Month: September 2008

CNN looks over the candidates ties to Wall Street. Ken Silverstein delves deeper. His bottom line:

So how will the presidential campaigns and congressional candidates seek to politically exploit the collapse of the financial sector? Very, very carefully.

Mickey thinks highlighting McCain’s lies is a losing strategy. Mickey is therefore now to the right of some honest journalists at Fox News:

Since I’m not running a campaign but trying to run a blog, I guess he’s not talking to me. But, still, I don’t follow the logic at all. It seems to me that the lies that McCain has told are not in the ambiguous category. They are obvious provable factual lies. Tucker Bounds is reduced to simply saying: we don’t believe Obama. So we are simply asserting that he will raise taxes on the middle class. Mickey seems to believe that that’s fine, and you mustn’t point out these disgusting distortions, for fear of alienating an already post-rational, whatever-we-say-is-true, all-facts-are-lies-all-GOP-ads-are-truths Republican base.

Give me a break. One candidate is telling whoppers. And the other candidate is supposed to ignore them?

Mickey, I fear, is a captive of the 1980s – like the Clintons: so conditioned into "learned helplessness" against Full Metal Rove that he is now an enabler of the Republican lie machine. Not all of us are that cynical. Not all of us have given up that much.

A sampling of economic opinion from around the web. Matt Cooper:

As a short-term player, the manager of the now quarterly Weekend at Bernanke’s crisis, Paulson is holding it all together. The questions is this: Will he update his Blueprint, his larger regulatory redo, to reflect the new world we’re in. If there’s a great gift he could leave before leaving the Treasury Department on January 20, it’s to offer up a new regulatory scheme that’s fitting for the world we’re in.

Paul Krugman:

…as the unknown unknowns have turned into known unknowns, the system has been experiencing postmodern bank runs. These don’t look like the old-fashioned version: with few exceptions, we’re not talking about mobs of distraught depositors pounding on closed bank doors. Instead, we’re talking about frantic phone calls and mouse clicks, as financial players pull credit lines and try to unwind counterparty risk. But the economic effects — a freezing up of credit, a downward spiral in asset values — are the same as those of the great bank runs of the 1930s.

Megan McArdle:

Hank Paulson is drawing a line in the sand.  In the long run, this will be a good thing, for two reasons:  if Lehman winds up in a relatively orderly fashion, it will prove to the market that it can survive a big insolvency.  And it’s a clear, strong signal to markets that they shouldn’t expect the feds to protect them from counterparty risk.

Jim Manzi:

Unfortunately, letting Lehman go down was probably the right decision.

Hold the glee about obnoxious bankers feeling some pain for a change. The Fed and Treasury have been, over the past year, trying to prevent contagion that could result in a major counterparty collapse. This would cause a lot more suffering on Main Street than Wall Street.

Arnold Kling:

What everybody hopes is that a lot of the mortgage loans will continue to be paid. At some point, the securities that those loans are backing will stop being orphans that nobody wants to adopt. The outstanding balances on the securities will start to decline. Pension funds and college endowments will take them into their portfolios. And the crisis will be behind us.

If it plays out that way, then Ben Bernanke will look even better than General Petraeus.

Ross has an insighful post:

In their first races for the presidency, both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton promised to take their parties in new directions, and both offered substance to back these promises up; the press treated them like new-model candidates because there was actually good reason to think that they were. McCain, by contrast, has promised to take his party in a new direction, but the centerpiece of his reform agenda is … cutting earmarks. Maybe that’s a laudable goal, but "compassionate conservatism" or "ending welfare as we know it" it sure isn’t, and you can’t fool reporters into thinking that it is.

The press is allergic to policy detail, but they do respond, at least to some extent, to innovation and unconventional proposals – and if McCain’s agenda had been bolder, his attempt to run a more high-minded campaign in the early going might have earned him more press coverage than he ended up receiving. Any politician can claim to be running as a new kind of a candidate – but unless you’re Barack Obama, who wears his newness in his name and on his skin, you need to prove it, and then prove it again, before the media will take you seriously.

Will Wilkinson wants to scrap all drinking age restrictions:

UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman, an ex-advocate of age restrictions, told PBS that he came around to the no-limits position when he saw a billboard that said, "If you’re not 21, it’s not Miller Time–yet." Age limits make drinking a badge of adulthood and build in the minds of teens a romantic sense of the transgressive danger of alcohol. That’s what so often leads to the abuse of alcohol as a ritual of release from the authority of parents.

Judis:

This kind of crisis places a premium on intelligence and the ability to explain and propose solutions for very complex problems. And it’s a favorable political terrain for Democrats, because the root of the crisis was the lack of government regulation.

There is still nothing on Obama’s website, but he made a statement this morning that gets to the point:  "The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store.  Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression."

The DNC has set up a wiki page chronicling McCain’s lies.

(Hat tip: John Cole)

Yglesias points me to these maps on US personality variation. Here’s one on agreeableness:

Openness after the jump:

Steve Chapman summarizes:

Why does McCain insist on running such a mendacious campaign? There is plenty an honest conservative might say in opposition to Obama: He’s wrong about Iraq. He’s wrong about Iran. He’s wrong about offshore oil drilling. He wants to raise taxes. He favors abortion on demand. He would appoint liberal judges. He would impede school reform.

But McCain has concluded that a fact-based case about Obama isn’t enough to prevail in November. So he has chosen to smear his opponent with ridiculous claims that he thinks the American people are gullible enough to believe.

The Wall Street Journal explains today just how obvious a lie McCain told on "The View" – a lie he still has not corrected as he too now hides from the press:

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hadn’t sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. But state records show Gov. Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years.

These projects include more than $130 million in federal funds that would benefit Alaska’s fishing industry and an additional $9 million to help Alaska oil companies. She also has sought $4.5 million to upgrade an airport on a Bering Sea island that has a year-round population of less than 100. …

Even Ed Morrissey is having a hard time spinning this one.