The Howard Beal election

It's hard to turn on the TV these days. The news and images from Washington are like a train wreck. The height of hypocrisy: the crooks who made this mess posturing for a bailout on the backs of the taxpayer... looking stern and serious while they sit in gilded offices paid for by the investment banks and mortgage firms -- those that provided them with cheap loans to their poor constituents, while profiting handsomely from complex, opaque financial instruments that no one understands. While Washington slept the market ran wild, fueled by impossibly cheap money and overabundant credit. The Wall Street Journal ran a picture of J.P. Morgan the other day. He looks like a banker: stern, serious, practical. I wonder if he'd have given people $400,000 stated income loans; not a piece of paper to prove their earning or their ability to pay it back. That's what we did in the hyper-fueled lending world of Freddie and Fannie. You need to buy a house. Can't afford it? No problem, we'll cover you. Can you imagine J.P. Morgan doing anything so stupid?

And now comes the final indignity: the "bail out". The House yesterday decided not to pass a $700 billion bailout bill. They did so to prove that we are still a free market. They did so to save their reelection chances. They did so to protest the Bush Administration and their total mishandling of this crisis from start to finish. Whatever the reason: it failed. And rightly so.Does anyone really think that the Bush, Paulson or Bernanke have any idea what is really going on here? Fortune Magazine reported last week that the $700 billion number that Paulson chose has no analysis behind it:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Wow. How comforting is that? We know that markets operate on psychology, and that the large number is designed to provide confidence in the market that the government has a big enough solution to take care of the problem. I understand that.

But I also understand something that George W. Bush and his team have never understood: this is also a political issue during a presidential election. The Bush Administration remains totally tone deaf to the concerns of the American people. While the $700 billion number may calm financial markets, it has shocked, dismayed and infuriated the American taxpayer.

Hello? Is anyone out there? Does George Bush really want Barack Obama to become president? It sure looks that way.

In fact, Bush's handling of this issue looks a lot like the war in Iraq before General Petraeus went to Baghdad. It looks incompetent, poorly planned and poorly executed. It looks just like the mess that Gens. Casey and Abizaid got us into, with American soldiers dying daily amid violence and chaos on the television. Total mis-management. The American people lost confidence in Donald Rumsfeld in 2004. And what did the President do? He held his course, kept Rummy on and took a beating in the 2006 midterm elections. Bush was shocked to take such a shellacking. He didn't understand the level of discontent among the voters then -- and he doesn't understand it now. Americans in vast numbers are angry at Washington. Mad as hell, as Howard Beale famously yelled out the window in the movie Network. And they aren't going to take it anymore.

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Who will pay the ultimate price for this debacle? John McCain. He's been swallowed whole by this mess and his campaign will never recover. Yes, he miscalculated -- the whole "suspending his campaign" gambit backfired. Frankly, his instincts on the bailout were wrong; his behavior showed him as a legislator. A compromiser. Not as an executive who had to make a tough call in a crisis. He temporized and vacillated.

In fact, McCain missed a golden opportunity: He could have taken the momentum and initiative away from Obama and come out forcefully against the bailout from the beginning. He could have stood up in the debate and said:

I'm against this because I don't believe in taxpayers footing the bill for what is essentially a $700 billion entitlement program. Yes, I know the situation is serious and that we need to provide relief to the credit markets. But there is a better, less-intrusive way to do this: change the "market-based" accounting rules so that firms can revalue their portfolios to something that reflects their true intrinsic value. Provide loans and guarantees that the firms will pay interest on, etc. etc. etc.

But McCain didn't do that. He didn't see the opportunity for bold action and decisive decision-making. He could have put Obama in a corner. And with public opinion running 2:1 against the bailout, the polls would have been on his side.

In the end, this is the kind of crisis that either makes or breaks a candidate. The odds were against McCain from the beginning, but his handling of this issue has fallen short. He was dealt a bad hand by Bush and his bumbling lieutenants; in this case, running against Bush would have been smart for McCain. But it was the kind of "game changing" opportunity that comes about only once in a campaign. If you seize it, you win. If you don't, you lose.

So far, McCain hasn't seized it, and unless Palin pulls out a miracle against Biden and McCain can rally in the last two debates, the Republicans will lose on November 4.

'Who are those guys?'

The late Paul Newman's famous refrain with Robert Redford, playing Butch and Sundance just a step ahead of their relentless pursuers, is what the GOP should have been making front-runner Barack Obama mutter for the past month. Opportunity missed, and election hopes greatly dimmed. McCain didn't go for the jugular on economics or national security in his first debate with Obama, despite many chances to do so.

Palin has gone bland and cautious since the convention, instead of blistering the opposition ticket and lynch-mob media with her testerone as we know she can.

House and Senate Republicans haven't trained their fire on Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter as the guilty authors of the mortgage mess.

It pains me to bracket a class act like Newman with a phony like Obama, however similar their political views may have been. (Redford is another story; he and BHO can have each other.) But the analogy of that wonderful Western and campaign 2008 holds true.

It was going to take hell-bent determination and, yes, a killer instinct for the center-right posse to chase down the charming leftist who already cleaned out Hillary's bank and is now closing in on the White House vault. Barack heard footsteps for a while there in August and early September. He was looking over his shoulder, maybe ready for that desperate cliff dive into the river.

But the cold sweat of "Who are those guys?" wasn't sustained, Obama has regained some breathing room, and in another 35 days of hard riding the biggest prize of all may be his.

"What we have here," to switch Newman movies for a moment, "is a failure to communicate." That monument of understatement from the death scene in "Cool Hand Luke" applies in spades to the McCain-Palin campaign and may become their epitaph.

We can hope not as we remember the great films and say: RIP, Paul.

Look for substance in debates

The first of three presidential debates has been completed, with the sole vice-presidential debate scheduled for Thursday evening. Evaluation of these quadrennial events tends to be based on the most superficial matters, such as whether a knockout blow or a major gaffe was made, the presidential "look" was evident, expectations were met, positive or negative impressions were given, and so on. Instead, what we should be looking for in a president is evidence of solid character and sound public policy. Some voters are still undecided, in part because neither of those decisive criteria matter to them as much as superficial appearances. However that may be, the country depends on wisdom and virtue, not charisma or demagoguery.

Of course, character and policy, wisdom and virtue, are only distinguishable in theory; in real persons one finds some combination of these. Still, a man of character is more likely to favor sound policy than a man of bad character. A virtuous man is more likely to be wise than a vicious man.

When it comes to character, Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, has a distinct advantage. For not only did he demonstrate his courage as a prisoner of war at the hands of the North Vietnamese communists, but he has never feared to buck political pressure from inside as well as outside of his political party. I will not maintain that he has always been right–only that he would rather be right than win an election.

A year ago McCain’s campaign for the Republican nomination seemed doomed. In fact, his own fate was inextricably tied to our country’s. During nearly four years of America’s attempts to crush extremists of various stripes following the stunning victory over the forces of the late Saddam Hussein, McCain was almost alone among members of Congress in calling for an increase in troops and a change in strategy. His judgment and his candidacy were vindicated when Gen Petraeus’ "surge" virtually chased the enemy from Iraq and gave peace and stability a chance.

That same courage was on display at last Friday’s presidential debate with Democratic candidate Barack Obama. He justifiably reminded everyone of his lonely crusade to save America’s policy in Iraq and criticized his opponent for his failure to admit that he was wrong in dismissing the surge, not to mention opposing the removal of Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime, with its history of deploying weapons of mass destruction.

McCain is not the skillful rhetorician that Obama is, for that latter’s nimble verbal footwork gave the impression that his quarrel with America’s decision to topple Hussein was merely because we had "taken our eye off the ball" in Afghanistan. But it is a known fact that Obama could not win the Democratic nomination without appeasing the far left that is animated by a combination of Bush hatred and hostility to American interests.

When Obama declares that the next president, preferably himself, will need to repair the damage done to America’s reputation abroad caused by the allegedly disastrous policies of George Bush, he is merely repeating a less obvious version of the "global test" that sank failed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry‘s chances four years ago. It was no accident that Sen. Obama went abroad a few months ago to "wow" Europeans and try to pressure the Iraqi government to delay any permanent agreements with the United States until Jan. 20, 2009.

Democrats are reputed to have an "edge" when the country is in economic crisis, as it is now. Obama only made an appearance with McCain at a meeting of the President and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson with congressional leaders to hammer out some sort of relief package for the nation’s credit. But McCain wisely rescued the House Republicans’ alternative private insurance plan from being ignored by Democrats, who preferred to stick taxpayers with the full cost of the proposed bailout and cover up their up-to-the-eyeballs involvement with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

We are in a credit crisis not because of inadequate federal regulation of private investment companies but because federal law encouraged easy credit and two quasi-governmental behemoths made a mockery out of the lending business by enticing people who could not afford even to make a down payment on a home, to sign papers for purchase anyway.

In future debates one hopes that voters will look past the atmospherics and listen carefully for evidence of what we need in a president, not for what merely pleases us.

Obama in a landslide?

In a weekend piece from the U.K.'s Telegraph comes a story that should be news to voters in the key states of Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado: Barack Obama thinks he's going to win the 2008 election in a "landslide".  "Barack Obama's senior aides believe he is on course for a landslide election victory over John McCain and will comfortably exceed most current predictions in the race for the White House. 

Their optimism, which is said to be shared by the Democratic candidate himself, is based on information from private polling and on faith in the powerful political organisation he has built in the key swing states.

Insiders say that Mr Obama's apparent calm through an unusually turbulent election season is because he believes that his strength among first time voters in several key states has been underestimated, both by the media and by the Republican Party. "

Obama and his campaign are further convinced that he can win no fewer than nine of the states carried by George Bush in 2004 -- putting him on track to win as many as 340 electoral votes. 270 are needed to become president.

This confidence comes from an assumption that I find dubious: that current polls are underestimating the level of new voter registration that the Democrat's have achieved in their get out the vote drives:

"Public polling companies and the media have underestimated the scale of new Democratic voters registration in these states," the campaign official told a friend. "We're much stronger on the ground in Virginia and North Carolina than people realise. If we get out the vote this may not be close at all."

"Their confidence that good organisation will more than compensate for latent racism will be reassuring to some Democrats, who were concerned by a poll last weekend that found Mr Obama would be six points higher in the polls if he were white. "

In my mind the Obama camp is suffering from having drunk too much of its own punch: voter registration drives are notoriously bad predictors of election outcomes. And this is particularly true if the registration drive is focused on young voters -- which Obama's certainly has been. Young voters are famous for saying they will vote and then not showing up on election day.

As far as the "latent racism" issue goes -- I also think it is overstated. In fact, I think that a reverse sort of racism -- of the politically correct variety -- may be upwardly skewing Obama's polling numbers. I have a sense that many voters tell pollsters that they will support Obama because they don't want to come off as racist or "uncool". It is a natural part of our psychology to be attracted to a black candidate as part of a greater social good, and it is part of a politically correct pressure for people to be seen as socially progressive.

But I don't believe this necessarily translates to the voting booth -- when in private, people cast a vote for president. My guess is that race will have less to do with that decision, and that policies and experience will be the determining factor. And on that score, I don't think that Obama has an advantage over John McCain. I believe that the polling doesn't accurately reflect the hesitation many people have about putting an unknown Obama into power, and that a greater percentage of those polled will choose McCain as a safer alternative.

This may not be enough to win McCain the election -- but it should provide some pause to the Obama campaign in thinking that they will win this in a landslide. I predict as close a race as Gore-Bush in 2000 -- unless something dramatic happens on either side to radically upset the balance.

It isn't surprising, however, that Obama is so confident. Afterall, he is the one we've been waiting for. Right?

Themeless, alas

"Senator Obama, that kind of thinking is dangerous. With views like that, you are not ready to lead. You've come a long way in a short time, and that's commendable. But you need to take a little more time and get to know the world better. America can't afford that kind of naivete' in its Commander in Chief." There were moments in Friday's debate when John McCain could and should have said something just this blunt. Obama gave him several perfect openings. If McCain had delivered such a body blow to his opponent, it would have rocked the political world for days to come, giving the Republican candidate a real chance to take the lead and hold it till election day. What a missed opportunity.

It's true that McCain hammered repeatedly on the point that Obama is naive, doesn't understand, doesn't get it. I still say he gave a themeless performance because there was no decisive, sizzling sound bite like the one I've suggested that would give the debate resonance in this campaign and earn it a place in history. There was no memorable tag that our guy hung on their guy to put him on defense for the next week and drive his supporters nuts trying to peel the tag off. What a pity.

"Themeless, alas" was one of my headlines as I live-blogged the Ole Miss debate for PoliticsWest.com. Read my whole thread from their 90-minute encounter right here.