Month: September 2008

It’s been a while since he was nominated as a vice-presidential candidate, and we still haven’t had a look at his medical history. This is the normal course of events for a person who could potentially be president next February. The press really needs to do its job and get Biden’s medical records pronto. Again: this needn’t be too invasive. It could even be done the way McCain’s medical vetting was – reserved for a room of reporters to comb through all the major and obvious issues.

So what are you waiting for, Joe?

Roger Simon nails it. For one brief moment, the press looked at the fantasist incompetence of the Republican establishment and did some actual reporting and vetting. Now, they seem cowed again by a bully like Steve Schmidt. For my part, I don’t believe the lesson of the past eight years is that the press should not ask every single question – and get honest, prompt answers – when we are being told things that we have to take on trust. After the WMD fiasco, when we all but gave the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime to be truthful about the very basis of a war, we have a responsibility to keep probing, filtering, vetting, asking. It’s our fricking duty. I learned my lesson not to take anything these people say on trust.

The McCain camp landed America and the world with someone who could technically be president of the US next February with close to no vetting and no real knowledge of who she is – and we are supposed to just accept the propaganda being peddled by people who once worked for Karl Rove.

Never again. Keep asking. Keep Googling. In so many ways, the Republican myth machine has finally met its match. It’s not the "Washington establishment" for Pete’s sake. They were busy sipping champagne and nibbling on truffles with Washington celebrity McCain at fabulous restaurants until very recently. It’s you, ordinary citizens with modems and questions. That’s who they’re afraid of. That’s who they want to intimidate.

Not this time.

Nate Silver explains why:

I think some of you are underestimating the percentage of voters for whom Sarah Palin lacks the standing to make this critique of Barack Obama.

To many voters, she is either entirely unknown, or is known as an US Weekly caricature of a woman who eats mooseburgers and has a pregnant daughter. To change someone’s opinion, you have to do one of two things. Either, you have to be a trusted voice of authority, or you have to persuade them. Palin is not a trusted voice of authority — she’s much too new. But neither was this a persuasive speech. It was staccato, insistent, a little corny. It preached to the proverbial choir. It was also, as one of my commentors astutely noted, a speech written by a man and for a man, but delivered by a woman, which produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

This was the moment that McCain surrendered to the base who once despised him.

A fascinating piece in today’s NYT details the very peculiar dynamics of Alaska’s economy and polity and provides a clearer picture of how Palin became so popular. First off, she’s been presiding over a massive boom because of oil prices – like Chavez, Putin, Texans, Canadians, and Maliki:

Thirty-one other states are projecting shortfalls in their state budgets. Alaska is expecting $5 billion more than it can spend in a state with only 680,000 people.

So it’s a very different kind of place than most states these days. So the question is: how well did she shepherd that windfall? She did two big things – she’s only been in office for a little over the year so her scant record is not in any way a negative, in my mind. She pushed for a big tax increase on oil companies and she then gave much of the surplus back to Alaskans in the form of oil-bounty checks. So 680,000 Alaskans got a summer Christmas present of three quarters of a billion dollars. There’s a pretty obvious reason why she’s so popular. And it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me, as long as the state government is being run properly and all contingencies are accounted for. But they may not be:

A debate is on now as to whether Ms. Palin’s policies will be wise for the state in the long run. Some economists have questioned, for example, whether the three-quarters of a billion dollars or so given to Alaskans this summer in the oil-bounty checks (a bill passed this summer with Democratic support in the Legislature), might have been better used in the state’s rainy-day fund.

And the oil tax overhaul, which linked state payments to net profits from the oil companies, rather than gross revenue, also exposes the state to potentially deep hits when oil prices decline. There are no neighboring states or regional economies to provide an alternative if the local economy dries up, nor is there a state income tax to fall back on.

“The state has always been exposed, but now it’s even more so because the state is now sharing the market risks more with the industry,” said Matthew Berman, a professor of economics at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. What might happen if commodity prices plunge is untested territory, he said.

“Nobody knows how the Palin administration is going to react to that, because they haven’t faced that problem yet,” Mr. Berman said.

Tax and spend now – worry about the bills later. And stay right out there in the edge of what’s possible now. It’s the American way for the past decade. But one wonders whether it isn’t terribly short-sighted.

Ben Stein is not cowed:

Eli Lake on Sarah Palin.

A reader points out one more untruth in the single sentence. Obama has written one memoir, not two. "The Audacity of Hope" is a campaign book.

McCain, of course, has "written" at least three memoirs and never held executive office. So, according to Giuliani, Palin is much more qualified to be president than McCain, right? Why not put her at the top of the ticket? I mean we can’t have just a Senator gasbag in the Oval Office, can we?

It was a great line:

Listening to [Obama] speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state senate.

I guess we should thank Matt Scully for inserting the word "major." You can go look at Obama’s State Senate legislative record here. And his US Senate record here. At last count, sponsorship of 820 laws in Illinois, and authorship of 152 bills and co-sponsorship of 427 in Washington. The 2007 Ethics Reform bill alone cannot be dismissed as simply non-existent. And since part of Palin’s own claim to substance is an ethics reform bill, it seems extremely weird that she should believe that Obama’s record is a total zero.

At her first press conference, why not ask her why she said that Obama has never passed a single reform, when he passed the 2007 Ethics Reform, described by many as the most sweeping package of its kind since Watergate. Of course, she doesn’t know. She was given this speech. But she should be asked to respond to the question of why she said something patently untrue to the entire country.

But you can see the idea here: to keep equating Palin’s experience with Obama’s. At one point, Rudy Giuliani claimed that after her first day as governor of Alaska, Palin had more executive experience than Joe Biden and Barack Obama combined. So there’s your standard. It’s fatuous and stupid. But if you repeat it often enough, it might just work.

Fallows evaluates Palin’s speech.

Jason Kottke posts on the rich working longer hours.