Iowa if Edwards Affair was Exposed.

Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide, making a charge that could exacerbate previously existing tensions between the camps of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

“I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee,” former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com.

Clinton finished third in the Iowa caucuses barely behind Edwards in second place and Obama in first. The momentum of the insurgent Obama campaign beating two better-known candidates — not to mention an African-American winning in such an overwhelmingly white state — changed the dynamics of the race forever.

Obama won 37.6 per cent of the vote. Edwards won 29.7 per cent and Clinton won 29.5 per cent, according to results posted by the Iowa Democratic Party.

“Our voters and Edwards’ voters were the same people,” Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. “They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama.”

Two months earlier, Edwards had vociferously, but falsely, denied a story in the National Enquirer about the alleged affair last October, and few in the mainstream media even reported the denial.
The lie “certainly had an impact on the election,” Wolfson said.

Former Clinton adviser James Carville told “Good Morning America” that Wolfson’s comments are just speculation.

“My instinct tells me she probably would have done better if Senator Edwards wouldn’t have been on the ballot,” said Carville. “But that wasn’t the circustances at the time. I think Howard is fine in engaging in this kind of speculation, but it doesn’t really mean very much.”

Wolfson said the Clinton campaign was aware of the issue, but did not try to fan the flames.
“Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it,” said Wolfson.

But he says he is mystified about the failure of the national media to pursue the story as it has allegations of other candidates’ affairs.

“I can’t say I understand the rules of the media and I’m not sure they do either,” he said.

Wolfson’s suggestion comes at a delicate time in negotiations between the Clinton and Obama camps, as the Obama campaign decides whether the convention later this month should feature a roll call vote allowing Clinton’s delegates to voice their enthusiasm for their candidate. Many Clinton supporters are already resentful of Obama, whom they see as having only won the nomination with the support of a sexist media and Democratic establishment. Wolfson’s argument that these same players helped keep Edwards in the race, thus hurting Clinton — a highly debatable contention — will likely only fan the flames of Democratic division.

Wolfson’s contention is not shared by the Obama campaign, whose officials never bought the argument that Clinton was the second choice of Edwards voters. Immediately after Edwards dropped out of the race at the end of January, Obama won eleven straight contests in a row.

And Clinton’s steadfast refusal to say she regretted her vote to authorize use of force in Iraq — unlike Obama, who always opposed the war, and Edwards, who said his vote for war was a mistake — turned off many anti-wars liberals in Iowa, who make up a disproportionate number of caucus goers.

In May 2007, Mike Henry, then Clinton’s deputy campaign manager, thought the terrain so hostile to Clinton he wrote a memo to “propose skipping the Iowa caucuses and dedicating more of Senator Clinton’s time and financial resources on the primary in New Hampshire on January 22, the Nevada caucus on January 19, the primaries in South Carolina and Florida on January 29, and the 20 plus state primaries on February 5th.”

There was no comment from the Obama campaign.

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The Left’s New Line On Iraq

When liberals thought it was politically expedient to declare Iraq lost, that was what they did. Liberal after liberal after liberal told us that we could not win in Iraq, that the surge was a waste of time, and that we should leave ASAP.

For example, there’s Time’s Joe Klein. Klein, like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, supported the war in Iraq initially — when it was politically popular — and then changed his position later when the political winds blew the other way.

By January of 2007 Klein was in full “cut and run mode” and writing things like this,

“Pelosi’s right, though: it’s too late for a surge. Instead of putting all its brainpower into surging, the military should be focusing on how to get our conventional forces out (and leave our unconventional forces in the neighborhood) in a way that prevents an all-out regional conflict.”

For the record, I’m outraged Bush is ignoring the election results and the reality on the ground in Iraq. I think he is sending more young American lives into an impossible situation.

Now, here’s Joe Klein yesterday at Time’s Swampland blog,

The reality is that neither Barack Obama nor Nouri al-Maliki nor most anybody else believes that the Iraq war can be “lost” at this point. The reality is that no matter who is elected President, we are looking at a residual U.S. force of 30-50,000 by 2011 (a year ahead of the previous schedule).

So initially, it was “too late” for a surge and the situation was “impossible,” so we needed to leave as quickly as possible. Now, it’s impossible to lose, so we need to leave as quickly as possible.

Incidentally, this is exactly the same line of reasoning that Barack Obama has been using. He opposed the surge and believed we should leave Iraq in 16 months because the situation was unwinnable. Now, his new line is that we should leave in 16 months because things are going so well that they won’t need us — and ironically, Klein’s post yesterday was sharply critical of John McCain for having the chutzpah to tell the truth about Barack Obama.

This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

If anything, McCain’s comments were too limited because they apply just as aptly to Klein and most of the other big name political pundits on the Left, who have consistently and soullessly been putting politics ahead of the good of their country and winning the war in Iraq for years.

PS: I would be thrilled if we actually could have 30,000-50,000 troops in Iraq by 2001, but that’s a decision that should be made after consultation with our generals, based on the situation on the ground, not a decision that should be made based on political calculations designed to move votes for the 2008 election.

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Senate passes mortgage rescue plan

WASHINGTON (AP) – A mortgage rescue to help hundreds of thousands of struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure and get more affordable, safer loans passed the Senate overwhelmingly Friday, but it faces a bumpy road amid continuing turmoil in the housing market.

The 63-5 vote reflected a keen interest by Democrats and Republicans to send election-year help to distressed homeowners with economic issues topping voters’ concerns.

The plan lets homeowners buckling under mortgage payments they can’t afford keep their homes and get more affordable mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration. Banks that agreed to take substantial losses on those distressed loans could avoid costly foreclosures and be assured of recovering at least some money.

The new program would let the FHA insure as much as $300 billion in new mortgages, helping an estimated 400,000 homeowners.

It still faces challenges, however, with the House planning to rewrite key details and the White House threatening a veto without major changes.

“It’s not the final stop, but it is a major stop in getting this bill done,” said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Banking Committee. “For those who said this Congress cannot come together in a bipartisan fashion to do something responsible about housing, this bill does that.”
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the Financial Services Committee chairman and an architect of the bill, says the few but significant revisions House leaders are seeking could be made in as little as one week.

Dodd said he was expecting minor “tweaks” that could be dealt with quickly.
But key players are bracing for intense negotiations to resolve the differences. They hope to smooth over disputes with the White House at the same time, with an eye toward producing a bill President Bush could sign later this month.

The White House Friday renewed its warning that Bush would veto the Senate-passed bill without revisions, citing $3.9 billion in the measure for buying and rehabilitating foreclosed properties it said would help lenders, not homeowners.

The measure includes a long-sought modernization of the FHA and would create a new regulator and tighter controls on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giants. It also would provide $14.5 billion in housing tax breaks, including a credit of up to $8,000 for first-time home buyers.

Democrats are divided over important elements of the plan, including limits on loans the FHA may insure and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may buy. The Senate measure sets them at $625,000, while House leaders—including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.—want the cap as high as $730,000.
House leaders also oppose the immediate effective date of the Senate plan, preferring to phase in the new regulations for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over six months.

“We’d have a hard time agreeing to that,” Dodd told reporters Friday. He called a Capitol Hill news conference to dispel fears about the financial health of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as their stocks plummeted on reports that the government was considering taking over one or both of them.

Another key point of dispute is the funding in the Senate measure for buying and fixing foreclosed properties. The House’s band of conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats oppose the money, arguing that it would swell the deficit unless paired with cuts or tax increases to cover the cost.

But many Democrats, particularly members of the Congressional Black Caucus, are fighting to keep the funding, which they say will help prevent the communities hardest hit by the housing crisis from sliding into blight.

“There are people who tell me to ignore” that threat, Frank said in a statement Friday. “But there is too much that is important in this bill, and it has already been too long delayed by procedural problems in the Senate, for us to risk the further delay involved in a veto.”

He said he was working to find a way to shift the funds to a must-pass spending bill that would be approved before lawmakers scatter for the year in September.

Dana Perino, Bush’s spokeswoman, said the money should be stripped out of the measure “so that they can get a housing bill to the president that he could sign right away.”

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the presumptive presidential nominee, said Bush should drop his opposition to the housing plan and other Democratic efforts to ease economic pain.

“I call on the administration to support this bill along with a second emergency stimulus package to jumpstart the economy and build on this important start to advance more rigorous measures to protect homeowners from foreclosure.”

With the administration scrambling to tamp down on investor fears about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Perino called the new regulations in the measure for the two mortgage giants its “most important feature.”

Lawmakers and the Bush administration agree on the central concept behind the housing package: allowing the government to backstop new mortgages for struggling homeowners.

To make it more palatable to Republicans, the Senate measure would take responsibility for any losses away from taxpayers and instead cover them by diverting a newly created affordable housing fund drawn from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits.

‘Watch out now, take care, beware, of politicians, they’ll steal your life and leave you nothing. Beware of darkness.’

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A Tactical Leap of Faith

The latest findings of the Pew Forum’s massive and indispensable U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reveal some intriguing confusion among Americans on cosmic issues. About 13 percent of evangelicals, it turns out, don’t believe in a personal God, leading to a shameful waste of golf time on Sunday mornings. And 9 percent of atheists report that they are skeptical of evolution. Are there atheist creationists?
On the relation of faith to politics, two points stand out in the survey:
First, there is a clear connection between piety — praying often and attending worship services frequently — and political conservatism across nearly every religious tradition. Seventy-three percent of evangelicals who attend services at least once a week believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases; among more loosely affiliated evangelicals, the figure is 45 percent. Jews who pray daily are twice as likely to call themselves political conservatives.
Second, religiously conservative people have more in common with the general public on political issues than some liberals and conservatives assume. Fifty-seven percent of evangelicals agree that “government should do more to help needy Americans, even if it means going deeper into debt.” More than half of evangelicals believe that stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost. And though 50 percent of evangelicals still identify themselves as Republicans, that number has declined amid the broader trend of political alienation and restlessness.
Barack Obama’s campaign looks at this political diversity and sees opportunity. His advisers report to me that the candidate’s evangelical outreach is deeply in earnest — a long-term personal goal, not a political ploy. Obama is as comfortable with the language of personal religious commitment as was Jimmy Carter — a facility that usually comes with sincerity. His recent meeting with 30 major religious leaders in Chicago was, by most accounts, a constructive success. His staff has conducted more than 200 American Values Forums — faith-based town halls — and plans to hold house parties and dorm meetings on similar themes.
But along with these advantages, Obama has challenges, particularly when it comes to evangelical outreach.
As James Dobson has inartfully pointed out, Obama is not a traditional evangelical when it comes to biblical interpretation and certain moral issues. But this should hardly surprise us, since Obama has never claimed to be. He came to faith in the United Church of Christ, one of America’s defining liberal denominations — the first to ordain women (in 1853) and to endorse same-sex marriage (in 2005). Obama is properly understood as a man of the religious left, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. According to a recent poll by Calvin College’s Henry Institute, Obama has expanded his appeal among mainline Protestants (who, it is often forgotten, are traditionally Republican). But he also seems determined to call an evangelical bluff: Since you now praise King as a model of religious involvement in politics, you need at least to consider me.
The greatest obstacle to this consideration is abortion. I’ve seen no good evidence that evangelicals are becoming less pro-life (a previous Pew poll indicated that young evangelicals are actually more pro-life than their elders). To blunt this issue, Obama calls attention to his views on adoption, teen pregnancy and the sacredness of sex. He insists he is open to late-term abortion restrictions, if they are accompanied by broad exceptions for the health of the mother. But when the up-or-down political decisions came, Obama would not support a ban on partial-birth abortion or even legal protections for infants who are born alive after the procedure.
An evangelical vote for Obama requires a large mental adjustment: “I like his views on poverty or torture or climate change, even though he cannot bring himself to oppose the most brutal form of abortion.” This may work for some, particularly more loosely affiliated evangelicals. But for most pro-life people, the protection of innocent life is not one issue among many, it is the most basic, foundational commitment of a just society. And John McCain has his own appeal to these voters — remaining pro-life while opposing torture, addressing climate change and championing human rights in places such as Burma and Sudan. So far, McCain’s support among evangelicals is holding up — a recent poll shows McCain with a three to one advantage over Obama.
In today’s environment of discontent and reassessment, a Democratic presidential candidate might achieve a historic political breakthrough with religious voters. Obama has great advantages in this attempt — except on the issue that matters most.

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